A program agreement that would streamline wireless and broadcast tower siting reviews ran into trouble last week when the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) raised concerns about how certain types of sites would be excluded, sources said. FCC and some industry officials said they remained bullish that differences could be worked out relatively quickly. But they said a key unresolved issue was one that had drawn recent Capitol Hill attention: Treatment of sites “potentially” eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Country of origin cases
The FBI has asked the FCC to deal with CALEA concerns before acting on pending broadband proceedings, which could delay the VoIP proposal circulating among commissioners on the agency’s 8th floor, we're told. In a letter sent Jan. 28, the FBI, Dept. of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration said they planned to file a joint petition within a few weeks asking the FCC to determine “what broadband services and service providers should be subject to CALEA,” as well as the procedures needed to bring them into compliance. They asked the FCC to complete the current CALEA rulemaking before acting on other broadband proceedings. The FBI had indicated concerns about the difficulty of imposing CALEA’s wiretapping requirements on broadband services such as VoIP.
The broadband over power line (BPL) industry welcomed as helpful in the FCC’s BPL inquiry the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new position that not all BPL technologies posed interference problems (CD Jan 29 p11). “It’s nice to see that FEMA is backing away from what they have earlier stated,” Brett Kilbourne, regulatory dir. of the United Power Line Council, told us. He said it seemed from FEMA Undersecy. Michael Brown’s letter to FCC Chmn. Powell that “they are open minded about” BPL and the agency didn’t intend to say, as it did in its original filing with the Commission, that all approaches to BPL would cause interference. Jay Birnbaum, pres. of Current Technologies, said FEMA’s original filing with the FCC did seem to indicate that the agency didn’t have any homegrown data about interference potential and was relying on 3rd-party assessments and studies. “I don’t think that it would be fair to look at the first filing and say they found interference.” Brown’s letter was confirmation that the agency hadn’t done any research on interference potential and was conceding that BPL and emergency communications systems should be able to “peacefully coexist,” he said. Both Kilbourne and Birnbaum said the FEMA filing would make a big difference to the industry in the FCC’s inquiry into the technical aspects of BPL. The Commission is expected to come out with its conclusions in the first quarter. “If the earlier [FEMA] filing made the FCC think twice, then this is a positive development and it should help,” Birnbaum said: “But if the FCC hadn’t given the earlier filing too much weight, then this is a nice clarification.” At the very least, Brown’s letter would make the Commission look at the original FEMA filing in a different light, he said. Some industry sources found it unusual that FEMA had filed comments directly with the FCC instead of going through the NTIA as was the norm for govt. agencies that had spectrum issues.
Verizon’s proposed plan for determining access charges on VoIP has at least one fan on Capitol Hill: Rep. Boucher (D-Va.), a member of the House Commerce and Judiciary committees. In a National Consumer League forum on broadband Thurs., Boucher said he was “impressed” by the ideas Verizon Senior Vp Thomas Tauke presented last week on VoIP regulation (CD Jan 22 p1). Boucher stressed that reform of access charges and the Universal Service Fund (USF) was critical. Highlighting comments by Senate Appropriations Chmn. Stevens (R-Alaska), who is likely to take the reins of the Commerce Committee in 2005, Boucher said Congress was likely to begin efforts next year on comprehensive reform of USF and other telecom regulations.
AT&T’s VoIP service “is plain long distance service” and thus not exempt from access charges, a group of associations representing small ILECs told FCC Comr. Martin and his staff Wed. In a follow-up ex parte filing, the group said AT&T used IP for transport but still used ILEC switched access services to originate and terminate calls. “Consumers would be harmed as revenues generated from access payments help small and rural telephone companies provide quality telephone service and keep end-user rates low,” said representatives of Alltel, the National Exchange Carrier Assn., NTCA, OPASTCO and USTA. Access revenue represents as much as 70% of some small telco revenue and an access charge exemption for long distance companies could force rural LECs to delay network upgrades, the group said. “AT&T’s request for preferential treatment that favors a specific technology is simply an attempt at regulatory arbitrage,” it said. Meanwhile, US Datanet, a VoIP provider, supported AT&T’s petition in ex parte letters distributed Jan. 20 to FCC commissioners and their staffs. US Datanet said “the full range of VoIP services -- including phone-to-phone applications -- qualify as ‘information services’… and therefore are entitled to connect to the PSTN [public switched telephone network] without paying the crushing burden of existing subsidy-laden ILEC switched access charges.” (The AT&T service is considered phone-to-phone.) The FCC never acted to require phone-to-phone VoIP providers to pay switched access charges so it would be “a destructive reversal” to do so now, the company argued. US Datanet said it would be particularly unfair and harmful to the VoIP industry to make AT&T and other VoIP providers liable retroactively for access charges, as some ILECs urge.
Under pressure from the Irish Presidency, the European Parliament (EP) and Council are scurrying to find common ground internally and with each other on a controversial European Commission (EC) directive aimed at beefing up enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. With a vote scheduled for the Feb. 10 EP plenary session -- but likely to be pushed back until later that month or March, we're told -- the Presidency is negotiating with both the rapporteur of the EP Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee and shadow rapporteurs from other political groups to find a way to reconcile opposing Council and EP views, a European Union (EU) diplomat said. The directive continues to be controversial, with telcos and ISPs contending it could subject them to massive liability and the consumer electronics industry saying its sanctions weren’t clear enough.
An effort to raise FCC fines for indecent broadcasts gained momentum Wed. when the Administration said it would support a House bill that would raise the maximum fines the FCC could levy against a broadcaster. House Telecom Subcommittee Chmn. Upton (R-Mich.) said the bill (HR-3717) was on a “fast track.” The House Telecom Subcommittee examined Wed. ways to curtail indecency on broadcast networks. The FCC told the panel that the Commission was increasing enforcement against broadcasters who carried indecent material. But members pondered other methods that might curtail indecent content, including license revocations and industry self-policing.
An FCC Wireless Bureau forum on the upcoming conversion of Multipoint Distribution Service and Instructional TV Fixed Service (ITFS) data to the Universal Licensing System (ULS) has been postponed from today (Wed.) to Feb. 11. The demonstration of the new system will be in the 3rd floor South Conference Room of FCC hq from 10 a.m. to noon. Prospective attendees can preregister by Feb. 10 and those already preregistered for the original date will be registered automatically, the FCC said.
In a case that touches on issues ranging from states’ rights to competitive entry, the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., will hear argument today (Wed.) in challenges to the FCC’s Triennial Review Order (TRO), which set rules for Bell company obligations to share UNEs with competitors. The arguments will be heard by the same 3 judges -- Harry Edwards, Raymond Randolph and Stephen Williams -- who remanded the FCC’s UNE rules in 2002. The judges had rejected the agency’s national UNE list and told it that it needed to employ a more “granular” approach to determining whether CLECs needed certain UNEs in order to stay in business. The Commission responded in the TRO by giving that decision to state regulators. Among the questions before the judges is whether the FCC order complied with the judges’ 2002 remand.
In the latest volley between Comcast and 2 labor unions, the CWA and the IBEW accused Comcast of trying to mislead the FCC and misconstruing Commission rules. The debate centers on public files that the FCC requires cable operators to have available for public inspection in regular business hours. The files include such materials as all requests in the previous 2 years for cable time by or on behalf of a political candidate, with information on how the request was handled; information on children’s programming on local origination channels; EEO reports; leased access requirements and signal leakage and repair logs.