Telecommunication

The Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 pole attachment order was upheld in a ruling July 31 by the Eighth Circuit Court, providing a potential win for competitive and incumbent providers expanding their fiber networks. In 2015, a group of electric utilities, including Ameren Corporation, American Electric Power Service, CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric, and Virginia Electric and Power Company petitioned to review a November 2015 order of the FCC governing the rates that utility companies may charge telecommunications providers for attaching their wired facilities to utility-owned poles.

The FCC, which was joined by intervenors Incompas, National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Level 3 Communications, and USTelecom, opposed the petition. In delivering its decision, the court found that the November 2015 Order provided a “reasonable interpretation of the ambiguity” in Section 224 of the Pole Attachments Act.

Every day American consumers report tens of thousands of illegal robocalls to the Federal Trade Commission, and now the FTC is helping put that information to work boosting industry efforts to stop unwanted calls before they reach consumers. Under a new initiative announced by the FTC, when consumers report Do Not Call or robocall violations to the agency, the robocaller phone numbers consumers provide will be released each day to telecommunications carriers and other industry partners that are implementing call-blocking solutions.

Unwanted and illegal robocalls are the FTC’s number-one complaint category, with more than 1.9 million complaints filed in the first five months of 2017 alone. By reporting illegal robocalls, consumers help law enforcement efforts to stop the violators behind these calls. In addition, under the initiative, the FTC is now taking steps to provide more data, more often to help power the industry solutions that block illegal calls. The consumer complaint data is crucial because many of today’s call-blocking solutions rely on “blacklists” -- databases of telephone numbers that have received significant consumer complaints -- as one way to determine which calls should be blocked or flagged before they reach consumers’ phones. The new data that FTC is making available also will include the date and time the unwanted call was received, the general subject matter of the call (such as debt reduction, energy, warranties, home security, etc.), and whether the call was a robocall.

Verizon is taking a different view on the one-touch make-ready (OTMR) proposals being considered by the Federal Communications Commission, saying that any new rules should not be driven by the labor agreements carriers have with unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA). In an FCC filing, the service provider said that developing OTMR rules that are in line with labor agreements could cause issues for providers seeking access to poles. “The commission should not tailor its OTMR rules to specific companies’ particular collective bargaining agreements,” Verizon said in the filing. “That approach would result in a patchwork of rules that might be subject to change every few years and would be administratively unmanageable for new attachers.” This is different than the position that has long been held by fellow telecommunication companies AT&T and Frontier.

Louisville (KY) has garnered much praise for an award-winning data map that visualizes the modern day effects of redlining — a practice that dates back to the 1930s, and involves racial and socioeconomic discrimination in certain neighborhoods through the systematic denial of services or refusal to grant loans and insurance.

This map, dubbed Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate, takes historic data about redlining found in the national archives in Washington (DC) in 2013 and combines it with a timeline of historic events, data about current poverty levels, neighborhood boundaries and racial demographic info. With a host of tools including buttons and sliders, users can clearly see the correlation between the deliberate injustices of the past and the plight of struggling neighborhoods today. Jeana Dunlap, Louisville’s director of redevelopment strategies, said the value of this map is wide-reaching, and that it serves to foster awareness and spur discussion of many civic challenges, including digital equity, poverty, and access to basic needs such as full-service grocery stores and health-care services.

The Federal Communications Commission today issued a $2.88 million fine against a New Mexico-based company, Dialing Services, for facilitating unlawful robocalls. Robocallers used Dialing Services’ calling technology platform to make millions of illegal robocalls to mobile phones without express prior consent from consumers.

AT&T and Verizon, two of the nation’s largest telecommunication companies, are making their case again to the Federal Communications Commission to shorten the copper retirement notice from 180 to 90 days. The longer 180-day period was developed under former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in the regulator’s 2015 Technology Transitions Order.

As part of that order, the FCC proposed giving competitive carriers and businesses a six-month notice, while residential customers get three months’ notice before copper facilities are shut down. Under that order, AT&T, Verizon and other ILECs are required to provide notice to CLEC wholesale customers that use copper facilities to deliver voice and Ethernet over Copper (EoC) services to business customers. ILECs would also be given the option to retire copper networks and replace them with fiber without prior commission approval, but only if no service is discontinued, reduced, or impaired.

Soon after his daughter's funeral, Hank Hunt began reaching out to dozens of resources to make sure his tragedy never happens to anyone else. His mission: to ensure 9-1-1 could be dialed directly from any landline phone from any public building in the US. He names it “Kari’s Law.”

A few state legislatures have passed Kari’s Law and Congress is considering nationwide action. But Verizon didn’t wait for a government mandate. Verizon began updating the network we use in our landline territory to serve multi-line customers and allow for direct dialing of 9-1-1, becoming the industry leader in making the goal of Kari’s Law a reality. The project is 97% complete and by summer’s end it will be at 99% with the final changes scheduled to be finished before the end of 2017.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted a Notice of Inquiry to explore methods by which reassigned telephone number data could be made available to callers to avoid making unwanted calls to consumers.

Continuing its work to improve communications services in rural America, the Federal Communications Commission took additional steps to combat the problem of long-distance calls failing to reach rural communities.

The FCC is seeking comment on rules that would hold phone companies more accountable for ensuring that long-distance calls to rural America get through to a called party. Certain telephone companies that hand off calls to intermediate providers would be required to monitor the performance of these intermediaries and hold them accountable if calls don’t go through. By making long-distance providers accountable for the rural call completion performance of their intermediate providers, this new proposal would more directly and quickly tackle rural call completion problems than the FCC’s current regulations. This solution represents an effective means of improving rural call completion while not unnecessarily burdening providers because it follows industry best practices. The Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeks comment on this proposal as well as on proposals to either modify or eliminate the FCC’s current rural call completion data collection and reporting rules.

The House Appropriations Committee approved the fiscal year 2018 Agriculture Appropriations bill on a voice vote. The legislation funds important agricultural and food programs and services, including food and medical product safety, animal and plant health programs, rural development and farm services, agricultural trade, financial marketplace oversight, and nutrition programs. The legislation includes $6.94 billion for rural electric and telephone infrastructure loans, the same level as fiscal year 2017.