A “clarification” order released by the FCC Wireline Bureau Monday (http://fcc.us/1i8HlJw) corrects “certain rules” relating to implementation of the intercarrier compensation (ICC) transition adopted in the 2011 USF/ICC order. Language in sections 51.907 and 51.909 was clarified to “reflect ongoing rate parity in the transition process for price cap and rate-of-return” LECs, the order said. The bureau also clarified aspects of the rules relating to transition of terminating end office access rates, and the calculation of eligible recovery for price cap and rate-of-return carriers beginning in 2014. The bureau also clarified an issue “related to duplicative recovery and the true-up of regulatory fees and revenue calculations.”
The distribution of potentially funded locations changed “substantially” between Connect America Model 3.2 and 4.0, CenturyLink told FCC officials Tuesday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1pk4Bc0). “More sparsely populated locations that had been reserved for the Remote Areas Fund have replaced somewhat more populated high-cost areas in the universe of potentially-eligible CAF II locations,” the ILEC said. Its analysis “raises several questions” for agency staff to consider, it said, citing the “higher-than-expected number” of sites that cover “just a few locations,” and “more instances than expected where normal assumptions regarding the economics of sharing feeder facilities may not apply in practice because of the uneconomic nature of the areas served.” However, “it does not appear at this time that changes to the model itself are called for,” CenturyLink said.
ENMR Telephone Cooperative asked the FCC for a waiver of some of its rules, “to allow ENMR to correct inadvertent, administrative errors that resulted in under-reporting of billed and collected revenue for Dedicated Transport Access Service, End Office Access Service, and terminating Tandem-Switched Transport Access Service,” in a petition posted Friday (http://bit.ly/1rM5OLl). A waiver for the New Mexico company “will allow NECA to revise ENMR’s Base Period Revenue,” and if not granted, ENMR would be “impacted each year of phased down” intercarrier compensation support, it said.
The FCC fined Presidential Who’s Who $640,000 for faxing more than 100 advertisements to consumers who did not request them and had no business relationship with the company, said a forfeiture order released Friday (http://bit.ly/1rM44lg). “Presidential Who’s Who persisted in this conduct after Commission staff issued the company a formal citation, explained that its actions were unlawful, and warned that additional junk faxing could result in monetary forfeitures,” the order said. “Due to the large number of violations at issue, the company’s apparently intentional misconduct, and its failure to provide full and updated support for its inability to pay, we impose the total forfeiture of $640,000."
Neustar hopes the North American Numbering Council made the right decision when it decided to forward the Selection Working Group report and recommendation to the FCC on the next Local Numbering Portability Administrator, it said. “We are hopeful that the NANC has recommended a pro-competitive outcome: another round of bidding,” said Neustar Senior Vice President-Data Solution Steve Edwards in a statement. “There is no downside to better bids -- this can only benefit consumers and carriers alike.” The FCC will now have the opportunity to address the “procedural irregularities” that have arisen throughout the bidding process, he said. “To call the game now would be anticompetitive and exclusionary of stakeholder interests. We continue to believe there should be an additional round of proposals. Failing to offer an additional round deprives the industry and consumers from being able to consider the best available offer.” NANC held a closed meeting Wednesday in which it discussed the LNPA selection process (CD March 26 p7). An FCC spokesman said he couldn’t discuss what was said in the closed meeting.
IT Connect “willfully and repeatedly” violated FCC rules by “brokering 210 toll free numbers for fees ranging from $375 to $60,000 per number,” the FCC said in a notice of apparent liability for forfeiture released Wednesday (http://fcc.us/1p7qfQO). Selling toll-free numbers by a private entity for a fee is against commission rules. The company had been cited in 2007 for “warehousing, hoarding, and brokering toll free numbers,” which are a “public resource” that are not owned by any individual or entity, the notice said. The company continued to sell toll-free numbers for the next several years, including to the Sokolove law firm, “for substantial fees,” the notice said. IT Connect and its owner, Richard Jackowitz, face a $3.36 million fine. The company did not comment.
Internet-based relay services don’t have to file waiver status reports by April 16, the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in an order Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1p7DS2k). The reports would have detailed their progress in meeting the existing waived mandatory minimum telecom relay service (TRS) standards. “The Commission currently is considering action that would make permanent exemptions to certain TRS mandatory minimum standards,” wrote acting Chief Kris Monteith. “It is unlikely that this proceeding will be concluded prior to the April 16, 2014 filing deadline for the annual reports. Given that the Commission is in the midst of conducting this review, we find that requiring [Video Relay Service] and IP Relay providers to file new status reports this year -- which are, at least in large part, expected to repeat what has been reported to the Commission on multiple prior occasions, as has been the case in prior years’ reports -- would serve little purpose and impose an unnecessary burden on the providers at this time."
AT&T responded to dozens of questions from FCC officials in a meeting Friday about its proposed IP transition trials, an ex parte filing posted Wednesday said (http://bit.ly/1p7FVmU). The agency was concerned with what would happen to customers in areas that will not have access to wireline service, or whose assistive devices don’t work with the new technology. “It is still considering its options,” AT&T said. AT&T won’t be able to offer wireless home phone via Voice over LTE in the trial areas until a certain technology is available, it said. The name of that technology was redacted in the public version of the filing. “After HD voice is deployed, the audio quality for VoLTE calls is expected to be superior to traditional [plain old telephone] service,” the telco said. AT&T has “not calculated the number of existing subscribers nationwide that are located in areas outside of AT&T’s wireline IP network footprint and ineligible for Wireless Home Phone due to network coverage issues,” it said. “Doing so would be very difficult and time-consuming.” AT&T is working on developing technology to support “standards-based analog health monitoring, home alarm, fax” and credit card validation devices over wireless services, it said. If a customer’s TDM-based “assistive technology device” does not work with U-verse voice or its wireless home phone service, the customer would be asked to obtain an IP-compatible device, AT&T said. If that’s not feasible, “we will work with the customer to develop a solution, which may include restoring TDM-based service” to the customer during the trial, it said. During the trial, AT&T will continue to make existing bare copper loops available for wholesale customers, it said. Payphone coin lines will be excluded from the IP transition trial, but AT&T is monitoring call volumes in the trial wire centers to determine “whether and when to transition such lines off,” it said.
If the FCC decides to allow document retention of sensitive Lifeline customer data, it’s important to safeguard that information, the National Consumer Law Center and National Hispanic Media Coalition told Wireline Bureau officials Monday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1p7op25). “It must only be allowed in very limited and controlled circumstances to protect customer privacy and protect from ID theft,” they said. It’s also important to have a consistent level of training among sales representatives, they said.
The definition and purpose of telephone numbers confronted FCC and industry engineers at a numbering testbed workshop Tuesday. “The whole point is to explore as many reasonable solutions as possible” to learn what works well, said FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne. Attendees considered what purpose telephone numbers should be used for “besides supporting real-time communications”; whether it’s possible to design a “fully-distributed ‘meshed’ system that does not rely on a master database” of number assignments; and how caching might be built into the architecture to “facilitate robustness.” Any new system has to do a much better job of presenting information about the entity to nontechnical users, Schulzrinne told the several dozen participants. It needs to be able to address consumer fraud, as well as more traditional, “not outright criminal, things that people do,” such as nuisance calls, he said. The group discussed how best to route numbers in an IP-based world, and some suggested a potential Domain Name System-like approach. “What makes a phone number unique” is that it’s a global identifier not associated with a specific provider of services, associated on a long-term basis with a person, organization or service; and -- compared with domain names -- it’s “reasonably international” in terms of usability, Schulzrinne said. It’s also usable outside the local domain, unlike, for instance, a Facebook ID, he said. As for “details” such as how many digits phone numbers contain, or whether they're assigned by one entity or another? “I'm agnostic on that,” Schulzrinne said.