FCC Releases Draft on C-Band Auction Rules, ICS Rates for Aug. 6 Votes

The FCC provided more details on the rules for the upcoming C-band auction in the draft public notice, circulated for an Aug. 6 vote by commissioners (see 2007150066). The FCC also posted draft items on inmate calling services rates and media modernization, among others set for a vote.

Under the C-band auction draft, licenses will be sold by partial economic area (PEA), a license size between economic area and cellular market area licensing first devised for the TV incentive auction. The auction starts Dec. 8, with short-form applications due Sept. 22, upfront payments Nov. 2 and a Dec. 3 mock auction.

In the 46 PEAs where some blocks are subject to the Phase I deadline, the FCC will offer two categories of generic blocks, the docket 20-25 draft says. “Category A consisting of the five 20-megahertz sub-blocks between 3.7–3.8 GHz that are subject to the Phase I deadline, and Category BC consisting of the nine sub-blocks between 3.8–3.98 GHz that are subject to the Phase II deadline.” The remaining 360 PEAs will be a single bidding category “consisting of all fourteen 20-megahertz blocks between 3.7–3.98 GHz.”

The FCC will allow bidding on generic blocks in each market in successive clock-bidding rounds, the draft says: An assignment phase “would allow bidding for frequency-specific license assignments, which will allow for interim and final frequency-specific assignments of contiguous blocks within each PEA.” The FCC proposes to establish upfront payment and minimum opening bid amounts for 5,684 flexible-use overlay licenses throughout the contiguous U.S.

The FCC will allow bidding credit caps of $25 million for small businesses and $10 million for rural service providers and a $10 million cap on “the overall amount of bidding credits that a small business bidder may apply to winning licenses in smaller markets,” the draft said. The quiet period for bidders starts when short-form applications are filed and ends with the down payment deadline after the auction closes.

ICS

A draft would update oversight on inmate calling services, in an order on remand and fourth Further NPRM for docket 12-375.

The agency has oversight over interstate ICS, but states govern intrastate calls. The rulemaking responds to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit after it twice remanded the agency’s efforts to address the rates and charges for ICS within its jurisdiction, the agency said. The court asked the FCC to consider "whether ancillary service charges -- separate fees that are not included in the per-minute rates that inmate calling services providers charge for individual calls -- can be segregated into interstate and intrastate components."

Such "ancillary service charges generally cannot be practically segregated between the interstate and intrastate jurisdictions, except in a limited number of cases," the FCC found. "As a result, inmate calling services providers would generally be prohibited from imposing ancillary service charges other than those allowed under the Commission’s rules and providers would generally be prohibited from imposing such charges in excess of the Commission’s applicable ancillary service fee caps," the agency said.

The FNPRM would lower interstate rate caps of 21 cents per minute for debit and prepaid calls and 25 cents for collect calls to 14 cents for debit, prepaid and collect calls from prisons and 16 cents from jails. It would address what it called flaws in underlying rate caps from 2015 and 2016. It would cap international ICS for the first time. It proposes a waiver process for outliers that providers can seek on a facility-by-facility or contract basis "if the rate caps adopted by the Commission pursuant to this Further Notice would prevent the provider from recovering the costs of providing" ICS there.

"The FCC’s findings demonstrate the need for federal legislation," emailed Cheryl Leanza, United Church of Christ policy adviser, because the FCC found it can't and won't regulate “egregiously high intrastate rates." She welcomes any decrease in the federal rate caps but "14 and 16 cents per minute are still too high" when states "like Mississippi easily charge 4 cents per minute and some jurisdictions are offering free calls." She said because a rulemaking could take a year or longer, "prison phone justice must be addressed in the forthcoming COVID-19 stimulus package."

Other Actions

Other items also are on the tentative Aug. 6 agenda.

The FCC also proposed updating telephone relay services rules in a draft order in Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau docket 03-123. TRS users would no longer have to designate a long-distance phone carrier to ensure TRS is a functionally equivalent communications service. "Voice customers routinely receive telephone service at a bundled or flat rate, with no separate time- or distance-sensitive fees for long distance calls," the FCC said. The proposed rule would eliminate requirements for Federal Register public notices of applications for certification of state TRS programs because the FCC doesn't require them for comparable applications. "Publication on the Commission’s website and electronic document management system (EDOCS) would make the public notices readily available to interested parties," the agency said.

The radio duplication rule “remains useful in furthering the public interest goals of competition, programming diversity, and spectrum efficiency,” -- at least for FM stations, said the draft media modernization order released Thursday. The draft would eliminate the rule for AM stations, to acknowledge “persistent interference issues that have hampered the service and frustrated both consumers and licensees,” the draft said. Eliminating the rule for AM could also make it easier for stations that convert to all-digital AM to simulcast their current broadcast stream, the draft said. FM stations could still apply for waivers of the rule, the draft said.

The other August broadcast media mod draft order would eliminate a decades-old, little used rule requiring broadcasters to share unique antenna siting locations. “These rules no longer serve any practical purpose in light of the significant broadcast infrastructure development since the rules were first adopted,” said the draft. “We received few comments in response to the NPRM, and no broadcaster commented in favor of retaining these rules.” Previous media-mod agenda items that got little response from commissioners and the industry have been occasionally approved ahead of the commissioners’ meeting and deleted from the agenda.