Somos urged the FCC in a filing posting Thursday to make changes to its numbering rules, consistent with the agency’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” proceeding. The company also has a petition before the commission asking it to alter how phone numbers are assigned and move away from its legacy systems to an IP environment (see 2601090040). The FCC shut down the North American Numbering Council last year (see 2506240074).
CTIA is urging the FCC to make a determination that its pole attachment regulatory authority extends to utility-owned light poles. In a filing posted Wednesday (docket 17-84) to recap a meeting with Wireline Bureau staffers, CTIA said that interpretation of Section 224 of the Communications Act, which covers pole attachments, would be consistent with the FCC's goals of accelerating broadband deployment and reducing barriers to it. "The best reading of Section 224's plain language" points to the law providing a nondiscriminatory access right to light poles, the group said.
Ulster Savings Bank CEO William Calderara asked the FCC to do more to clamp down on unlawful robocalls and text message scams, noting the “alarming rise in bank impersonation fraud targeting” the elderly. In a filing posted Wednesday in docket 17-59, Calderara said such scams "are no longer minor nuisances" but rather "financially devastating crimes that exploit trust in financial institutions and drain life savings."
The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition and the Consortium for School Networking told the FCC this week that they support the preservation of broadband labels for mass-market services offered to anchor institutions. “Mass-market service plans might be the sole or only viable means of connectivity for many schools, libraries, and health care providers,” the groups said in a filing Monday in docket 22-2. Comments are due Friday on a further NPRM proposing various changes to the agency's broadband label rules (see 2512290038).
Some Trump administration BEAD policies, such as conditioning funding on states not regulating AI, will make the program less effective, the American Enterprise Institute said in one of its tech predictions for 2026. President Donald “Trump’s team is adding its own extra-statutory requirements,” the organization wrote Friday in a blog post. While a market-based AI policy is the best approach, “using broadband subsidies as leverage makes federal oversight arbitrary and will result in less broadband deployment and more wasted taxpayer dollars.”
Whether texts count as telephone calls for purposes of bringing a do not call private right of action will vary among different jurisdictions until federal appellate courts settle the issue, Klein Moynihan telemarketing lawyer David Klein wrote Wednesday. There's a split among district courts on whether consumers can bring Telephone Consumer Protection Act DNC claims for receiving unsolicited text messages, Klein said. Companies should obtain consumer consent before sending commercial text messages and quickly honor consumers' requests to opt out from future ones, he added.
There were 258.5 million telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry as of Sept. 30, up roughly 4.8 million from the same time a year earlier, the FTC said this week in its biennial DNC Registry report to Congress. The agency said consumer complaints about illegal calls, particularly illegal robocalls, jumped in FY 2025 after steady declines from FY 2017-24. The number of robocall complaints averaged about 133,000 monthly in FY 2025, compared with about 92,000 a month in FY 2024, it said. Despite the uptick, the complaints remain "substantially down" from their FY 2017 peak.
The FCC Wireline Bureau reminded Priority 1 recipients of grants from the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program about the May 8 deadline “to complete the permanent removal, replacement, and disposal of covered communications equipment and services in their networks,” said a notice in Wednesday’s Daily Digest. The bureau said it’s encouraged by the progress that recipients have made since additional funding was made available last year to replace Chinese gear in their networks. More than three years have passed since July 2022, when the bureau approved the applications of Priority 1 recipients, “and they should be fully prepared to meet the … deadline.”
The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau on Tuesday ordered the extension to Jan. 31, 2027, of the effective date of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requirement for callers to treat any called party's revocation of consent as applicable to all future robocalls and robotexts from that caller on unrelated matters. The bureau said the extension of the waiver of that rule will give more time to review the record compiled in response to the TCPA further NPRM adopted by commissioners in October (see 2510280024).
Most parts of a rule requiring robocall mitigation database filers to take “additional steps to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and currentness of submitted information” take effect Feb. 5, said a notice for Tuesday’s Federal Register. The FCC approved the order in late 2024 during the Biden administration.