Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal awarded $36.7 million in Connections for Classrooms grants Monday to 103 of the state’s school districts to upgrade their broadband access. Top grants included $8.43 million to DeKalb County Public Schools, $1.53 million to Gwinnett County Public Schools, $1.5 million to Laurens County Public Schools and $1.42 million to Atlanta Public Schools, said the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. Deal, a Republican, announced the grants based on recommendations from the state’s Digital Learning Task Force. “A key portion of its recommendations was to build out the technology infrastructure necessary for effective digital learning, and these funds will go a long way toward helping us achieve that goal and bridge the digital divide” in schools, Deal said in a statement.
Delaware and Japan have "about the same delivered peak broadband speed," NCTA said in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/12svdBB). If individual U.S. states are compared with other countries in average peak connection speed, 10 of the top 20 states and countries in the world are in the U.S., with Delaware the fastest at an average peak speed of 62.5 Mbps, said the association. Only Hong Kong, South Korea, Israel, Singapore and Romania beat Delaware’s speeds, NCTA said. Others in the top 20 include Virginia in eighth place, Washington, D.C., in ninth, and New Hampshire at 20th. Forty-nine of the 50 states and D.C. showed double-digit speed growth year over year, NCTA said.
Frontier Communications said it completed its buy of AT&T’s Connecticut broadband, video and wireline assets Friday, along with Dish Network’s satellite TV customers in the state (http://bit.ly/1tkx5HE). Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority approved the deal earlier this month (see 1410150070). Frontier separately said Friday that it has made gigabit fiber service available to business and residential customers in six areas of Durham, North Carolina.
EarthLink will use Bandwidth’s nationwide emergency services network to manage 911 routing for all of its business and residential endpoints, Bandwidth said Thursday. The emergency services network is operationally efficient, “allowing EarthLink to leverage Bandwidth’s consolidated nationwide database of customer endpoints and nationwide emergency call routing platform,” Bandwidth said. “The end result is a more efficient way of servicing customers, while providing them extremely reliable emergency services.” Bandwidth’s network “meets all of the public safety requirements for our customers and also allows us to deploy the next-generation IP voice applications that our customers demand,” said John Dobbins, EarthLink executive vice president-network operations, in a news release (http://bit.ly/1DFjz3z).
The New York Police Department said up to 41,000 mobile devices, including tablets, are being distributed to officers (http://bit.ly/1zmIMks). The devices were paid for using criminal asset forfeiture funds, which funded a $160 million NYPD Mobility Initiative, the department said in a Thursday news release. “We must have 21st century tools to deal with 21st century threats, and this infusion of new resources will arm our officers with the technology and information they need to fight crime and protect the City against terrorism more efficiently and more effectively,” said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced $190.5 million in Department of Agriculture (USDA) funding Wednesday for broadband deployments and other advanced communications infrastructure improvements in 19 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The 25 projects being funded through the USDA grants and loans include a $24 million loan to Arkansas’ Arkwest Communications to provide voice, broadband and Internet TV service to almost 4,000 customers and make other system improvements. Other projects include a $2.5 million grant to Nexus Systems to provide broadband in Powhatan, Louisiana, and a $750,000 grant to public TV broadcasters in the U.S. Virgin Islands to replace analog production and satellite equipment with high-definition equipment, USDA said (http://1.usa.gov/ZOODPu).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Archive and reddit opposed the New York Department of Financial Services' (NYDFS) proposed BitLicense, in comments filed Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1FCESEJ). Coin Center, TechFreedom and other groups highlighted concerns over financial privacy stemming from the NYDFS proposal (see 1410210038). The BitLicense proposal will “reach many businesses that have only a tenuous connection” to New York state, said the EFF’s joint comments. “Digital currencies rely on global internet infrastructure, and so the vast majority of businesses in the digital currency ecosystem will be likely to engage in commerce involving New York or New York residents at some point in time,” it said. “The proposal would require licensees to maintain specific details about transactions -- including information about merchants who accept digital currencies and their customers,” it said. “This represents an enormous expansion of the recordkeeping requirements even for financial services covered by state and federal anti-money laundering regulations,” even though the “wording of the current proposal appears to extend to many businesses and individuals who are not required to comply with those rules,” it said.
FairPoint Communications said Tuesday it's “concerned” that employees affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), who are currently on strike, are disrupting services and intimidating employees and customers (http://bit.ly/1ouXtgZ). More than 1,700 CWA- and IBEW-affiliated workers went on strike Friday in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont (see 1410170025). Some of the striking employees “have followed and intimidated contractors and employees, blocked our trucks, surrounded our workers on job sites, trespassed on customer property and engaged in conduct that impedes the work FairPoint is doing to meet customer needs,” FairPoint said in a news release. The unions said in a statement that they will “continue to work hard to ensure that our labor action is safe and respectful to our neighbors and friends throughout northern New England, but we will not let the company use these spurious and unfounded allegations to take the spotlight off of the company's unfair practices.”
Comcast and Time Warner Cable officials urged the New York Public Service Commission to exempt information on call center operations at Comcast and TWC from public disclosure laws in connection with PSC review of the first company's plan to buy the second. The PSC remanded the companies’ appeal of a July decision by Administrative Law Judge David Prestemon that the call center operations information shouldn’t be exempted. Prestemon said he would issue a ruling on the remand after parties submitted responses, which were due Monday. Officials for both companies said they view information on their call center operations as a trade secret and its release would “unfairly advantage” competitors. Information about Comcast’s call center operations “identifies the number of employees at each Comcast call center in the Northeast, describes Comcast's call interflow parameters that direct calls to sister call centers, and sets forth also detailed facility-by-facility hours, staffing and operational information,” said Don Laub, Comcast senior director-Northeast Division regulatory affairs (http://bit.ly/1DxiUky). Information about TWC’s call center operations “identifies the number of employees at each Time Warner Cable call center in New York and sets forth also detailed facility-by-facility hours, staffing and operational information, including call interflow parameters,” said Terence Rafferty, TWC Northeast regional vice president-operations. Other information the PSC sought involved TWC’s broadband deployments. TWC said it opposes publication of an un-redacted version of that information, which shows “detailed build-out and deployment plans for individual projects in each affected Time Warner Cable franchise area,” Rafferty said. “The information is particularly granular, showing the plant mileage to be built out, the number of premises to be passed by the buildout, and the expected completion date” (http://bit.ly/1FxVayA). The Public Utility Law Project of New York said the Comcast and TWC interpretation of what constitutes a trade secret is overly expansive, and the PSC should release the information under the narrower definition used under the federal Freedom of Information Act (http://bit.ly/1sLK0Q8).
The proposed BitLicense by the New York Department of Financial Services could create consumer privacy issues and complicate other state and federal regulations for cryptocurrencies, said bitcoin advocates and think tanks in NYDFS comments Tuesday. The comment period for the proposed BitLicense (http://on.ny.gov/1rkfYEO) ended Tuesday, but another round of comments is expected after revisions stemming from the first round, said Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center research director, in an interview. Some states, like Texas, allow virtual currency transmitters to apply for normal money transmission licenses, but the NYDFS decided to “tailor” specific regulations for virtual currency transmitters, said Valkenburgh, who co-wrote joint-comments with the Center for Democracy and Technology and TechFreedom (http://bit.ly/1vIElwF). The BitLicense’s requirement for who should apply for such a license is “nebulous and confusing,” Valkenburgh said. There’s a “fear” that software programmers who write code for cryptocurrencies would need to apply even though they don’t use those currencies, he said. Valkenburgh said the joint comments focused on “financial privacy” issues, because cryptocurrencies have the “potential to be safer than credit cards.” But under the BitLicense, firms would be required to keep records of their customers, and perhaps, their customers’ third parties, he said. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation applauded the “desire to bring regulatory certainty, transparency, and clarity to virtual currency businesses.” But ITIF said in a Tuesday filing that the “State of New York is likely the wrong entity to address these important policy issues” (http://bit.ly/1wi6mdx). “Subnational governments, like states, should not compound the problem of multiple and varied laws between countries by creating their own additional rules and regulations,” it said. ITIF recommended the NYDFS “exempt virtual currency mining operations, virtual currency businesses that don't have full control of the virtual currency on behalf of their users, and businesses without a meaningful connection to New York from these proposed regulations.” It also suggested the department “exempt virtual currencies used as a platform for non-financial services and nascent virtual currencies from these proposed regulations” and “relax disclosure requirements for material changes to business, user identities, and the affiliates of companies with a BitLicense.”