The FCC’s latest technical difficulty that forced it...

an agency spokeswoman told us. The agency created a new online interface, separate from ECFS, for broadband and voice providers to submit broadband deployment data as part of the commission’s new effort to collect the data as part of its twice-annual census of providers, she said. While monitoring the data to make sure the new system was working, staff noticed “an anomaly,” and “in an abundance of caution,” halted submissions until the problem is fixed, said a commission spokesman. In a public notice, the Wireline Bureau gave no timeline for the repairs (http://bit.ly/1ovVALd), saying it’s trying to resolve the problem “as quickly as possible.” Meanwhile, ECFS is running more slowly than normal, the spokeswoman acknowledged, attributing it to “several very large searches that download a large number of comments sequentially.” That “tends to tie up the system and slow down query response times,” she said. The large influx of comments in some dockets, including the net neutrality proceeding, is also adding to the delays, she said: “Our [information technology] team is doing what it can to find workarounds to the issues.”