Telecommunication

The small city of Hull in northern England is planning to be one of the first places in Europe to consign its telephone lines to history. By the end of 2017, between 150,000 and 180,000 of Hull’s 210,000 buildings will be using the city’s super-fast fibre broadband network. That means it is time, according to Bill Halbert, the head of the local telecoms company KCOM, to start thinking about decommissioning the old copper telephone network. “Copper cannot handle the future,” said Halbert, who pointed out that most British households are now running seven to nine devices off their internet network and that fibre-optic cables are the only option. “It has to be fibre all the way. That’s one of the big national challenges for our economy.” If the city gets rid of its phone lines, it would follow in the footsteps of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago, and the Channel island of Jersey. Palaiseau, outside Paris, is also planning to ditch the old wires in 2018.

A half-dozen consumer groups have asked the federal government to take action against Navient, a student loan servicer, and have accused the company of “harassing and abusing” borrowers with repeated automated telephone calls, even after being asked to stop. In a request filed on June 12 with the Federal Communications Commission, the National Consumer Law Center and other groups accused Navient of calling borrowers’ cellphones multiple times a day, and often many times a week, totaling hundreds or in some cases thousands of calls over a period of months or years.

The groups asked the FCC to take enforcement action against Navient for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by making repeated “robocalls” to student loan borrowers and other consumers. The letter asks the agency to force Navient “to stop making robocalls to consumers from whom it does not have consent to call, or consumers whose consent has been revoked.”

A former CenturyLink employee claims she was fired for blowing the whistle on the telecommunications company's high-pressure sales culture that left customers paying millions of dollars for accounts they didn't request, according to a lawsuit filed in Arizona state superior court. The company's shares fell the most in six weeks on the news, while the shares of merger partner Level 3 Communications Inc. also dropped sharply.

The plaintiff, Heidi Heiser, worked from her home for CenturyLink as a customer service and sales agent from August 2015 to October 2016. The suit claims she was fired days after notifying Chief Executive Officer Glen Post of the alleged scheme during a companywide question-and-answer session held on an internal message board. The complaint alleges CenturyLink "allowed persons who had a personal incentive to add services or lines to customer accounts to falsely indicate on the CenturyLink system the approval by a customer of new lines or services." This would sometimes result in charges that hadn't been authorized by customers, according to the complaint.

[Commentary] My cousin Charlie is serving time in an upstate New York prison. On June 13, a federal appeals court struck down several provisions in the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decisions to cap the cost of prison- and jail-phone calls. This ruling is a real blow to my family and many others like mine across the country. It’s also a huge step backward.

In late 2015, the FCC voted to reduce the steep cost of prison-phone calls charged to incarcerated people and their families. Many inmates and their families had spent years fighting to cap these calls, which can run to more than a dollar per minute. When the FCC voted to implement the caps I felt a sense of relief knowing that Charlie would be able to afford to call my grandmother on a more regular basis without worrying that he’d deplete his commissary on just phone calls. But soon after these rules were adopted the prison-phone industry sued the agency. In February 2017, Donald Trump’s newly appointed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, said the agency’s lawyers wouldn’t defend key aspects of these rules in court — paving the way for Tuesday’s decision.

Democratic Sens are calling on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai not to allow telemarketers to leave “ringless voicemails” on potential customers' phones. Sens Ed Markey (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and others penned a letter to Chairman Pai, asking that he not allow companies to leave messages soliciting business on consumer’s phones that go straight to their voicemail. The FCC is currently considering a petition from firms that would like the commission to revise its position on such calls, which are currently barred under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991.

“Exempting ringless voicemails from the TCPA’s autodialer protections would allow callers to overwhelm consumers with ringless voice messages without first receiving express consumer consent,” wrote the senators. “Whether by robocall, by robotext, or by ringless voicemail, consumers should have meaningful control over who can and cannot contact their mobile device.”

Today’s DC Circuit decision is deeply disappointing, not just for me and the many advocates who have fought for more than a decade to bring about much needed reform in the inmate calling services regime...it is a sad day for the more than 2.7 million children in this country with at least one incarcerated parent. But the families who have experienced the pain, anguish and financial burden of trying to communicate with a loved one in jail or prison, are still counting on us, so we will press on.

I remain committed to doing everything I can from working with my colleagues at the Commission, to supporting the efforts of Congress and those in the states to bring relief to millions who continue to suffer from the greatest form of regulatory injustice I have seen in my 18 years as a regulator in the communications space.

New to the Federal Communications Commission’s list of items on circulation an un-docketed item on protecting the privacy of customers of broadband and other telecommunications services; implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996; and telecommunications carriers' use of CPNI and other customer information.

Today, the DC Circuit agreed with my position that the FCC exceeded its authority when it attempted to impose rate caps on intrastate calls made by inmates. Looking ahead, I plan to work with my colleagues at the Commission, Congress, and all stakeholders to address the problem of high inmate calling rates in a lawful manner.

We can all agree that what we could do with less is the pull and push between federal, state, and local policymakers. We are in need of and should strive for a new era of cooperative regulation, that recognizes the states as laboratories of democracy, and your federal partners as a uniform guide where and when appropriate. So allow me to take some time this morning, to outline areas where we can work together, and other areas I feel, where states and localities should take the lead when it comes to privacy, universal service, pole attachments, rights-of-way access, and inmate calling.

Empirical research demonstrates that the Obama Administration’s aggressive regulatory agenda at the Federal Communications Commission reduced investment in the telecommunications sector between $20 and $40 billion annually, robbing the nation of a boom in network expansion the public wants and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act mandates.

As there is a direct relationship between network investment and jobs, the next logical question to ask is how this reduced network investment affected employment in the telecommunications sector. Using standard economic techniques and publicly-available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ford finds that over the period 2010-2016, the telecommunications sector lost approximately 100,000 jobs per year—many of them high-paying union jobs. This loss is the pay-equivalent of about 130,000 “average” US jobs.