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  2. October 2015

October 2015

Senators praise FCC for prison calling proposal

In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler signed by 14 Senate Democrats and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), they said that “it is of utmost importance that the FCC move forward with its proposal to curb intrastate calling rates for inmates.”

“The current proposal is a critical step forward in ensuring fair and just calling rates for incarcerated individuals,” they said. “We applaud the FCC’s discouragement of commissions paid by phone providers to institutions and continued oversight of this matter,” they said. “We also are encouraged by the Commission’s decision to review the market again in a few years, including a review of potential abuses in the video visitation telecommunication services market.”

Nonprofits using WiMAX sue Sprint, alleging violation of contracts ahead of network shutdown

Sprint is facing a lawsuit from two nonprofit groups that have been providing mobile WiMAX Internet service to low-income students and families. The groups allege that they had been offering unlimited WiMAX service to more than 300,000 customers.

With Sprint's impending shutdown of the legacy Clearwire WiMAX network in Nov 2015, Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen are being pushed to accept LTE data service that will throttle the speeds of customers after they hit a cap of 6 GB of data, in violation of their contract with Sprint. Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen filed the lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston and claimed they serve 429 schools, 61 libraries and 1,820 nonprofits who are dependent on the WiMAX service for Internet access. "However, our customers tell us that the benefits of one modem have a multiplier effect," said Kristen Perry, a spokeswoman for Voqal, the parent organization of Mobile Citizen.

ACA: Charter-TWC Deal Needs Strong Conditions

The American Cable Association has asked the Federal Communications Commission to apply various conditions on the Charter-Time Warner Cable-Bright House merger, saying without "significant, effective and long-lasting remedial conditions," the deal is not in the public interest and should not be approved.

As have other potential competitors to the merged company—Dish, COMPTEL—ACA points to the alleged new programming clout of a New Charter with ties to Discovery and Starz and says current program access and arbitration remedies are not sufficient to remedy the potential harms posed by those ties. ACA says must-have remedies include a non-discriminatory access condition and a commercial arbitration condition for New Charter-affiliated programming, and that the FCC has to "significantly bolster" enforcement of that nondiscriminatory access condition so its smaller MVPD members are protected from the combined company's increased bargaining position, and make sure the arbitration condition is a viable option for smaller carriers.

Op-ed

Is Change Here to Stay?

Of course I was thrilled this past April when the Federal Communications Commission indicated it was leaning against approval of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Reading their tarot cards, the companies promptly dropped their anti-competitive proposal. This was a real public interest victory, made possible by widespread grassroots opposition and an FCC that was listening to the people. (And it followed closely on the heels of the FCC’s hard-won and vastly-improved net neutrality rules for an Open Internet.)

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