The FCC’s Connect America Fund will be the subject of a cost-model order and a new boundary mapping tool soon, agency officials told state regulators at the winter NARUC meeting. But as the FCC moves full steam ahead on what it’s calling its highest priority, state regulators worried about boundary area mapping expressed concern that some of the FCC’s plans may be coming too soon for states and companies to handle.

CompTel CEO Jerry James told state regulators that incumbent telcos must abide by the interconnection regulations of the Communications Act and must file the agreements on the state level. “The ILECs must comply with Sections 251 and 252,” James said in a Monday speech. “This interconnection must be filed and should be filed at each state commission.” The regulations are still “applicable” as well as vital and aren’t a matter of wanting to “regulate the Internet” or trying to “turn back the clock,” he said.

State regulators tackled the significance of the FCC’s access recovery charge (ARC) early on at its winter committee meetings in Washington. Panelists struggled to make sense of the charge, which has spurred heated filings between the D.C. Public Service Commission and Verizon and is a concern that’s come up in other states, as FCC filings have shown. A panel of telco and state regulators met Saturday afternoon to discuss the contested charge, introduced to make up for revenue telcos lost in reduced access rates when the FCC issued its November 2011 USF order.

The U.S. is experiencing an “historically high” patent grant rate after decades of increases, but the government’s patent system needs improvement, said the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program Friday in a new report. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 247,713 patents during 2011, a “record high” that follows steady increases in patent grant rates that extend back to 1985, Brookings said (http://xrl.us/bod6n4).

The FTC laid out best practices on how mobile apps should notify users of their data collection and sharing practices, in a Friday report approved by a unanimous vote of commissioners. The report gave privacy-bolstering recommendations for app developers, third parties, such as advertising networks, and app platforms, such as Google Play or the Apple App Store.

The FCC’s next steps on narrowbanding will come only after the commission has a chance to plow though the large number of applications for waivers filed by public safety and other licensees, a spokesman said Friday. He acknowledged that a small number of waiver applications came in after the deadline.

Opinions within the noncommercial broadcasting industry vary on whether the FCC will prioritize an order allowing noncommercial educational (NCE) stations to raise funds on-air for other nonprofit organizations. NCE officials noted there’s been no action by the commission on the issue, and replies in docket 12-106 were due Aug. 22. The proposal faced opposition from NPR (CD Aug 23 p13), and the Association of Public Television Stations and PBS urged the commission to uphold the current rules for stations that receive funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (http://xrl.us/bnh3fd). If the agency continues to hold off acting, waivers must be sought to run such fundraising on-air on a case-by-case basis.

Should telcos have to file IP-to-IP interconnection agreements with state regulators? Several competitive carriers say yes. In a Thursday petition, they question Verizon’s undisclosed potential IP-to-IP interconnection agreements and ask the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable to remedy the situation. They pointed to February 2012 statements from Verizon that it had one such agreement in place for its FiOS VoIP service and is “negotiating others.” The group of CLECs, which includes EarthLink Business, Cbeyond Communications and tw data services, don’t view the action as legal or fair, according to the petition. The “failure of Verizon” has prevented state regulators from their “statutory duty,” the carriers said.

Tens of millions of viewers were expected to tune to CBS Sunday to watch the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens face off in the Super Bowl. Increasingly, the game is available on more devices and online. Through an agreement with the NFL, Verizon Wireless NFL Mobile customers were to get a live stream of the game on their mobile devices. But one place the Super Bowl was not scheduled to be seen this weekend was on TV stations’ mobile DTV broadcasts.

Accipiter Communications received a waiver of some of the high-cost USF support rules until the end of 2014. The Phoenix-area telco asked for waiver of the rule limiting per-line support to $250 per month, and a waiver of the high-cost loop support benchmarks rule limiting reimbursable capital and operating expenses. A Wireline Bureau order Wednesday determined a waiver is in the public interest, is justified based on Accipiter’s “reasonable” expenses, and will ensure the telco’s customers continue to have access to broadband and voice service.