Eliminating some of the requirements that the FCC has proposed to slash in its broadband labels further NPRM is ill-conceived, said Jon Peha, a former FCC chief technologist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in comments last week in docket 22-2 (see 2512290038). A consumer can’t “make an informed decision about whether to keep … current service or switch to another service unless the customer can see the label associated with that current service,” Peha said. The FCC should “require ISPs to display the label in the online account portal, and to clarify that the label should be updated when the customer’s plan changes.”
Comments are due Feb. 2 on a November NPRM seeking comment on modernizing the telecommunications relay service rules (see 2511200047), said a notice for Friday’s Federal Register. Replies are due March 3 in docket 03-123. “Through these proposals, the Commission aims to align TRS with today’s communications landscape, better serve the needs of relay users, ensure the continued availability of TRS through the transition from legacy communications network, to modern, IP-based networks, and continue to protect the integrity of the TRS program through the prevention of waste, fraud, and abuse,” the notice said.
More companies will realize the benefits of keeping their data on premise, said Other World Computing CEO Larry O'Connor as part of a list of 2026 predictions Tuesday. “More teams are going to rediscover the joy of having their data and workflows close to where the work actually happens,” O’Connor said. It’s “easy to move a workflow up into the cloud, and then you wake up one day and realize you are paying for every little thing, and you are also at the mercy of a lot of services you cannot fix or influence.”
Smart communications platform company Ooma said Monday that it completed its purchase of Phone.com, which provides cloud-based communications for businesses, for about $23.2 million in cash. Phone.com has about 36,000 customers and 87,000 users in North America, Ooma said.
Japan's SoftBank Group announced Monday that it has agreed to buy Florida-based telecom investment firm DigitalBridge Group for $4 billion. The deal is based on SoftBank's push into artificial superintelligence, which will require “breakthroughs not only in AI models, but also in the platform infrastructure needed to train, deploy, and serve them at global scale,” the company said. It wants to build, scale or finance the “foundational infrastructure” needed for next-generation AI. “As AI transforms industries worldwide, we need more compute, connectivity, power, and scalable infrastructure,” SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said.
Strand Consult said in its year-end predictions that pressure is likely to continue on big tech companies to pay into the USF. “The largest internet companies Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and TikTok derived an estimated $200 billion in revenue in 2024 from the 135 million users connecting to the internet through the USF,” Strand said last week. The companies earned on average $2,600 in 2024 through every household connected, it added. An “explosion of data centers is poised to exacerbate this free ride if left unaddressed.”
AT&T said Tuesday that its global network now carries an average of 1 exabyte of data per day, an increase of more than 1,000% in 10 years and an 11,000% increase over the past 20 years. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes of data, “the equivalent of streaming billions of hours of video or trillions of songs,” the carrier said. “It’s like stacking 20 billion filing cabinets on top of each other or downloading every book ever written, thousands of times over, every single day.”
New America’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society and the Utility Reform Network urged the FCC to delay comment deadlines 30 days for an NPRM proposing various changes to the agency's broadband label rules. Comments are due Jan. 2, replies Feb.2, in docket 22-2.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a self-described neo-conservative think tank, urged the FCC on Monday to require recertification for any authorized device that's modified by an entity on the agency’s “covered list” of unsecure companies. “This oversight would prevent any entity currently on the Covered List from modifying previously authorized equipment in ways that might introduce new vulnerabilities following purchase or installation,” said a filing in docket 21-232. The requirement would “encourage American firms to transition toward alternate suppliers, further bolstering U.S. national security.” The FCC should also impose the “broadest possible prohibitions” to safeguard U.S. security, rather than pinpointing “specific components that may harbor vulnerabilities, such as modular transmitters, logic-bearing hardware, firmware, software, or semiconductors," the group said.
AT&T has dropped its lawsuit against BBB National Programs' National Advertising Division (see 2510300031), which in turn retracted its claims against AT&T, they said in a joint statement Monday. NAD and AT&T “have amicably resolved their dispute,” they said. AT&T filed a lawsuit in October against the ad watchdog after it sent a cease and desist letter ordering the carrier to stop running ads about T-Mobile’s repeated violations of NAD rules on deceptive ads. NAD accused AT&T of violating agreements that restrict participants in its industry self-regulation efforts from making deceptive statements about NAD rulings. “BBB National Programs no longer takes that position and retracts its cease-and-desist letter in all respects,” NAD’s legal counsel said Friday in a letter to AT&T. The organization “recognizes that AT&T’s statements on T-Mobile were based on publicly available information published by BBB National Programs” and doesn’t oppose networks running AT&T’s commercials based on those statements, it said.