The FCC would benefit from additional authority to go after robocallers rather than wait for the DOJ to take up the cases, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said during the FCBA's annual seminar Friday. Legislation for new authority, which she requested during a Thursday hearing of the House Communications Subcommittee (see 2203310060), would help speed the enforcement process, she said. Currently, after the FCC issues a fine, it can ask the DOJ to prosecute, she said: Those "requests for prosecutorial attention can sometimes take a long time." Spectrum is “a big, big priority” for new NTIA chief Alan Davidson, said Deputy Administrator April McClain-Delaney, during another session. “Innovation happens when you’re able to have more efficiencies in the spectrum,” she said. NTIA is working on a national spectrum strategy and focused on making sure federal agencies have the spectrum they need, she said. “There’s so much on our plate,” she said: “We’re hiring and putting the front office back together.” McClain-Delaney said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tasked her to help with the campaign of American Doreen Bogdan-Martin’s as ITU secretary-general over Russian nominee Rashid Ismailov (see 2203020068). The election is important because of Russia’s focus on “top-down” control of the internet and potentially censorship, she said. Bogdan-Martin’s campaign is about “standards” and a “multistakeholder approach” to internet governance, McClain-Delaney said.

The FCC’s electronic comment filing system (ECFS) was scheduled to be unavailable Saturday and Sunday for a system upgrade, said a news release Friday. A message on the front page of the FCC’s commission registration system (CORES) showed aspects of that system offline as well, from Thursday to Monday. The ECFS system upgrade “is expected to be completed and full service restored to the public no later than 7:00 a.m. EST on Monday,” the release said. “The upgrade will enable immediate system improvements and allow for expanded features and functions to be introduced into ECFS in the future.” Because the outage was scheduled to occur outside of normal business hours, filing deadlines won’t be extended, the release said. The current application programming interface (API) for submitting filings to ECFS will also no longer be available, and filings must be submitted using the ECFS web interface. The FCC didn’t respond to questions about whether that is a permanent shift or is just for the current maintenance, and also was unresponsive on whether the CORES and ECFS outages are related. For two weeks, ECFS has been cluttered with thousands of apparently empty filings in docket 20-99 that the agency said are the result of a routine software update that caused problems in a database (see 2203240049). On Friday, docket 20-99, which concerns a carriage dispute, contained 19,447 filings, 19,439 of which were entered in the past 30 days. The agency didn’t respond to questions about whether the issue and maintenance are connected.

The global semiconductor supply chain is “experiencing pressure” due to the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on an earnings call Tuesday for its fiscal Q2 ended March 3. “The region is an important source for the global supply of noble gases and other critical minerals that are used in semiconductor manufacturing.” Micron's fiscal Q2 mobile revenue grew 4% year over year to $1.9 billion as the 5G transition continues in smartphones, said Mehrotra. “We see some weakness in the China market as the local economy slows, smartphone market share shifts and some customers take a more prudent approach to inventory management,” he said. Demand for Micron’s mobile memory and storage solutions “continues to be supported by content-hungry applications and the ongoing transition from 4G to 5G, which is driving 50% higher DRAM content and the doubling of NAND content,” he said. Micron expects 700 million 5G smartphones will be shipped in calendar 2022, which would be a 40% increase from 2021, he said.

Tech companies said it's important that the U.S. advocate no change to 6425-7125 MHz in ITU radio regulations, as recommended by the FCC’s World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee (see 2202150030), at next year’s WRC. “We discussed the Commission’s efforts towards global harmonization of unlicensed use of 6 GHz,” said filing posted Wednesday in docket 16-185: “We highlighted the economic and technological importance of unlicensed use in the full band, particularly for continued development of Wi-Fi 7 equipment. As the world leader in Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies, the U.S. is a global leader in unlicensed innovation, with U.S. firms holding significant W-Fi 6E patents, and U.S. consumers and enterprises relying heavily on the hundreds of millions of access points and hotspots around the world, along with billions of client devices." Representatives of Cisco, Meta Platforms and Microsoft were among those on a call with an aide to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

Wireless carriers are having to change how they do business because of 5G and the move to the cloud, speakers said Tuesday at an RCR Wireless virtual conference. The move to the cloud meant Verizon had to change how it was organized, said Abby Knowles, vice president-information technology. “We needed to really specialize more and functionalize,” Knowles said: “We were able to actually scale faster. As we created infrastructure experts, as we created application experts, as we created folks who focus on the performance, we were able to learn it faster, we were able to turn it up faster.” Staffers had to maintain a focus on customers even as their focus narrowed, she said. The biggest challenge is getting employees with the right skills for the cloud, said Rahul Atri, Rakuten Mobile managing director. “We are in a transition stage with telecom where we need the expertise” of small and medium-sized enterprises, he said. Potential employees don’t have the intersecting skills for legacy telecom and the cloud, he said. Some employees were quick to learn the cloud and others took more time and resisted the change, Atri said. “The whole idea was to get your hands dirty,” he said. Standing up the technology platform is the easiest change, said Chris Hill, vice president global telco at technology provider VMware. “You really do have to focus on the people piece and the process piece,” he said. The focus has to be on being competitive “in a 5G-edge cloud world,” he said. “We are at the point now” where the cloud is “no longer a technology conversation,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, Google Cloud digital transformation officer-telecom. “We understand the technology at this point, the technology is well proven,” he said. “When you really start to see technology adoption ramp … it happens when you spend less time proving the technology is viable and more time focused on how do I organize myself to operate this technology at scale.” Networks are already complicated, “but we generally don’t think about the spectrum, we generally don’t think about balancing the 4G and 5G traffic,” said Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director-radio access network engineering. “We have a mix of customers” and 70%-80% don’t have phones compatible with a 5G stand-alone network, he said: “You need to think about balancing the spectrum usage. You need to think about optimizing your dynamic-sharing features in such a way that you should not hurt the 4G customer … while you’re giving your 5G customer a superior expected experience and you should keep both of them happy.” Service agility, the ability to monetize new services and network efficiency are driving carriers to make changes to their networks, said Chandresh Ruparel, Intel senior director-5G/wireless core infrastructure segment.

The FCC's expanding its list of "covered" equipment suppliers -- deemed to present security concerns -- by adding Russian cybersecurity powerhouse Kaspersky Lab (see 2203250067) is likely only a start, emailed Tatyana Bolton, R Street Institute policy director-cybersecurity and emerging threats. “It sounds like exactly like the discussions the government had when the threat of China started to become the primary concern within the national security establishment,” she said: “If Russia doesn’t stop their unprovoked aggression, it seems highly likely that more Russian companies may join the list. Given that the number of Russian suppliers is fairly low, however, there is a limit to how effective this strategy is in constraining Russian behavior.”

The FCC expanded its list of "covered" equipment suppliers -- deemed to present security concerns -- adding three companies Friday, including Russian cybersecurity powerhouse Kaspersky Lab. The FCC has been scoping steps it could take in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (see 2203180051). The others added are China Telecom (Americas) and China Mobile International. The FCC previously revoked China Telecom’s domestic and international authorities (see 2110260060). In May 2019, in a first shot at Chinese providers, commissioners voted 5-0 to deny China Mobile’s long-standing Section 214 application (see 1905090039). The FCC released its original list of five covered companies, including Huawei and ZTE, a year ago (see 2103120058). Kaspersky is the first non-Chinese company to make the list. “Last year, for the first time, the FCC published a list of communications equipment and services that pose an unacceptable risk to national security, and we have been working closely with our national security partners to review and update this list,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel Friday. This action “is the latest in the FCC’s ongoing efforts, as part of the greater whole-of-government approach, to strengthen America’s communications networks against national security threats, including examining the foreign ownership of telecommunications companies providing service in the United States and revoking the authorization to operate where necessary,” she said. None of the companies immediately commented. The expansion of the list is “welcome news,” said Commissioner Brendan Carr: “I am pleased that our national security agencies agreed with my assessment that China Mobile and China Telecom appeared to meet the threshold necessary to add these entities to our list. Their addition, as well as Kaspersky Labs, will help secure our networks from threats posed by Chinese and Russian state-backed entities seeking to engage in espionage and otherwise harm America’s interests.” Kaspersky is a Moscow-based company that offers artificial intelligence-driven “protection against hackers and the latest viruses, ransomware and spyware,” according to its website. The company claims 400 million users worldwide. Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security warned against use of Kaspersky security products earlier this month, citing the danger of cyberattacks, according to Hackread.

Thousands of unusual, nearly blank filings in docket 20-99 inundated the FCC’s electronic comment filing system this week, complicating routine searches. An FCC spokesperson said Thursday the agency was working to fix the issue, and it appears to have been caused by a "routine software update that impacted some files in the database.“ All the filings (here is one representative sample) are labeled as though they were submitted by individual people, and many contain blank attachments. All were filed in the docket that pertains to a Dish Network carriage dispute. Communications Daily first noticed small volumes of the errant filings on Monday, but their pace appeared to have dramatically increased by Thursday, when the docket contained more than 15,000 submissions.

The Interagency Steering Group on Native American Voting Rights said Thursday “more could be done” by the FCC and other policymakers to promote voting on Tribal lands. The FCC auctioned off spectrum licenses and USF support “to build out broadband capacity to millions of unserved locations, but could do more to integrate Tribal governments into the process, to ensure better communication and relationships between the auction winners and the Tribal communities they serve,” the report said. To the extent states deploy federal funding or funding of their own to promote broadband in Tribal areas “it would be advisable to similarly incorporate Tribal governments into the process of assessing needs and selection procedures, as well as bid evaluation and contract approval.” When the FCC issues spectrum licenses to Tribal governments it should offer “the technical and grantmaking assistance necessary for Tribal governments to capitalize effectively on the spectrum availability,” the report said. Information designed for viewing on desktop computers “may not be effective for eligible voters who are primarily online through smartphones, no matter how robust their connectivity or capacity,” it said: State and local officials should ensure “their election-related applications and information are also optimized (and translated) for mobile, in order to reach Native American voters where they are.”

New York urged the 2nd U.S. Circuit of Appeals to reject federal preemption arguments of ISP associations contesting the state’s affordable broadband law. Plaintiffs at first argued that field preemption restricts states from regulating “any aspect of the business practices of broadband providers simply because they deal in interstate communications," but they now "assert on appeal that the allegedly preempted field instead consists of regulation of the rates charged by interstate communications providers,” said AG Letitia James (D) in a Wednesday reply brief in case 21-1975. “But this reformulated argument also fails. Congress has not enacted a uniform, let alone a comprehensive, regime of rate regulation for interstate communications services -- such as telephone (Title II), radio (Title III), and cable television (Title V-A).” The various Communications Act titles “treat each type of service differently and specifically vest the FCC with differing levels of authority over rates,” James said. “And critically for this case, the FCC altogether lacks power to set broadband rates under Title I, leaving the field at issue here federally unoccupied.” Plaintiffs’ other argument that the 2018 net neutrality order "impliedly preempted" New York's law is inconsistent with D.C. Circuit and 9th Circuit appeals court rulings, said James. “If the FCC has no authority to regulate expressly, it has no authority to do so by implication either.” Four ex-FCC members from both parties urged the 2nd Circuit earlier this month to reject the New York law because they said it improperly regulates broadband rates (see 2203030042).