Former telecom executives said switching Local Number Portability Administrators 10 months before the change is supposed to take place poses risks, in a webinar sponsored by Neustar Thursday. “It’s a really tight time frame for anything,” said Standish Group CEO Jim Johnson. The North American Numbering Council has recommended that Ericsson subsidiary Telcordia, doing business as iconectiv, replace Neustar as the next LPNA. Neustar has filed challenges to the selection in docket 09-109, and in its webinar, former Sprint Chief Information Officer Dick LeFave said the work of the LNPA is far more complex than in the past when there were “a limited number of customers. Customers have multiple devices now.” It’s a “short amount of time” to ensure there won’t be any problems, said former Comptel CEO Jerry James. Customers are “all going to blame you regardless of where in the process things may have failed,” he said. Any problems that would arise would carry the risk of losing customers, James said. Which company is the LNPA “is going to be very important” to the IP transition, he noted. “For local number portability, the biggest risk is actually staying with the incumbent who has no incentive to innovate and who has continually charged high rates,” responded Richard Jacowleff, CEO of iconectiv/Telcordia, in a statement. “No one is going to proceed with a transition faster than makes sense. The current contract allows for extensions in transition if needed. … But delay will also cost industry and consumers tens of millions of dollars per month.” The company’s transition plan “was thoroughly reviewed by a subcommittee of industry experts and by the North American Numbering Council. … For service providers, their interfaces to the NPAC won’t change and everyone will see lower costs, including consumers.” A new LNPA will also allow better integration into new technology “because it will have been built for the current environment and not based on what telecommunications looked like in 1997,” the statement said.

President Barack Obama faced “a handful” of net neutrality protesters Wednesday when traveling through California’s Silicon Valley for a political fundraiser, according to White House pool reports. A pool report flagged “one colorful sign: ’stop cable company f-&:39$! ery,'” quoting John Oliver’s HBO segment on net neutrality. Obama joined House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Energy and Commerce Committee Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. Eshoo is vying to be ranking member of the full committee after current ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., retires, a political battle in which she’s already won the support of Pelosi.

The FCC should maximize the number of white space channels available for unlicensed use above channel 20 and maintain as many consecutive white space channels as possible as it repacks broadcasters after the incentive auction, said representatives of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition (PISC) and Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) in a meeting Thursday with staff from the FCC’s Incentive Auction Task Force and Media Bureau, according to an ex parte filing posted online Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1sMsD3F). Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project, and Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld attended the meeting on behalf of PISC, along with WISPA counsel Stephen Coran. In an upcoming FNPRM on the auction and secondary TV services, the commission should clarify that low-power TV channels that are being occupied using construction permits or “not currently providing a substantial broadcast service” should be available for at least temporary unlicensed use rather than their spectrum being allowed to lie “fallow,” PISC and WISPA said. The FNPRM should also seek comment on new reporting requirements for broadcast licensees that would require more “granular” data, such as periods when a given station isn’t operating. “Since broadcast licensees occupy the public spectrum at no cost, a requirement that they report changes in their operational status from time to time would present a trivial and appropriate obligation,” said the filing. PISC also proposed that the FCC should encourage more efficient spectrum use by requiring secondary broadcast licensees to “co-locate and share a single 6 MHz channel where that is feasible without reducing their broadcast service to the community,” the filing said. The FCC should test such a requirement in “at least the 30 largest” designated market areas, and seek further comment on the idea, PISC said.

Correction: Most state governments that commented on the FCC’s NPRM on net neutrality rules urged the FCC to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service under Communications Act Title II (CD July 22 p7).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit should uphold the FCC’s prison phone order because the interim reforms contained in the order are a “sound exercise of the FCC’s broad discretion to adopt ratemaking rules on an interim basis,” the FCC said in a court brief it posted Tuesday (http://fcc.us/1r45rKl). Inmate calling service provider Securus and other providers are challenging the order, which the D.C. Circuit partially stayed in January (CD Jan 14 p3). The FCC said it was within the law in requiring interstate inmate calling rates be based on the “reasonable costs of providing inmate calling services,” and noted it provided “ample notice” of its intentions. The cost-based rule also doesn’t impose rate-of-return regulation, despite what Securus and other providers say, the FCC said. The commission said it gave sufficient guidance on what costs were “reasonably related” to inmate caller services and was reasonable in finding that site commissions weren’t recoverable through interstate calling rates. The interim hard caps included in the order are also “reasonable and reasonably explained,” as were the interim safe-harbor caps, the FCC said. The D.C. Circuit should also reject the providers’ challenge to the order’s requirement that ancillary charges be cost based, the FCC said. The commission has the authority to issue that requirement, which itself is a “necessary aspect of ensuring just, reasonable, and fair interstate inmate calling rates,” the FCC said. The D.C. Circuit should also reject the providers’ claim that the order “unlawfully infringes” on state and local authorities’ power to manage correctional facilities because the FCC has the authority to “ensure that rates for interstate inmate calling services are just, reasonable, and fair,” the commission said. The order doesn’t “abrogate contracts between inmate calling providers and correctional facilities; it merely regulates the charges that providers may impose on consumers,” the FCC said.

Verizon is working on directly connecting Netflix content servers to Verizon’s network “so that we both can keep the interests of our mutual customers paramount,” a Verizon executive said Monday in a blog post (http://vz.to/1o1qoXl). Verizon and Netflix found a way to avoid congestion problems created by Level 3, said David Young, Verizon vice president-regulatory affairs, in the post. Rather than buy the capacity they need, Level 3 “insists that Verizon should add capacity to the existing peering link for additional downstream traffic even though the traffic is already wildly out of balance,” he said in response to Level 3’s blog post criticizing Verizon on how it handles interconnection (CD July 21 p11). Verizon and Netflix were at odds over which company is responsible for congested networks (CD June 18 p7).

Netflix will continue to advocate “strong net neutrality,” including interconnection, and that’s “about preventing large ISPs from holding our joint customers hostage with poor performance to extract payments from us, other Internet content firms, and Internet transit suppliers such as Level 3 and Cogent,” CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells said Monday in the company’s Q2 letter to shareholders. “Our policy goals are for the FCC to not sanctify paid prioritization,” and for the Justice Department and the FCC to block the merger of Comcast/Time Warner Cable, “or at the very least, to require as condition to approving the merger that the combined entity be prevented from charging for interconnection,” the letter said. In 4K, Netflix is now streaming “flagship content” in Ultra HD to subscribers with 4K smart TVs, “putting Netflix at the leading edge of high-quality AV delivery,” it also said. The company globally in Q2 topped 50 million subscribers for the first time, a 33 percent increase from Q2 a year ago.

The FCC will ensure that consumers can rely on 911, “even as the technologies and platforms we use to communicate evolve,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Friday in a blog post. Wheeler cited an April 911 outage centered in Washington state, during which more than 4,500 911 calls did not get through during one six-hour period. The FCC launched an investigation in May (http://bit.ly/1n1PvID). “Initial reports suggest that this outage appears to be a case where the transition to new networks may have been managed poorly and providers in the 911 ecosystem are not operating in a manner that is transparent to system users, regulators and each other,” Wheeler said in the post (http://fcc.us/1moFZLh). “Let me be plain -- no company will be allowed to hang up on 911.”

The FCC and NTIA jointly released coordination procedures for the two AWS-3 bands: 1695-1710 and 1755-1780 MHz. Commissioner Ajit Pai sharply criticized Chairman Tom Wheeler for allowing the Wireless Bureau to approve the document on delegated authority rather than through a vote of commissioners. The document provides guidance to AWS-3 licensees and affected federal incumbents on coordination for shared use of the two bands. “The rules are a milestone in providing commercial access to new spectrum bands through a spectrum-sharing arrangement with incumbent federal users,” said a Friday public notice (http://bit.ly/WnCwYt). “As part of that arrangement, the Commission’s AWS-3 rules require successful coordination with Federal incumbents prior to operation in Protection Zones.” Pai said in a statement (http://bit.ly/1kDMk5M) that a draft order circulated to commissioners purported to change some of the AWS-3 geographic coordination zones adopted by the FCC in March, but with a “catch.” The proposal “did not say what the relevant new zones would look like,” Pai said. He said he asked how the document changes the protection zones. “I had thought that these were quite reasonable inquiries,” he said. “So I was surprised when my requests for this basic information were denied. Instead, I was told that after the Commission adopted the item, I would be briefed on the new zones.” The item was ultimately pulled from circulation and approved instead at the bureau level, he said. “This is no way to run a railroad.” A senior official responded to Pai on behalf of the chairman, saying the Wireless Bureau acted only because of timing considerations. Wheeler circulated the order July 2, with the hope commissioners would vote by the end of the day Tuesday, the official said. “Chairman Wheeler offered his fellow commissioners the opportunity to vote on the notice,” the senior official said. “But, because some commissioners did not vote on the notice by the deadline, and in the interest of swift work on behalf of the American public, the bureau released the notice.”

NARUC’s board unanimously approved a resolution encouraging the FCC to craft its new net neutrality rules using Communications Act Section 706 as its main legal justification. The Wednesday resolution, cleared by NARUC’s Telecom Committee Tuesday, also lists Titles I, II and III as backup jurisdictional bases (CD July 16 p7). The board’s only revision to the resolution was to remove specific references in the title to Title II and Section 706, said Vermont Public Service Board member John Burke, the resolution’s original sponsor.