Telecommunication

Universal service is the core principle of US telecommunications policy, and Congress has directed the Federal Communications Commission to ensure affordable advanced telecommunications capabilities are available to everyone. Members of Congress from across the political spectrum, the Administration, the FCC, and state and local lawmakers vigorously agree that bringing the benefits of high-speed broadband to all areas of the US is a moral and economic imperative.

Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and John Hoeven (R-ND) led a bipartisan coalition of senators urging the delay of the Federal Communications Commission’s order to reform the Rural Health Care (RHC) Program. In a letter addressed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the senators outlined their concerns with the FCC’s proposed RHC Program order by highlighting unaddressed obstacles that could effectively limit rural Americans’ access to high-quality health care by preventing health care providers from participating in the program.

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics, in consultation with the Wireline Competition Bureau, launched the urban rate survey for 2020. The information collected in this survey will be used to develop voice and broadband reasonable comparability benchmarks that will be in place in 2020. The FCC will be collecting the rates offered by a random sample of providers of fixed services identified using December 2018 FCC Form 477 data. The FCC will collect separate samples for fixed voice and fixed broadband services with up to 500 urban Census tracts in each.

Corporate choices made by AT&T and Verizon, and Frontier Communications’ dire financial condition created the growing divide between relatively modern telecommunications infrastructure in affluent urban and suburban communities and the decaying infrastructure in poor and rural ones. The result is “deteriorating service quality”, “persistent disinvestment”, an “investment focus on higher-income communities” and an “increased focus on areas most heavily impacted by competition.” When addressing service quality going forward, the California Public Utilities Commission should:

The largest US telephone companies in 2018 asked regulators to kill limits on the rates smaller carriers can be charged for connecting to the giants’ networks. Now the small carriers are claiming they have successfully defended the regulations as the Federal Communications Commission nears conclusion of a proceeding it has acted on in parts.

SensTom Cotton (R-AR) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), along with Sens Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mark Warner (D-VA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Mitt Romney (R-UT), introduced legislation to reinforce the Trump administration's efforts to prevent the Chinese-owned telecommunication company Huawei from threatening America's national security. The Defending America's 5G Future Act would codify President Donald Trump's recent Executive Order and would prohibit the removal of Huawei from the Commerce Department Entity List without an act of Congress.

“We must move aggressively to help consumers combat scam robocalls that use and abuse caller ID spoofing, and that’s why we held today’s summit. The summit was productive, and we received generally encouraging signs that companies are headed toward full implementation of the SHAKEN/STIR caller ID authentication framework. I was pleased to hear from voice service providers, vendors, consumer advocates, and others about the successes to date and the challenges that remain.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Aug 1, 2019:

Establishing the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund – The FCC will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would propose to adopt a two-phase reverse auction framework for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, committing $20.4 billion in high-cost universal service support to bring high-speed broadband service to millions of unserved Americans.

This April, I joined President Donald Trump at a White House event, where I announced my plans to create the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a modernized approach for connecting the hardest-to-serve corners of our country. Today, I’m circulating a proposal to formally establish this program. If adopted, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund will mark the Federal Communications Commission’s single biggest step yet to close the rural digital divide and will connect millions more rural homes and small businesses to high-speed broadband networks.