It’s a “safe bet” competitive telcos loathe Verizon’s latest forbearance request for Virginia Beach (CD April 1 p8), a CLEC lawyer told us. Monday, Verizon filed a petition seeking relief from loop and transport unbundling requirements in parts of Virginia Beach where Cox is the incumbent cable operator. The request is “exactly the same type of petition” as a pending Verizon forbearance petition for the Rhode Island market, the lawyer said. Both amount to a “regurgitation” of a Verizon petition the FCC denied in December (CD Dec 5 p1), the attorney said. In that petition, Verizon sought relief in Virginia Beach, Providence and four other East Coast markets. An FCC public notice on Virginia Beach forbearance setting a 30-day deadline for comments is expected soon, the lawyer said. But CLECs are expected to mention Virginia Beach when they comment April 7 on a CLEC motion to dismiss Verizon’s Rhode Island request.
Adam Bender
Adam Bender, Senior Editor, is the state and local telecommunications reporter for Communications Daily, where he also has covered Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. He has won awards for his Warren Communications News reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, Specialized Information Publishers Association and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. Bender studied print journalism at American University and is the author of dystopian science-fiction novels. You can follow Bender at WatchAdam.blog and @WatchAdam on Twitter.
Policymakers should promote broadband deployment to help reduce global carbon emissions, industry officials said on a Freedom to Connect conference panel Tuesday. Broadband at very fast speeds reduces business travel and promotes e- commerce, they said. “We are not going to reach the kind of efficiencies I believe we can reach without high-speed broadband networks that are hooked up to our homes and communities,” said Kathy Brown, a Verizon senior vice president.
Network congestion is “a worry” in Japan, said Adam Peake in a panel at the F2C conference. Peake is an executive research fellow at the Center for Global Communications of the International University of Japan. Some U.S. net neutrality advocates argue that building network capacity would relieve ISP congestion woes. Japan has the world’s fastest, least expensive broadband, Peake said. But those benefits encourage users to “pump out a lot of traffic,” he said. About two-thirds of ISP backbone traffic is residential, he noted. Japan has implemented net neutrality principles similar to proposed FCC rules, but ISPs increasingly use packet-shaping to target P2P and manage traffic, he said.
Competitive telcos acted in droves to oppose a Verizon petition seeking forbearance in Rhode Island from loop and transport unbundling requirements (CD Feb 29 p12). In four filings, CompTel and 29 CLECs urged that the FCC reject a Verizon petition they said reprised one the agency denied. “Verizon has demonstrated both its astonishing sense of entitlement and the fundamental flaws of the forbearance petition,” said One Communications, Time Warner Telecom, Integra and Cbeyond in a 202-page filing. Sprint Nextel, a longtime special access reform advocate, also opposed the petition. Comments were due Friday.
A Google message of wireless openness “is going to take root and it’s going to be difficult to dislodge it,” Google Android Group Manager Rich Miner said at the Freedom to Connect conference. Android, the search firm’s upcoming open-source operating system, will give consumers a taste for openness and teach them to value it, Miner said. The trait will influence how they pick a wireless carrier, breaking down “walls of innovation erected by handset makers [and] carriers,” he said. The first Android devices ship later this year, he said. But a more critical issue for wireless may be access to spectrum, said Michael Calabrese, a New America Foundation director. The 700 MHz auction raised the barrier to wireless entry, with the “DSL duopoly” Verizon and AT&T taking the most spectrum, he said. Verizon’s “Any Devices, Any Apps” effort is promising, but the “jury is still out” on how open the network will be and how Verizon will price it, he said.
Bell Canada Enterprises got Canadian Radio-TV and Telecommunications Commission approval for its private equity buyout by the Ontario Teachers consortium, with conditions, Bell Canada said Friday. The deal “proposed to privatize the country’s largest communications company and included significant foreign interest,” said CRTC Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein. “Consistent with previous decisions, we have imposed conditions to address our concerns relating to corporate governance,” he said. “These conditions will ensure that control of BCE remains in Canadian hands once the transaction is completed.”
The FCC should stop cable companies from slowing video service ports to competing TV companies, Verizon said in a Wednesday petition. “The process to switch video providers is… cumbersome for consumers,” Verizon said. “Cable incumbents do not accept disconnect orders from the new provider; instead, they require the customer to contact them directly to cancel service after choosing a new video provider and to return equipment. This significantly complicates the process of switching video providers, thereby entrenching the cable incumbents’ dominant market position.”
An economic slowdown means opportunity for alternative phone companies, as well as curtains for some VoIP companies, industry officials said in interviews. Meanwhile, former Bell companies and other wireline incumbents dismissed notions that their businesses are vulnerable.
Wireline carriers sounded alarms over an FCC proposal to shrink the number porting shot clock for completing wireline- to-wireline and intermodal number requests to 48 hours from four days. MetroPCS and one state regulator said the time interval could be shorter still. The proposal is part of a further notice to an order mandating that carriers use four validation fields in porting requests.
The FCC hasn’t decided whether it will invite the MPAA or Hollywood studios to the Stanford hearing on network management, Chairman Kevin Martin said at a news conference Thursday. The groups have opposed neutrality regulation, saying it could make enforcing copyrights more difficult. But the action that spurred FCC concern about management practices, Comcast’s blocking of BitTorrent, “didn’t have anything to do with copyright or lawful content,” Martin said. “If it did, I think the commission has very clearly stated that all of our net neutrality principles protect lawful content.” Martin said he was unsure whether the FCC would hold a hearing after the one April 17 at Stanford. “We'll wait and see how the commission feels about the success” of that one, he said.