The FCC’s pending cramming notice of proposed rulemaking is couched as a wireline order, but also has a major focus on wireless, said agency officials who have seen the item and industry officials who have been told some of the details. Some proponents of bill shock rules worry that the wireless parts of the cramming order could be the replacement for proposed bill shock rules. When Chairman Julius Genachowski said he'd circulate a cramming NPRM last month (CD June 21 p6), he also indicated that final bill shock rules were on their way.

Rural telco associations are urging their members to swarm the FCC and Capitol Hill as part of an all-out effort to help shape the pending Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms. “All three associations are working to get as many member companies to Washington, D.C., as possible over the next two or three months to pull out all the stops in conveying to policy-makers both their general concerns about reform as well as details on the specific impacts of the FCC’s reform proposals,” NTCA, OPASTCO and the Western Telecom Alliance told members in an email blast late last month.

FCC decision makers met with all sides on program access complaints, as the officials ponder how to proceed after an appeals court sent some rules back to the agency for rethinking. The June 27 meeting came as the top two telcos seek action now on their 2009 complaints (CD June 22 p6), and as the cable defendants contend the agency must first pursue a rulemaking under the ruling on Cablevision v. FCC. A commission official watching the complaints against that company and its former programming unit said the agency doesn’t seem to have yet decided what to do. At the meeting, commission staffers indicated they could act on the complaints even under last month’s decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit, Cablevision recounted in its filing on the gathering in docket 07-198 (http://xrl.us/bkypff).

The GAO said in a recent report it could not identify any companies that are providing sensitive technologies to Iran. The report, based on interviews with U.S. officials, intelligence agencies, trade publications and SEC filings, said the Iranian regime has focused on developing its own indigenous communications filtering technologies. GAO made no recommendations on addressing that problem.

The FCC overextended itself in its order changing spectrum rules for mobile satellite services when it weighed in on the responsibility for receivers that pick up signals outside of their allocated spectrum, said the U.S. GPS Industry Council and CTIA. The industry groups filed petitions for reconsideration or clarification on the order, based in part on the agency’s take on the role of incumbent users with receivers that pick up signals outside their spectrum. The order was part of the commission’s effort to increase terrestrial broadband use of spectrum allocated for MSS (CD April 7 p6).

A non-nomadic VoIP component may put an $8.5 million Rural Utilities Service-funded project in West Virginia under state regulation. Spruce Knob Seneca Rocks Telephone, a local service provider, asked the West Virginia Public Service Commission if its project needs a certificate of convenience and necessity. Though provisioning of broadband services isn’t state-regulated and doesn’t need a certificate, there remains the issue of non-nomadic VoIP, PSC staff said. While industry groups claimed that states are preempted from jurisdiction, commission staff cited orders from states like Maine, which indicated federal regulators have not yet taken a position on non-nomadic VoIP jurisdiction issues.

Cable operators soon will be required to carry independent networks once the FCC decides a complainant made an initial case in discrimination disputes, agency officials said. They said commissioners are poised to vote to approve a draft order and rulemaking on program carriage that contains such a standstill requirement. The FCC’s Democratic members have already electronically voted for the item on circulation, or said they will approve it, commission officials told us. They said Commissioner Robert McDowell may also end up voting for the order, but he hasn’t yet decided.

The FCC issued its first guidance on the net neutrality order’s disclosure rules. Among its recommendations, the commission said in a public notice Thursday (http://xrl.us/bkygdq) that the December order allows ISPs to comply with the point-of-sale rules by “directing prospective customers at the point of sale, orally and/or prominently in writing to a web address."

The FCC should classify tw telecom’s facilities-based VoIP services as telecom under Title II and give the company the right “to establish direct IP-to-IP interconnections” with incumbent carriers, the CLEC said in a petition for declaratory ruling. Thursday’s petition is the first of its kind since the Supreme Court ruled in Talk America in June that incumbents must interconnect with competitors “at any technically feasible point” (CD June 10 p7).

The decision whether LightSquared can begin terrestrial-only service will likely come through the International Bureau rather than be a call by the full FCC, an agency spokesman said Thursday. The bureau wasted no time in asking for comments on a working group study of LightSquared interference with GPS signals filed Thursday, signaling the importance of the proceeding to the commission. The public notice asks about LightSquared’s revised roll-out plans that revolve around the company beginning beginning service in the lower part of its L-band spectrum (http://xrl.us/bkygmf). Interested parties have until Aug. 15 to file comments. The inter-bureau spectrum task force will review the study and comments, though the decision was on track to come out of the International Bureau, said the spokesman.