Shelve Minnesota’s LTD Broadband review until the FCC reverses its rejection of the company’s long-form application for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) support, urged the company’s outside counsel Andy Carlson of the Taft firm at a teleconferenced prehearing conference Tuesday. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is considering whether to revoke LTD Broadband’s ETC status while the company challenges the FCC rejection (see 2208240037). Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Kristin Berkland disagreed that the state commission should pause. FCC and PUC proceedings are "interrelated, but they are not interdependent,” with the state agency able to decide ETC designation regardless what the FCC is doing, she said. Carlson said LTD’s actual buildout will be proof it's qualified to deploy broadband. "That's great,” said Berkland, “but ideally you want to know in advance whether a company can do those things that it says it can do because it is incredibly difficult to claw back funding from a company that overrepresents its ability.” Minnesota PUC Administrative Law Judge Jim LaFave said he will decide later how to proceed. In South Dakota, the state telecom association urged the Public Utility Commission Sept. 2 to deny LTD’s request to suspend a proceeding to rehear its denied ETC application. The PUC should instead close docket TC21-001, it said. That request remains pending.
The U.K. ports of Liverpool and Felixstowe are preparing for consecutive dockworker strikes in the next few weeks following a pause after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Strike details will likely be announced next week after her funeral, Bloomberg reported. The Port of Liverpool's previously announced a two-week strike will now start Sept. 20, following the rejection at a Sept. 12 meeting of a pay offer from Peel Ports, the port operator, and the funeral for the queen on Sept. 19. Dockworkers at the Port of Felixstowe rejected a pay proposal that would boost wages from the U.K. wing of CK Hutchison Holdings, setting up a walkout at Britain's busiest container port, Bloomberg said. The Felixstowe strike is set to run Sept. 27 to Oct. 5.
Car audio-maker Alpine is the first aftermarket brand with full Tidal integration for hi-res audio playback, it said Thursday, announcing a free software update to enable the integration. Compatible head units are the Alpine Halo11 iLX-F511, Halo9 iLX-F509, iLX-507, and Jeep-specific i509-WRA-JK and i509-WRA-JL radios, the company said. The head units can reproduce music at a 96kHz/24-bit streaming rate when tethered to a mobile or smartphone hotspot, Alpine emailed Thursday. Tidal subscribers can access select Tidal features directly on the head unit, including My Mix, curated playlists and individualized daily listening insights. Alpine said. They can also browse through featured artists, genres and moods and access control features for play, pause, repeat and shuffle, it said.
Action on a proposal to revive FCC collection of equal employment opportunity workforce diversity data using Form 395-B isn’t expected soon despite recent calls from public interest and diversity groups for swift action, industry and FCC officials told us. The National Urban League, Common Cause, the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council and others said in recent joint supplementary comments in docket 98-204 that the agency needs to act within six months to produce useful reports by mid-2024, but industry and FCC officials said they don’t anticipate action on the matter while the FCC is without a Democratic majority.
Ad-supported streaming services are gaining a larger share of consumers' wallets in connected TV, but consumers’ attitudes toward commercials that air during programming vary and are sometimes contradictory, a July report from Infillion shows.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission should have hearings in its Lumen service-quality investigation, said Minnesota Commerce and Attorney General offices and Communications Workers of America in a Tuesday letter in docket C-20-432. The three intervenors said, after eight months of settlement talks with Lumen’s CenturyLink with no resolution, they “have concerns with the pace and scope of the discussion and believe other action may be appropriate.” Intervenors “are concerned that consumers may be experiencing problems with CenturyLink’s service that are beyond the scope of the originally filed complaint,” they added. The PUC should have at least six hearings in different parts of the state to collect comments from consumers, local officials and others about service-quality problems, intervenors said. The PUC paused the probe in December to allow for settlement talks (see 2112150049). Lumen has “been working cooperatively" with the intervenors to resolve their concerns, said a spokesperson."We are disappointed that they have moved in this direction."
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, urged the commerce secretary to talk to First Solar, which is headquartered in his state, before finalizing the rule to temporarily waive duties or deposit collection on imported solar panels and cells from Southeast Asia. Auxin Solar, a small solar panel producer, is asking Commerce to find that those panels are really Chinese in origin, and should be subject to antidumping and countervailing duty orders against Chinese solar products.
About quarter of the comments on how to implement an executive order on possible anti-circumvention duties on solar panel and cell imports say that the executive order is illegal or, at best, legally strained, and that Commerce cannot waive duty collections because that is contrary to its mission to protect domestic manufacturing through trade remedies.
Industry sought improved coordination and transparency through the FCC, USDA and NTIA’s interagency agreement established under the Broadband Interagency Coordination Act of 2020. Some asked the agencies to make the shared information available publicly and to increase reliance on the FCC’s maps when coordinating broadband programs, in comments posted Tuesday in docket 22-251.