Telecommunication

The time is long past for Congress to adopt outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s recommendation: Move the universal service program on-budget, which will shore up its precarious financial state and cure many of the real or perceived problems with the existing program. Some have suggested expanding the revenue base to include broadband access. An alternative proposal floated by state utilities commissioners would have replaced the existing surcharge with a per-number tax on residential lines and a revenue-based tax on commercial telephone revenue.

Federal Communications Commission Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the February Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, February 17, 2021:

Exploring the use of an innovative approach to a public-private partnership (PPP) to spur the deployment of broadband and create more resilient telecommunications networks in Puerto Rico. Such a partnership is a critical ingredient of the plan for rebuilding the telecommunications sector of Puerto Rico after the island was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017. The proposed partnership also has the potential for enabling the expansion of citizen access to broadband services throughout Puerto Rico.

This is the twenty-third report in a series prepared by federal and state staff members for the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service. The findings are reported in seven sections: Section 1 of the report provides an update on industry revenues, universal service program funding requirements, and contribution factors. Sections 2 through 5 provide the latest data on the low-income, highcost, schools and libraries, and rural health care support mechanisms.

The Federal Communications Commission heard reports from leaders of the Wireline Competition Bureau and Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force on their work over the last four years. The Wireline Bureau’s presentation to the Commissioners summarized the Wireline Bureau’s substantial progress in core areas, including expanding broadband to millions of previously unserved homes and businesses in rural America, removing regulatory barriers to infrastructure investment, and transitioning to next-generation networks.

The Communications Act of 1934 outlines several reasons why our agency was created, including “for the purpose of the national defense” and “for the purposes of promoting safety of life and property.” Consistent with those charges, identifying threats to our communications networks and taking aggressive action to counteract those threats have been among the hallmarks of the Federal Communications Commission during my four years as Chairman.

The Christmas Day explosion that rocked Nashville caused considerable disruption, as it damaged a critical piece of the broader area’s telecommunications infrastructure. One of the major lines of inquiry was whether there was significance in the location of the blast: on a downtown street in front of an AT&T transmission building. The explosion created significant damage to the facility, causing widespread repercussions to telecommunication systems in Nashville and beyond. Officials said the outages have affected 911 operations and flights at Nashville International Airport.

The telecommunications ecosystem is broken, but there's a move underway by the Telecom Ecosystem Group to rectify, if not completely reset, some of those problems.

A Biden Federal Communications Commission needs to tackle exorbitant jail and prison call prices: extending reform efforts to jails and intrastate communications, tackling exploitative video call contracts for the first time, and addressing the problems of fees and monopolistic bundled service provision in addition to fully dismantling the regressive commission system.

The Federal Communications Commission universal service support fund's revenue base has been shrinking while the payouts have risen. As a result, the contribution factor, an ad valorem tax on the revenue base, rose from 16.7% in 2017 to 21.2% in 2020. We propose two solutions to the funding problem: A near-term funding reform proposal that widens the revenue base by replacing the current definition of assessable services (interstate and international) with a more inclusive definition of all communication services that have a telecommunications component.