Telecommunication

Verizon has avoided paying local taxes on telecommunication equipment in many New Jersey municipalities over the past decade, but a proposed state law would force the company to pay back taxes for all the payments it didn't make.

Some businesses are pushing back against a regulatory proposal that would allow phone companies to block unwanted robocalls. Representatives for trade bodies that lobby on behalf of debt collectors, banks, health-care providers and other businesses met with Federal Communications Commission officials recently, urging them to delay a planned June 6 vote on the matter and instead seek public comment, apparently. Banks, collection agencies and merchants say automated calls are crucial, even though some consumers find them annoying.

The Trump administration’s offensives aimed at frustrating the 5G ambitions of China and mobile-technology giant Huawei might end up impeding America’s wireless ambitions, too. Recent White House actions land as China and the US race to launch the superfast cellular networks, with Huawei and its Chinese customers targeting a nationwide 5G rollout in 2020. A US Commerce Department measure, designed to hinder Huawei from buying critical components, might make it harder for American and European telecom-equipment makers to buy certain supplies as well, Western industry executives said.

On March 28, 2019, Reps Yvette Clark (D-NY), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA), Tony Cárdenas (D-CA), GK Butterfield (D-NC), Marc Veasey (D-TX), and Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai raising concerns as to the rollout of the Lifeline National Eligibility Verifier.

Incarcerated spaces are, by design, replete with insidious and unethical realities, but one of the most infuriating is how much money people in jail and prison are forced to pay if they want to make a phone call to someone on the outside. This unjust reality, however, could be changing soon for incarcerated people in Connecticut.

The future of competition in high-speed broadband access looks bleak. A vast majority of homes only have their cable monopoly as their choice for speeds in excess of 100 mbps and small ISPs and local governments are carrying the heavy load of deploying fiber networks that surpass gigabit cable networks. Research now shows that these new monopolies have striking similarities to the telephone monopolies of old. But we don’t have to repeat the past; we’ve already seen how laws promoted competition and broke monopolies. In the United States, high-speed fiber deployment is low and slow.

I commend the US Senate for passing the TRACED Act and Sens John Thune (R-SD) and Ed Markey (D-MA) for leading this bipartisan effort. The TRACED Act would help strengthen the FCC’s ability to combat illegal robocalls, and we would welcome these additional tools to fight this scourge. Further powers like increased fines, longer statutes of limitations, and removing citation requirements which obligate us to warn some robocallers before penalizing them, will significantly improve our already strong robocall enforcement efforts.

The Senate passed the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act (S 151) by a 97-1 vote. The bill would give the Federal Communications Commission civil fining authority of up to $10,000 per call for those who "intentionally flout" telemarketing restrictions.

On April 10, 2019, Sens John Thune (R-SD) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai in support of eliminating the Universal Service Fund High-Cost program's rate floor rule and ending the federal mandate that increases telephone rates for rural Americans. The senators called the rule "inherently flawed and unnecessary." On May 6, Chairman Pai wrote back to say that the FCC had eliminated the rule. "consider this a big win for rural Americans—we repealed a defacto federal government mandate that increased rates paid by rural Americans."

After Hurricane Michael wreaked havoc on Florida in 2018, AT&T restored wireless service more quickly than Verizon because it relied on well-trained employees while Verizon instead used contractors that "did not have the proper credentials," according to the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents workers from both telecoms. The Federal Communications Commission recently found that carriers' mistakes prolonged outages caused by the hurricane. Many customers had to go without cellular service for more than a week.