The Lifeline program is very important to many people, several public interest groups told then-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Thursday, said an ex parte filing by Consumers Union (http://bit.ly/16Mj4XI). “Many diverse immigrant communities lack access to basic phone service and would be unable to look for jobs, communicate with family, or use 9-1-1 services” without it, the filing said. Lifeline should be expanded to include broadband, said groups also including the Asian American Justice Center, Center for Digital Democracy, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Urban League, New America Foundation and Utility Reform Network. The groups encouraged Clyburn to issue a rulemaking on inmate calling rates, and look into making more data available to the public on broadband adoption and complaints.

On Wednesday, the Texas Senate unanimously passed legislation relating to the state’s 911 service. House Bill 1972 passed the House easily April 24 and with its Senate passage is now enrolled. The bill (http://bit.ly/11HVLNZ) sets out to revise the liability portions of Texas law relating to 911 service and to address Internet Protocol-enabled service and other technology changes affecting 911 service. According to the Legislature’s analysis (http://bit.ly/107s5GT), the bill would expand liability protections to include “communications service providers, developers of software used in providing 9-1-1 service, and third parties or other entities involved in providing 9-1-1 service” and “extend this protection to the officers, directors, and employees of these providers and associated entities.” It also kills references to “telephone” and replaces them with “communication devices,” among other language changes. The act will take effect Sept. 1 if it is signed into law.

The California Public Utilities Commission should tell the FCC to issue multiple rules related to 911, CPUC staff recommended in a Thursday memo (http://bit.ly/166fkQt). Staff suggested responses to the FCC’s 911 reliability NPRM with comments due May 13. Staff believe the CPUC should tell the FCC to “adopt minimum backup power requirements or standards for central offices and other network locations necessary to ensure the provisioning of 9-1-1 service” but with appropriate flexibility based on many factors. The FCC should “adopt minimum back up power mandates as discussed above, a certification scheme, and a continuation of best practices where mandates do not exist,” CPUC staff suggested the California regulators recommend. “The CPUC should also recommend that if the FCC adopts reporting requirements, the FCC should provide states timely access to the reports pertaining to 9-1-1 networks in their state.”

The Ohio Public Utilities Commission can have lower budgets in the fiscal years 2014 and 2015 because it’s losing authority over the state’s Wireless Enhanced 9-1-1 funds, PUC Chairman Todd Snitchler told the Ohio Senate Tuesday. “The FY14 proposed budget of $71,646,302 million is a 23% decrease from the FY13 budget of $92,978,316 million, and the FY15 proposed budget of $53,254,528 is a 43% decrease of the FY13 budget,” Snitchler said in his written testimony (http://1.usa.gov/100xRGD). The fund, which comes from a 25-cents-per-month wireless surcharge, was created in 2005, he said. Fiscal year 2015 shows an $18.4 million drop in the proposed PUC budget, he said. He noted that two state laws are transferring the supervision of the funds from the PUC to the Ohio departments of taxation and public safety. The PUC will stop administering these funds as of Jan. 1, 2014, where upon “Taxation will be in charge of the collection and distribution of funds at that time, currently an assigned responsibility of a Commission staff member,” he said.

House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., said in a news release Tuesday that last week’s Boston Marathon attack shows the need for states to move forward on next-generation 911. “First responders in Boston did not hesitate and, without question, saved lives,” Eshoo said. “We owe it to them and to the public to ensure the best possible emergency response technology is being utilized.” Eshoo cited a recent GAO report (http://1.usa.gov/17sEwN7) that said states are making progress on E-911 and that as of March, 98 percent of public safety answering points are capable of receiving Phase I location information and 97 percent have implemented Phase II for at least one carrier (CD April 19 p12). “The GAO report shows states are making good use of funds to implement enhanced 9-1-1 services that can pinpoint the location of emergency callers,” Eshoo said. “But it also shows we are still in the early phases of implementing Next Generation 9-1-1 technology that gives 9-1-1 call centers the ability to receive text, photos and video directly from bystanders at the scene of an emergency.”

Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and a coalition of other advocacy groups for the deaf and hard of hearing told the FCC in a filing released Monday that the agency should authorize Progeny to deploy its E-911 locator service on the 902-928 MHz Multilateration Location and Monitoring Service band. The coalition encouraged the FCC to complete its review of Progeny’s request and encourage wireless carriers to incorporate Progeny’s service and related locator technologies into their networks. Ensuring reliable access to emergency services is a “major concern” for the advocacy groups and Gallaudet University’s Technology Access Program, which also supports the Progeny service, the coalition said. “Accurate location information is a critical element in 9-1-1 response, and the need to locate 911 callers is even more acute in the case of TTY and text-to-911 ‘callers’ who may be unable to provide their location with the speed or accuracy of traditional voice callers,” the coalition said. Progeny’s service will answer the “limitations of existing location identification technologies,” which often cannot accurately locate callers indoors -- and particularly in multi-story structures, the coalition said (http://bit.ly/ZlIyq0).

"It’s really just a set of high-level requirements,” said a carrier official. “In order to implement something consistent that supports all of the [public safety answering points] and all of the different carriers we normally work from an industry standard.”

The District of Columbia’s Office of Unified Communications stands to benefit from the city’s FY 2014 budget. The budget’s Capital Improvements Plan designates “more than $35 million for equipment upgrades at OUC to ensure that these resources remain state-of-the-art, which will include enhanced 9-1-1 service,” the budget notes. D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray sent the budget to the City Council Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/11Ro6QP). The budget includes other upgrades slated to happen around the city and describes how “over $20 million will be invested in technology upgrades at schools and in information systems to track progress of over 100,000 students.”

The Connecticut Legislature is moving forward with a substitute for its bill limiting regulation of Internet Protocol-enabled telephony, and posted its fiscal and overall analyses Monday. House Bill 6401 prevents the state from regulating the rates of interconnected VoIP and IP-enabled service but it “shall not be construed to affect the authority of the Attorney General to apply and enforce the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act” or other general consumer protections, according to the text (http://1.usa.gov/106hNnE). It also won’t affect interconnection obligations for voice traffic or “affect, mandate or prohibit the assessment of enhanced 9-1-1 fees, telecommunications relay service fees or lifeline service fees on interconnected voice over Internet protocol service or any other voice over Internet protocol service,” it said. There'll be zero fiscal impact since it reiterates the current practice of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, the analysis said. The Energy and Technology Committee voted in favor of the substitute 21-2 earlier this month.

Microsoft did not release customer data in either “content” or “non-content” form in response to the vast majority of law enforcement requests in 2012, the company said Thursday in releasing its first “transparency” report (http://bit.ly/Xs2y6D). Microsoft collects such data as a member of the Global Network Initiative. Google has been releasing the reports periodically since 2010, and in its latest report for the first time segmented law enforcement requests by the legal process used. The Microsoft data cover its online and cloud services including Hotmail and Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365, it said. Skype data are included but reported separately since Skype collected data in a different format before Microsoft’s acquisition of the service in late 2011 and because Skype continues operating under Luxembourg law, Microsoft said. Microsoft and Skype together received 75,378 law enforcement requests that “potentially impacted” 137,424 accounts, which Microsoft said was “likely” less than 0.02 percent of active users. Its compliance teams provided “no customer data” in response to 18 percent of requests, “non-content information” only for 79.8 percent, and content information for 2.2 percent. Non-content data refer to “basic subscriber information, such as the e-mail address, name, location and IP address captured at the time of registration,” while content data are created by customers, such as email text, it said. The company gave only broad ranges for the number of national security letters it has received from the FBI in recent years: 0-999 in 2012, 1,000-1,999 each in 2011 and 2010, and 0-999 in 2009. The top 5 countries for law enforcement requests (http://bit.ly/13fHl7R) were Turkey (11,434), U.S. (11,073), U.K. (9,226), France (8,603) and Germany (8,419). The U.S. was the only country with any significant number of its requests approved for content data -- 13.9 percent, or 1,544 of its requests. Requests that disclosed no customer data were segmented by those for which no customer data were found and those rejected for “not meeting legal requirements.” Only a handful of countries had more than a few rejections on legal grounds, led by the U.S. with 759 rejections, or 6.9 percent of its total. Skype received 4,713 requests on 15,409 accounts or identifiers in 2012, led by the U.K. (1,268), U.S. (1,154), Germany (686), France (402) and Taiwan (316), and none involved disclosure of content, Microsoft said. It provided data only from July through December 2012 on “accounts specified in requests where compliance team found no data” -- 2,847, led by the U.S. (1,032) and Germany (475) -- and “provided guidance to law enforcement” in 501 requests, again led by the U.S. (210) and Germany (70). Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/Y1iqR2) it would update the report every six months. He said Microsoft is publishing more than just total requests and affected accounts, which “we hope will provide added insights for our customers and the public who are interested in these issues,” and said Skype data will be reported in the same format as other Microsoft services in future reports. Smith emphasized that 99 percent of content disclosures were in response to “lawful warrants” from U.S. courts and only four other countries -- Brazil, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand -- got content, and nearly two in three non-content disclosures apart from Skype went to just five countries. It received only 11 requests in 2012 for enterprise customers, either rejected or redirected to the targeted company in seven of those requests, and in the four disclosures it either got the customer’s consent first or released data “pursuant to a specific contractual arrangement” with the customer, Smith said. He invited users to provide feedback or suggestions to mcitizen@microsoft.com. The Electronic Frontier Foundation saw vindication in Microsoft’s release of law enforcement request details, as EFF was part of a coalition in January calling for Microsoft to publish requests for Skype user data. The digital rights group said (http://bit.ly/16NBPIA) Microsoft’s report “goes beyond” that of Google in reporting the number of non-Skype requests for “subscriber/transactional data,” which is a “great step forward,” and it urged “Google and others to match Microsoft on this one.” The fact that Microsoft says there weren’t any content disclosures for Skype “may appear reassuring, although some have raised good questions about” such figures, EFF said. It noted Microsoft made an “important caveat” about Skype, that “some users of our services may be subject to government monitoring or the suppression of ideas and speech” and that despite using encryption for Skype-Skype calls, “no communication method is 100% secure,” especially if it touches the public telephone network. EFF said one “troubling question” in the report is whether falsified Skype certificates or disclosure of cryptographic secrets counts as “disclosure of content” for Skype: “It’s important for Microsoft to clarify this point to make the information reported about Skype meaningful.” The group said nonetheless Microsoft deserves “big credit” for publishing such broad information: “We hope that 2013 is the year that transparency reports become to new normal."