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."

Alabama’s largest county, Jefferson County, chose Emergency CallWorks for its advanced 911 call management and call mapping, the company said Tuesday (http://yhoo.it/15npRBU). “The new system, built to meet and exceed the latest Next Generation (NG) 9-1-1 standards, will help improve emergency response capabilities, consolidate operations and add efficiencies as well as lower technology and operational costs,” it added.

Changing 911 technologies call for a change in behavior and federal advocacy, speakers told the National Number Emergency Association Monday. Public safety officials from around the country are gathering in Washington for the association’s 911 Goes to Washington meeting, which continues Tuesday. “We become a part of the government procedure,” said NENA Second Vice President Christy Williams of the 911 directors’ visits to Capitol Hill offices this week. She noted that more than 31 states and territories were represented at this year’s meeting. Speakers discussed the best ways to approach federal government officials as well as the challenge of text-to-911 and potential spectrum interference. (See separate report in this issue.)

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission shot down CenturyLink’s latest appeal of the PUC’s telecom deregulation order. The PUC adopted its new order in December and modified it since due to several appeals at the beginning of the year. CenturyLink asked for more changes at the beginning of March, focusing on white page directory listing obligations and how those should factor into the PUC’s effective competition rulings. “We disagree with CenturyLink’s threshold premise that maintaining regulation over ‘any’ aspect of telephone service is discriminatory and inconsistent with Commission policy,” the PUC said in its Wednesday order denying CenturyLink (http://bit.ly/10SoLBb). “The information constituting white page directory listing -- a customer’s name, address, and telephone number -- is correlated to emergency services due to its necessity to the Automatic Location Identification (ALI) database providers for the provision of 9-1-1 services and emergency notification services.” The PUC pointed to the significance of these directory listings, in contrast to CenturyLink’s arguments. “Emergency and related services are more than ‘competitive features,'” the PUC said. “They are vital to the public interest, and market forces cannot ensure the availability of basic emergency services, including 9-1-1 services, in time of need."

Last year’s derecho communications failure in the mid-Atlantic region created the need for ongoing regional assessment, said the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) in its final report on the storm and 911 failures (http://bit.ly/ZKJEcs). The review, in progress since last summer, noted the 911 outages inspired many investigations, including those by the FCC and the Virginia State Corporation Commission, and pointed to issues that state and local government officials should consider. State and local 911 authorities need to assess fully their 911 systems and review 911 laws and regulations, the report said: “The interest of the public and public safety should come first over the interest of commercial providers.” The report addressed both funding and coming technology changes: “State and local 9-1-1 authorities should work with their Legislators to ensure the funding required to support the current 9-1-1 services and future Next Generation 9-1-1 are adequate and available, and that the fees and funds collected from the citizens of their States for 9-1-1 services are dedicated and used solely for the purpose as intended for the implementation, operation and maintenance of 9-1-1 emergency telephone services and other supporting technologies,” and that they're “equitably distributed to the 9-1-1 authorities,” it said. The MWCOG should form a more permanent committee of 911 directors and “take the lead to work cooperatively in the development of a multi-year 9-1-1 strategic plan to include development and implementation of Next Generation 9-1-1,” it said. Verizon’s 911 service failed due to backup power issues and could have done better during the derecho and must do more, on an ongoing basis, to regain the trust of public safety officials, the report said. Verizon defended its activities and “acted decisively and aggressively to identify and resolve 911 issues and other areas for improvement,” said Verizon Mid-Atlantic Vice President of Network Operations Maureen Davis in a statement. She described “substantial progress,” ranging from “audits of key 911 facilities to improved communications with the public safety community -- progress that was borne out in our solid performance during and after Hurricane Sandy last fall and, most recently, last week’s winter storm that brought heavy snow and high winds to parts of the region.” Verizon has worked “actively” with the MWCOG, she added. Davis authored a Wednesday blog post (http://vz.to/Z6ygsu) outlining the telco’s efforts, such as backup power audits and diversifying its network monitoring system.

Transition to a replacement for the text telephone (TTY) system for emergency communications for the disabled should last 12 years, the FCC Emergency Access Advisory Committee’s (EAAC) TTY Transition subgroup said in a draft report. That timeline would include three years for getting the TTY replacement “commonly available,” three years until “no more legacy TTYs should be deployed,” and an additional six years until TTY support can cease, the subgroup said. That timeline can be sped up or slowed down depending on conditions in the overall transition from the public switched telephone network to Internet protocol, the subgroup said in the report. The subgroup recommended implementing the National Emergency Number Association i3Detailed Technical specification 08-003 and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) request for comment 6443 to achieve interoperability between service providers when at least one uses IETF Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call control. The default interoperability protocols include: IETF RFC 3261 SIP for call control, ITU-T Recommendation T.40 for real-time text presentation and IETF RFC 4103 for real-time text transport, as well as “suitable audio and wide-band audio codecs” commonly used in the implementation environment and supported by Next-Generation 911 (N-G9-1-1). For IMS, the profile specified in GSMA PRD ir.92, including its Annex B, specify a “similar set suitable” for TTY replacement, the subgroup said. That profile also recommends IETF RFC 3261 SIP for call control and IETF RFC 4103 for real-time text, but also requires 3GPP TS 26.114 IMS Multimedia Telephony Codec Considerations for audio. A “suitable combination” with video as specified in GSMA PRD ir.94 should be considered, the subgroup said. Other real-time text protocols can also be used within each service provider’s network or between service providers, provided the functional goals for TTY transition are still met and other protocols are supported as a fallback, the subgroup said. For interoperability of calls between PSTN’s TTY and the TTY replacement, the subgroup recommended placing gateways in the network -- and that calls that may contain text should automatically be routed through the gateway. Other alternatives should also be considered and further investigated, the subgroup said. Recommendation T6.3, which allows for conversion of TTY to IP-carried real-time text at the point of entry to IP networks, is the “realistic solution” for TTY access to N-G9-1-1, the subgroup said. There should be coordination with the U.S. Access Board, the Telecommunications Equipment Distribution Programs and the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program, the subgroup said. TSR rules should be updated to “specifically support relay calls based on the protocols used in accessible interchange with N-G9-1-1,” including information requested in the NENA i3 technical specification, the subgroup said. Videophone and VRS service providers should implement TTY replacement features in combination with video, the subgroup said. NENA recommendations to provide 9-1-1 access to instant messaging users should be encouraged separately from TTY replacement activities “in order to provide 9-1-1 access for current users of these services related to both accessibility and general needs,” the subgroup said. The draft report includes two possible versions of a recommendation for a move toward TTY replacement in industry practice and FCC regulations, as the EAAC “could not come to an agreement” on a common version (http://bit.ly/Y5tvjC).

Rep. Anna Eshoo asked FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to “promptly consider” Progeny’s request to begin using unlicensed spectrum in the 902-928 MHz band for first responder location services. The commission is reviewing the results of field tests completed in 2011 and 2012 to ensure that Progeny’s services don’t cause unacceptable levels of interference to other users in the band. “With more than 396,000 9-1-1 calls made through wireless devices each day, the need for accurate and reliable location services is increasingly clear,” Eshoo, the California Democrat who is ranking member on the House Communications Subcommittee, wrote in a letter last month posted Tuesday to docket 11-49. “It is important that the 902-928 MHz band remain available for unlicensed devices, while ensuring that Progeny’s location service does not cause unacceptable levels of interference to unlicensed services.”

Georgia needs new 911 rules and a new 911 authority geared toward next-generation 911, Georgia Senate Bill 144 proposes. It was introduced last month and a substitute text was passed favorably out of committee this week. It’s designed to change Georgia rules “so as to create the Georgia Emergency 9-1-1 Support Authority as a body corporate and politic, an instrumentality of the state, and a public corporation; to require the authority to establish an Emergency Information Program for emergency first responders; to provide for the purposes of the authority, which purposes shall include, but not be limited to, ensuring that effective 9-1-1 service is provided to all Georgians,” according to the latest 17-page text (http://1.usa.gov/Yur1u0). The bill proposes to streamline and better coordinate many elements of a changing 911 system which is facing new concerns of funding and technology. It endeavors to help in “assisting the implementation of updated technological resources and enhanced 9-1-1 services throughout the State of Georgia, facilitating the adoption of information services for the provision of lifesaving information to first responders, auditing the payment of certain 9-1-1 fees by prepaid wireless telephone service providers to increase compliance in collection of revenues and provide fairness to those service providers already paying such fees, supporting the public interest in providing cost-efficient collection of revenues, and disbursing funds to local governments for the operation and improvement of emergency telephone 9-1-1 services; to provide for duties of the authority; to make available on a state-wide basis services and resources to local governments for improvement in emergency 9-1-1 systems,” it said. The 911 support authority would have 13 members, including one director, it said. Six of the members “shall be a mayor, a chief of police, a fire chief, a county commissioner, a sheriff, and an emergency medical services director and who shall be appointed by the Governor” and another six “experienced in and currently involved in public safety, local government, or management of emergency services, three of whom shall be appointed by the President of the Senate, and three of whom shall be appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives,” it said. The law, if passed, would take effect Jan. 1.