The FCC is establishing the Task Force on Optimal Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) Architecture, the commission planned to say in Monday’s Federal Register. The task force will examine the structure and architecture of U.S. PSAPs “to determine whether additional consolidation of PSAP facilities and architecture would promote greater efficiency” in various ways while retaining needed integration with local first responders, the FCC said. The task force has an April 30 deadline to report recommendations to the FCC. The commission’s August text-to-911 Further NPRM directed the Public Safety Bureau to establish the task force.

​The White House plans an event pegged to its ConnectED initiative Wednesday, it said. The event will bring President Barack Obama together with educators and superintendents. The White House announcement did not give a specific time and location. The event will be dubbed “ConnectED to the Future,” the White House said. “During the event, President Obama will host a digital pledge signing ceremony with over one hundred superintendents to be joined virtually by hundreds more across the country,” the notice said. “The event builds on the momentum of the ConnectED Initiative, a plan the President announced in 2013, to connect 99 percent of students to high speed internet and empower teachers with the technology they need to transform teaching and learning. An important part of this initiative is ensuring that digital connectivity supports innovation in America’s classrooms.”

FirstNet needs to “speed deployment of the network, and the goal is get the network built as quickly as practical,” said Acting General Manager TJ Kennedy during an interview with NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield posted Wednesday. FirstNet should leverage existing infrastructure built by telcos and government, Kennedy said. FirstNet wants to keep public safety user fees affordable “because at the end of the day it’s not going to do them any good if the device is not in their hands,” he said.

National Institute of Standards and Technology officials said they're encouraged by sector-specific work that critical infrastructure industries are doing to adapt NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework. Adam Sedgewick, NIST senior information technology policy advisor, cited the communications sector’s work to adapt the NIST framework via FCC Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council Working Group 4 as an example of a market driver in moving framework use forward. Industry groups’ adaptation of the framework was a major topic at NIST’s framework workshop in late October (see 1410300050), something that NIST officials found “very informative” as they decide how to proceed on any future work on the framework, said Matthew Scholl, NIST acting chief-Computer Security Division.

The informal working groups of the 2015 World Radiocommunication Advisory Committee will meet this month by teleconference. The space services and regulatory issues working groups will meet Friday, the FCC International Bureau said in a public notice Friday. The terrestrial services working group will meet Nov. 18, it said. "The meetings are open to the public."

The FCC Technological Advisory Council will next meet Dec. 4, starting at 1 p.m. EST at commission headquarters, the agency said Friday. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler once chaired the group.

AT&T and Granite Telecommunications agreed to extend their commercial deal for delivering what they called high quality communications products and services to Granite customers through 2017. Granite is a wholesale customer of AT&T, Granite said Tuesday in a news release. Granite is a participant in AT&T’s IP transition trials in Alabama and Florida. AT&T “is committed to helping Granite and all of our wholesale customers succeed in their growth,” said Rob Dapkiewicz, vice president-wholesale services.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association applauded the FTC’s lawsuit against AT&T for allegedly deceiving millions of its unlimited data plan users and throttling their data plans, said a CCIA news release Wednesday. The FTC Tuesday announced the lawsuit, which AT&T called “baseless” (see 1410280047). AT&T “failed to adequately disclose the specifics of the company’s policy of throttling data once customers reached higher levels of data usage over a month,” said CCIA CEO Ed Black. A Tuesday study released by the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Labs) said the “problem of interfering with Internet traffic is even more widespread,” noted CCIA. M-Lab’s “analysis of connections between networks concluded that what Internet users assumed were technical problems connecting to Netflix or other content sites were really the result of pressure exerted by the subscriber’s Internet Access Provider,” said CCIA. Customers of major ISPs “experienced dramatically poor performance” when connecting to core Internet transit infrastructure, said the study (see 1410280036). Black said that it's "increasingly clear that a few powerful companies in this area continue to abuse their customers when they think they can get away with it, and continue to push for the weakest rules possible to allow them to discriminate and manipulate the services they provide."

The federal government is unlikely to seek major changes to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework Version 1.0 “in the near future,” said Ari Schwartz, White House National Security Council senior director-cybersecurity, during a NIST workshop Wednesday. NIST is holding the workshop to collect stakeholders' input on their use of the framework since its release in February so the agency can make tweaks. “We feel that the framework is an excellent product” that currently requires only minor updates, Schwartz said. Information and communications technology sector stakeholders have said in comments to NIST that it’s still too early to fully evaluate the framework because the sector is still working to adapt the framework for sector-wide use (see 1410140173). AT&T Assistant Vice President-Global Public Policy Chris Boyer cautioned NIST during the workshop “not to rush too quickly” to make major changes to the framework. The Version 1.0 framework still needs time to “ferment,” particularly given ongoing work within the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) Working Group 4 to adapt the framework for the communications sector, Boyer said. AT&T was an early adopter of the NIST framework and is an active participant in CSRIC Working Group 4’s efforts, Boyer said. The telco is “optimistic” that the FCC’s overall efforts on cybersecurity “are turning in the right direction,” he said. CSRIC Working Group 4 remains on track to release a final report and recommendations on communications sector use of the NIST framework in March (see 1409240046).

Bright House Networks said it will increase speeds on its most popular high-speed data Internet packages starting in December. It plans to offer download speeds of up to 150 Mbps for new and existing customers, it said Tuesday in a news release. Its standard service will move from 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps, and Lightning 90 service will move from 90 Mbps to 150 Mbps, it said. Speeds for Lightning 30 and Lightning 60 services also will increase, Bright House said. The increases come at no additional charge to existing customers who have subscribed to these packages, it said.