Massachusetts advocates are optimistic about making jail and prison calls free in this year’s state budget, they said in interviews this week. Legislators, who are a month late passing the budget, heard testimony on a stand-alone no-cost calls bill at a Joint Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. If lawmakers can quickly finish the job, call costs will be “one less thing I have to worry about,” said Joanna Levesque, an advocate whose partner is incarcerated in Massachusetts.
Verizon added 384,000 fixed wireless access customers in Q2, with 8,000 net postpaid phone adds, as the carrier Tuesday became the first of the big three wireless providers to report. Despite questions about legacy lead-sheathed telecom cables used by Verizon (see 2307210004), the company maintained its full-year earnings and revenue guidance. Officials said it's too early to estimate the cost of lead remediation. AT&T reports Wednesday.
The FCC remains focused on the lower 3 GHz band for commercial use and will consider an auction of spectrum remaining, or returned, from past auctions when its auction authority is restored, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The U.S. must lead the world on 5G, which is critical to the U.S. economy and to export democratic values “to the rest of the world,” she said. Rosenworcel spoke with Clete Johnson, CSIS senior fellow.
Congress should continue to fund the affordable connectivity program, the FCC may not be the right entity to regulate AI and the agency's spectrum auction authority should be restored, said former FCC chairs and commissioners at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council’s 2023 virtual Former Chairs’ Symposium Tuesday. Panelists -- including former acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn and former Chairman Richard Wiley -- also discussed diversity, the failed Standard/Tegna deal, and the confirmation of nominee Anna Gomez. Gomez is “a mainstream Democrat” who will “work well on a bipartisan basis,” said former Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. “She’s not particularly ideological even though she’s been a strong fighter.”
The FBI’s circumvention of court orders by purchasing cellphone data "violates the spirit of the Constitution,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told us Thursday.
The U.S. Supreme Court should “unequivocally abandon” the contemporary Chevron deference doctrine “because it contradicts Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution,” said an amicus brief (docket 22-451) in support of the petitioners in Loper Bright v. Raimondo submitted Monday by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., and 34 other Republican members of Congress.
Wireless carriers disagree with public safety over some FCC proposals for revised requirements for wireless emergency alerts, based on comments to the FCC. The Further NPRM, approved 4-0 in April, proposes to require participating providers to ensure mobile devices can translate alerts into the 13 most commonly spoken languages in the U.S. aside from English, to send thumbnail-sized images in WEA messages, and other changes (see 2304200040). Comments were due Friday in docket 15-94.
The House plans to vote as soon as Tuesday under suspension of the rules on the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act (HR-1338) and three other Commerce Committee-approved communications policy bills, said the office of Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. Notably absent from the agenda is the Spectrum Auction Reauthorization Act (HR-3565), which some lawmakers were pushing House leaders to bring up for a floor vote before Congress leaves on the month-plus August recess (see 2307200071). The House Rules Committee, meanwhile, will consider Wednesday whether to allow votes on three broadband-focused amendments to the FY 2024 Agriculture Department appropriations bill (HR-4368).
The FCC’s 2022 $518,000 forfeiture order against Gray Television over the 2020 buy of another broadcaster’s CBS affiliation in Anchorage doesn’t violate the First Amendment and doesn’t amount to the creation of new regulations without notice, the agency said in a brief filed Monday in Gray’s challenge of that forfeiture (docket 22-14274) in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (see 2301040059).
NTIA's broadband equity, access and development (BEAD) program puts a heavy emphasis on fiber deployments, but satellite-delivered connectivity will likely be part of the mix of technology options states set out as options in their initial proposals, we were told. States' and territories' initial proposals are due to NTIA by Dec. 1.