IBM settled with the FCC and agreed to return $24.25 million to the USF for violations regarding the E-rate program in New York City and El Paso school districts, a consent decree said Wednesday.
The FCC Wireline Bureau exempted seven voice service providers from secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) requirements, said a Wednesday public notice. AT&T, Bandwidth, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Verizon and Vonage received exemptions and must still verify that they met full implementation in the second certification round. The bureau denied Nsight's exemption request.
A coalition of consumer advocates and accessibility researchers raised concerns about CaptionCall’s application to the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau to add automatic speech recognition (ASR) to its IP captioned telephone service (see 2011190027). The FCC "continues to place the cart before the horse in approving ASR-based applications," the coalition said in its filing, posted Tuesday in docket 03-123. It noted that the commission hasn't established service quality standards for new IP CTS services. Reply comments are due Jan. 5.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai joined the Orleans Parish Communications District to push businesses to comply with the New Orleans commission's Jan. 6 deadline to transition their phone systems to support direct-dial access to 911 from multiline systems. "These reforms will save lives," Pai said Friday. The new law will also require businesses to identify dispatch locations for emergency responders because "they know their building the best, what doors to enter, how to get there quickly, any barriers like keys or access that will be needed," OPCD Executive Director Tyrell Morris told us: "They can have all that ready when the responders get there, so we're not delaying service even more." Morris applauded Pai's efforts and noted the next obstacle is overcoming the lack of awareness about the change. "I think a lot of it has to do with we were really waiting to see if the deadline would hold true, but now that we know that it is, the expectation is that businesses step up to communicate to their customers and this is now a requirement," Morris said.
The FCC Wireline Bureau granted a limited waiver of performance testing requirements for recipients of alternative connect America cost model I (A-CAM) support, said an order in Monday's Daily Digest. A-CAM recipients will be required to pretest 70% of Universal Service Administrative Co.-selected samples during each quarter in 2021. The order was "very welcome news for smaller companies" that are still figuring out how to do pretesting for performance requirements in Q1 2021, said Mike Romano, NTCA senior vice president-industry affairs and business development. NTCA backed the waiver, noting in an ex parte letter last week that nearly 90% of its members indicated delays in the supply chain.
Raise the benchmark in the Section 706 report from 25/3 Mbps downstream/upstream to 100/100, NTCA and the Fiber Broadband Association told the FCC. The FCC “persists in positing that a fixed broadband benchmark of 25/3 Mbps -- the same benchmark it has used for the last five years -- is good enough,” said a Friday filing in docket 20-269. “By any measure, this benchmark does not reflect what American consumers need today, let alone tomorrow,” they said. Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to seek a vote on the report before he leaves Jan. 20 (see 2012160051).
Slic Network Solutions' winning bid for Connect America Fund II support is ready to be authorized, the FCC Wireline Bureau announced in a public notice Friday. The provider has until 6 p.m. Jan. 8 to submit letters of credit and an opinion from its legal counsel. Slic won $2.4 million to serve 906 locations. The Wireline Bureau also sought comments Monday on Slic's request to acquire Crown Point's 1,150 customers. Comments are due Jan. 4, replies Jan. 11.
Connect America Fund recipients are subject to the final performance testing milestone at the end of a carrier's support term, the FCC Wireline Bureau clarified in an order Friday. Carriers have one year after the final milestone to address any shortcomings to ensure they're fully compliant. CAF Phase II auction winners must fulfill deployment obligations by the end of 2025 but will be subject to performance testing until 2029 and have an additional year to come into compliance before being subject to permanent support withholding. The order clarified that compliance for carriers participating in multiple high-cost programs will be determined separately.
Prohibitions on the use of artificial or prerecorded voice calling without third-party consent under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies to calls made by live agents using soundboard technology, the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau ordered Friday. CGB denied a petition by NorthStar Alarm Services to exclude prerecorded messages played by a live agent and a retroactive waiver from Yodel Technologies for calls made using soundboard technology.
The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau gave Hamilton Relay and Sprint partial waivers of FCC rules prohibiting early termination of telecom relay service calls, said an order in Friday's Daily Digest. The companies sought waivers due to operational changes during the pandemic in which some communications assistants had to end a call before a new assistant can replace them.