Comporium said it “lit up” its Zipstream 1 Gbps fiber network in downtown Rock Hill, South Carolina. Comporium affiliate Home Telecom previously began providing Zipstream service to MeadWestvaco’s Nexton community in Summerville, South Carolina, in mid May. Comporium announced development of the Zipstream network in February, saying it would cost $99 per month for consumers and $299 monthly for companies (CD Feb 13 p15).
The Office of Management and Budget approved the FCC’s one-time mandatory data collection of inmate calling rates (CD Aug 12 p1), said a notice in Thursday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1hMVOzG). OMB approved the collection June 2, and so the information collection requirement is effective immediately, the notice said. All inmate calling service (ICS) providers must submit data on the costs of providing interstate, intrastate toll and local ICS. Submitted data should provide the costs of telecom service, interconnection fees, equipment investment, installation and maintenance, security, ancillary service and other costs, the notice said. Providers will also be required to provide certain related rate, demand and forecast data, the notice said. Confidential treatment for proprietary information is available through a protective order in dockets 12-375 and 13-113. The FCC estimated the time per response at 90 hours, the notice said. Major ICS providers had challenged the data collection, calling the FCC’s response time estimate “laughably” low (CD March 28 p3).
Comments are due June 25 in docket 14-89 on an AT&T Communications Act Section 214 petition to discontinue business directory assistance service. The services have been offered to business with PBX phone systems as a means to provide phone listings through the businesses’ phone systems, said an FCC public notice (http://bit.ly/1n489x1). AT&T plans to discontinue these services around July 1, and notified its customers of the proposed discontinuances by U.S. mail on April 10, it told the FCC. “AT&T maintains that the public convenience and necessity will not be impaired by the proposed discontinuance because there are alternative services available and customers will be able to reprogram their PBX and continue to have access to directory assistance services by dialing 411,” the notice said.
An FCC switched access decision in favor of AT&T will stand, the agency said Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1n47k7m). AT&T filed a complaint in 2010 against various telcos for charging for services they did not provide. The agency found the telcos to be “sham” CLECs created to “capture access revenues that could not otherwise be obtained by lawful tariffs.” All American Telephone, e-Pinnacle Communications and ChaseCom violated Communications Act sections 201(b) and 203 by engaging in “unjust and unreasonable” practices and by billing for services they did not provide, said the original order. Tuesday, the agency denied a petition for reconsideration by the defendants. Defendants’ petition and reply “repeat many arguments that the Commission has already fully considered and rejected,” said the denial.
AT&T plans several consumer outreach events in its proposed IP transition trial cities, it told FCC Wireline Bureau officials May 27, according to an ex parte notice posted June 10 (http://bit.ly/1n497cE). Over the next 60 days, AT&T plans three “senior tech training” sections in West Delray Beach, Florida, and three informational sessions and one city council briefing in Carbon Hill, Alabama. AT&T again said it would not seek approval to withdraw TDM services in the trial wire centers “any earlier than the second half of 2015” (CD May 29 p2).
Rural telcos should be OK despite a possible FCC re-definition of “broadband,” said Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant in a research note Monday. The FCC recently proposed to redefine “broadband” as 10 Mbps, up from 4 Mbps, in order to be eligible for Connect America Fund money (CD April 8 p1). “Given the tone of the Democratic majority in announcing the proposed increase, we suspect the FCC is likely to raise minimum deployment speeds from 4 to 10 Mbps,” Gallant said. That could lead to higher projected costs and a risk carriers wouldn’t accept CAF Phase II money, but “the FCC is sensitive to this risk and is likely to explore adjustments to other buildout factors” that might make it more “economically attractive” for telcos to accept CAF II payments for broadband buildout, Gallant said. Telcos like CenturyLink, Frontier Communications and Windstream are likely to accept the money, he said. They would start getting those payments in lieu of USF support around July 2015, he said. (See separate report on broadband speeds above in this issue.)
Paid prioritization as envisioned by Free Press and other net neutrality proponents doesn’t exist, said AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi Friday in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1i8OitQ). The Internet “is totally safe from fast lanes and slow lanes,” and no ISP has any plans to introduce the kind of paid prioritization Free Press warns against, he said. All ISPs have posted policies that prohibit the kinds of discriminatory practices raised by net neutrality proponents, he said. Reclassifying broadband as a Title II common-carrier service would do little good, Cicconi warned. “Some groups have suggested the best path to prevent paid prioritization is Title II,” he said. “But there’s one gigantic problem with this. The plain language of Title II provides no basis to prohibit paid prioritization. Quite the contrary, Title II actually allows and could protect any such practice.” Cicconi is “just plain wrong,” responded Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood. “AT&T has a consistent record of blocking applications that compete with its own voice and messaging services.” Wood cited AT&T’s blocking of Skype, Apple’s FaceTime app and Google Voice “right up until the FCC and Free Press started asking questions and drawing up Net Neutrality complaints about these tactics.” AT&T also demands extra from content providers, Wood said. “Look no further than the new practice of charging video-streaming services like Netflix an extra fee just to get their traffic on to last-mile broadband networks."
Purple Communications asked the FCC to act on its Feb. 20 emergency request for review of a decision by the Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service Fund administrator to withhold reimbursement for all IP-captioned telephone service (IP-CTS) minutes processed by Purple for November. The administrator “without any analysis or investigation, summarily concluded that Purple was ‘in violation’ of the Commission’s emergency handling requirements for IP CTS,” Purple said (http://bit.ly/UeVoYu). But Purple maintains that these emergency call handling requirements do not apply to Purple’s Web and wireless IP CTS service “because users of this service do not ‘initiate calls,'” the company said in a letter posted Thursday in docket 03-123.
Matrix Telecom will pay $875,000 to resolve an FCC Enforcement Bureau investigation into the telco’s ability to reliably complete long-distance calls to rural areas, said a bureau order released Wednesday. Matrix also agreed in the bureau consent decree (http://bit.ly/Sc1PcZ) to implement a three-year plan to comply with FCC rural call completion requirements. Upon the start of the investigation, Matrix significantly reduced the number of intermediate providers it uses to deliver long-distance calls to rural areas, said an FCC news release (http://fcc.us/SxYW6G). It said Matrix’s call completion performance to rural areas improved significantly. A message left at Matrix’s corporate headquarters was not returned. The case is the third resolving a rural call completion investigation in the past 15 months, the FCC said. In March 2013, Level 3 paid $975,000 (CD March 13/13 p7) to settle the bureau’s investigation of its rural call-completion performance, and in February 2014 Windstream paid $2.5 million (CD Feb 21 p15) to settle. The agreement was hailed by members of Congress, including Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., who called it in a statement Thursday, “an important step forward” that sends “another clear message that the bad actors failing to complete calls to rural areas will be held accountable. ... The ongoing call completion problems create serious economic and public safety concerns for rural communities in South Dakota and across our nation.” Senate Commerce Committee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., urged continued FCC enforcement. “This is a timely action by the FCC, particularly after two FCC commissioners visited South Dakota last week to hear about and observe the challenges rural carriers face,” he said in a statement Thursday. “This is only the third enforcement action in 15 months by the FCC to combat this persistent problem. The inability of individuals and businesses in rural America to have reliable telephone service is inexcusable.” NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield said in a statement Thursday, it’s again “clear that the unsafe and illegal practices of least-cost routers and the carriers that employ them are to blame for rural consumers’ ongoing inability to receive phone calls.” She said the investigation emphasizes the need for congressional legislation like a measure proposed (CD March 14 p7) by Johnson “to bring least-cost routers out of the shadows and put an end to the problem once and for all."
The FCC rejected a request by the Diogenes Telecommunications Project (DTP) that it reopen an investigation of AT&T for alleged misconduct in providing Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS). The project lacks standing, the FCC said in a Wednesday order (http://fcc.us/S9ho5h). In May 2013, AT&T agreed to pay $18.25 million to settle an FCC investigation into improper billing to the TRS fund and to adopt compliance measures (http://bit.ly/109q7Fk). The application for review by DTP “does not allege any direct or personal injury to DTP as an organization or to any of its members,” the FCC said. “It offers only a generalized and purely hypothetical injury.” DTP only “speculates that there might possibly be some injury to one of its members,” the FCC said.