Make permanent a temporary waiver for wireless ISPs to operate their unlicensed point-to-multipoint systems in the 5.9 GHz band, Qualcomm asked an aide to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, said a filing posted Monday in docket 19-138. The FCC approved special temporary authority for some WISPs to use the lower 45 MHz of the band during the pandemic (see 2005040053).

The FCC sought comment by Sept. 25, replies Oct. 2 on the National Association of Chain Drug Stores petitioning for clarification that drugstore communications about COVID-19 vaccines, “once available, and flu vaccines during the pandemic” fall under Telephone Consumer Protection Act “emergency purposes” exception, said a Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice Friday on docket 02-278.

Universal Administrative Service Co. is opening a second 2020 filing window Sept. 21 to Oct. 16 to allow schools in the E-rate program to request funding to buy more bandwidth to meet added on-campus connectivity demands due to the pandemic, without having to go through a new competitive bidding process, says the FCC in Monday's Federal Register. The order was approved last week (see 2009160036).

The government's repository of regulatory actions and comment deadlines is experiencing delays publishing complex rules due to the COVID-19 pandemic and an “unusually” large number of documents submitted this year, said Katerina Horska, Office of the Federal Register legal affairs and policy director. The Federal Register typically publishes rules within three days of receiving items, but some “can take more than a month,” she emailed us Wednesday. “Given the unusually high volume of documents submitted since the beginning of this year, compounded with the number of emergency documents related to COVID-19 submitted over the past several months, lengthy and more complex documents are taking longer to publish.” The FTC is among communications agencies affected. Horska said FR staff processes documents “on a first-in, first-out system as much as possible,” but that process may be interrupted by emergency documents for the pandemic and the time it takes to work with agencies on edits. For “complex” documents that aren't designated as emergencies, “the backlog has only extended the usual processing time,” she noted. "The FTC has experienced delays of three to four weeks on rulemaking documents (proposed rules, final rules)," emailed a commission representative Thursday. "There have been no delays on notices." NTIA hasn't experienced slowdowns with its FR documents, most of which at that agency are routine and not of a regulatory nature, a rep said. The FCC declined to comment.

The FCC Wireline Bureau extended a waiver of access stimulation rules through Dec.1 for CLEC Inteliquent, said an order Thursday. COVID-19 caused a continued increase in traffic for conference-calling services Zoom and Cisco WebEx, which are Inteliquent customers, the order said. The bureau previously extended the waiver in June to Sept.1 (see 2006230015) but denied Inteliquent’s request to set the deadline to March, “given the ongoing uncertainty about how long the pandemic will continue to impact Inteliquent and its customers.” Granting Inteliquent’s waiver “in increments of three months has proven to be a workable and effective timeframe by which to closely monitor the effects of the pandemic on Inteliquent’s terminating-to-originating traffic ratios,” the order said.

5G means a busy period for Crown Castle, CEO Jay Brown told a Goldman Sachs virtual conference Thursday. “We are sitting right here on the doorstep of the deployments of 5G and our asset mix, some 40,000 towers in the U.S., 80,000 route miles of fiber, are sitting squarely in that really strong winds of demand that are coming.” Brown said the pandemic is both positive and negative for his company. “Connectivity becomes really critical in the current environment and has really caused companies to start to really think about redundancy and the quality of the connection,” he said: “There have also been some cases where, as a result of COVID, access has been limited to some facilities where it's delayed the start of new revenues.”

Omnichannel shopping options were key during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass on a Thursday National Retail Federation webinar. Kohl's is a return location for Amazon purchases, she said: Along with buy online, pick up in store fulfillment and curbside pickup, it's bringing customers into stores. Kohl’s had 60% growth in digital shopping during the pandemic, as lockdown created new digital shoppers, she said: “For folks who hadn’t adopted digital, this was the time.” Some customers are now shopping both channels, and “they’re the most valuable,” six times more productive than digital-only shoppers and four times that of store-only consumers, Gass said. It's a “tough week” at Kohl’s, cutting 15% of staff.

American Express expects consumer travel “will come back” after the COVID-19 pandemic, Doug Buckminster, head-global consumer services, told an Autonomous Research virtual conference Thursday. “That's our enterprise position.” The “rebound” AmEx is seeing in consumer travel and entertainment is “an effect of substitution,” people substituting driving vacations and “home-stay rentals” for air travel, he said. Expansion of outdoor dining, plus pickup and delivery, “has bounced the restaurant category, more than you would expect just from dine-in volumes alone,” he said. Buckminster expects a vaccine “will unleash a lot of anticipatory and pent-up demand” in consumer travel and entertainment, though “getting back historic volumes is going to require time,” he said. “There's no question that T&E volume is taking a disproportionate hit.”

The FCC will open a second funding year 2020 filing window to allow schools to request additional E-rate funding, citing increased bandwidth needs because of remote learning during COVID-19. The window opens when a notice is posted in the Federal Register and closes Oct. 16. “As the school year begins, many school districts are relying on remote learning, either in whole or in part,” the FCC said Wednesday: “This heightened reliance on remote learning, as well as social distancing in schools providing in-person instruction, has dramatically increased demand on school networks, creating an urgent need for additional on-campus bandwidth.”

August sales through electronics and appliance stores were up 0.8% from July, down 3.4% from August 2019, reported the National Retail Federation Wednesday. Total retail sales in August were up 0.6% from July, 2.6% from a year earlier, said NRF. August online sales growth was flat compared with July, up 20.1% from August 2019. “August was topsy-turvy as COVID-19 brought a lot of shifts and uncertainty regarding back-to-school spending and other issues,” said Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz. “Retail spending habits have remained largely consistent and stable these past few months since stores began to reopen.”