Adam Bender

The FCC is looking at ways to spur more research and development as it develops its National Broadband Plan, commission officials said at a workshop Monday. The effort may include outreach and more emphasis on rules on enabling research, they said. Industry executives warned that the U.S. is falling behind in doing basic research, and that this could hurt U.S. competitiveness.

The FCC is looking at ways to spur more research and development as it develops its National Broadband Plan, commission officials said at a workshop Monday. The effort may include outreach and more emphasis on rules on enabling research, they said. Industry executives warned that the U.S. is falling behind in doing basic research, and that this could hurt U.S. competitiveness.

The FCC said it’s tightening oversight of video relay services (VRS)after the Justice Department charged 26 people with stealing more than $50 million total from the video relay service program. After a joint investigation by the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the FCC Office of Inspector General, FBI agents and postal inspectors made arrests Thursday in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Maryland, Justice said. Meanwhile, VRS provider Purple Communications said it expects its Q3 revenue to dive $7.2 million from a year earlier unless the FCC loosens its compensation rules.

Policymakers should use localities as test beds for different broadband technologies, said President-elect Joanne Hovis of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors. Localities aren’t tied to legacy investments or business models, so they are “an important opportunity for experimentation and innovation,” she said Thursday at an FCC workshop about fiber. Municipal networks can offer greater value than commercial networks for anchor institutions like schools, Hovis said. In Montgomery County, Md., many elementary schools get 100 Mbps broadband through fiber built by the county, she said. “The operating cost to the county, which does not charge the schools, is $71 per megabit per year,” she said. Other schools not served by the county’s fiber lease 1.5 Mbps T1 lines from a carrier -- and pay nearly $2,000 a megabit yearly -- net of E-rate subsidies, she said.

Fiber is the only broadband technology that is “not bound by demand,” Verizon Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch said Thursday at an FCC workshop about fiber. Asked whether Verizon’s customer traffic will eventually rise to fill FiOS capacity, he said, “Yes … but it’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight.” Verizon’s fastest FiOS service offers 50 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps up, but that’s based on a “commercial decision, because today we're capable of more than that,” Lynch said. “The existing infrastructure we have in place truly is capable of more than that, and we'll see more than that coming from us” as costs come down and demand increases, he said. Relatively few customers today buy 50/20 service from Verizon, he said. But consumer bandwidth usage historically has been 10 times what it had been six years earlier, Lynch said. Fiber is the most economical way to keep up with demand, with a lower cost per bit to build and operate than copper, he said. Fiber is less vulnerable to weather than copper, and as a passive technology it has fewer failure points, he said. There’s not enough spectrum to make wireless a suitable substitute for fiber, he said. Lynch said the cost of taking fiber to rural areas is decreasing. As the technology advances, “you're going to continue to see that economic breakpoint moving out, he said. Fiber cables used to be reliable only up to 12.5 miles, but “that’s been stretched” and some say the limit is now about 37 miles, he said.

Any action the FCC takes on the Universal Service Fund “will be very cognizant of consumers and will be focused on looking at ways to break savings out of the system, so the impact on consumers can be lessened if at all possible,” Chairman Julius Genachowski told reporters after an FCC meeting Wednesday. A Wall Street Journal article that morning said the FCC was thinking about hiking consumer USF fees and imposing open-access policies. Also, Genachowski said a controversial Harvard University study on broadband should have equal weight with other information in the record.

Incumbent broadband providers accused a broadband study commissioned by the FCC of bias. The paper, written by researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, concluded among other things that open-access policies drove broadband growth in other countries. The commission ordered the study to help it develop a National Broadband Plan. In comments Monday, incumbents and free-market proponents told the commission to scrap the report’s findings, but competitors urged the FCC to give them significant weight.

The FCC asked how long-pending overhauls for the Universal Service Fund (USF) and intercarrier compensation should fit into the agency’s National Broadband Plan. In its 19th public notice on the plan, released Friday, the commission sought comment on the USF’s size and contribution method, shifting USF money to broadband, the impact of any changes to revenue flows and the competitive landscape, and appropriate oversight of the high-cost fund. The agency also wants comment on establishing broadband Lifeline and Link-Up programs for low-income consumers, an idea discussed at a meeting last week (CD Nov 16 p1). Comments are due Dec. 7. The nine-page public notice shows the regulator recognizes that national broadband goals won’t be realized absent federal support, said Joshua Seidemann, regulatory affairs vice president of the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance. Some of the FCC’s questions could be interpreted as leaning to one side, but they're generally balanced by other questions tilting the other way, he said.

MySpace users greeted the FCC’s new channel on the social networking site with profanity and off-color rants. Several left comments protesting censorship. The channel, unveiled last week, also allows users to read commission blog posts and view videos. An agency spokesman said Friday that the agency has “moderation policies for blog and ideascale comments, and are applying those principles to MySpace while we draft a moderation policy specific to that site.” Policies on the other FCC sites prohibit threats, obscenity and encouraging illegal activity, among other things. The FCC’s move to MySpace was criticized in a blog post Friday by Progress & Freedom Foundation President Adam Thierer. “I mean, shouldn’t someone over there have known it would take about 2 milliseconds for various cranks to launch into profanity-laced rants that would make George Carlin blush?” he said. An industry official said the MySpace page “offered a much needed chuckle on a rainy Friday.”

“No problems have surfaced so far” with the telecom relay service transition to 10-digit phone numbers, said FCC spokeswoman Rosemary Kimball on Friday. The deadline was Thursday for deaf consumers using video and other Internet- based relay services to register 10-digit numbers. Users without 10-digit numbers won’t be able to make calls, though companies are still registering them. Many relay companies and consumer advocates had feared awareness about the transition was low, especially among users of IP text relay services (CD Sept 28 p5). Regulatory Affairs Manager Mike Maddix of Sorenson Communications, the largest relay provider in the U.S., said the transition is “going well.” Sorenson’s call answer speed is consistent with normal levels, and the company is handling new registration requests as they come in, he said. Hamilton Relay’s “initial impression is that the process is going smoothly,” said their lawyer, Wilkinson Barker’s David O'Connor. Consumer advocates for the deaf “are currently monitoring the situation,” said Executive Director Claude Stout of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Some concerns remain: A lot of those who seldom make text relay calls “may not be yet registered with any one of the Internet Protocol relay service providers,” he said. “It will be a confusing and frustrating time for us, but the FCC has made sure that we can register with our chosen provider in order to make IP text relay calls.” Also, consumer groups have a petition pending before the FCC related to people using 800/866 toll-free numbers, Stout noted: “Deaf and hard of hearing Americans that opt to use toll-free numbers instead of the local ten digit numbers from their VRS providers for the VP devices they use, will learn that their devices will not be interoperable during peer-to- peer video calls with devices from different providers.”