Lawmaker interest in the draft order on improving its broadband coverage data collection practices continued Wednesday and Thursday before its afternoon release (see 1907110071). The order and broadband mapping legislation came up repeatedly during a House Agriculture Commodity Exchanges Subcommittee hearing. A day earlier, the Senate Commerce Committee scuttled a planned markup of the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act (S-1822), one of several measures seen as potentially influencing the proposal's direction (see 1907100061).
The FCC would use two reverse auctions to distribute $20.4 billion in funding over the next decade through a Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) that Chairman Ajit Pai announced at the White House in April (see 1904120008), per a draft NPRM released Thursday. The new USF program (in docket 19-126) would help deliver broadband service tiers of at least 25/3 Mbps to rural communities unserved and underserved. The draft circulated Wednesday; commissioners will vote on it at their Aug. 1 meeting (see 1907100072).
The FCC’s Aug. 1 commissioners’ meeting will be headlined by proposed rulemakings on robocalls and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, per the tentative agenda and drafts released Thursday late afternoon. Members will vote on an NPRM on low-power FM technical rules, orders on 911 location and small satellites, plus items on a toll-free number auction and local franchising authority over cable.
The FCC is prepared to “go to rules” in early 2020 if major voice providers don’t deploy by year-end, said Chairman Ajit Pai at a Thursday summit on Shaken/Stir. Pai's encouraged by what he heard at the summit and asked larger providers to work with their smaller peers so everyone offers secure handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) and secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) technology on a timely basis. Speakers warned that hurdles remain and bad actors will do their best to circumvent anything industry does. Small carriers said they face unique problems.
The FCC will give relief to incumbent LECs, granting them forbearance from pricing regulation on lower-speed legacy transport and requirements to sell the transport as unbundled network elements (UNE) to competitive carriers that then use them in their business data services, voting unanimously at its meeting Wednesday on a petition from USTelecom (see 1905130050). The agency issued a draft order in late June in docket 18-141 (see 1906190044). The new order allows CLECs to continue to buy the UNE transport from ILECs for the next six months, and gives them three years (concurrently) to transition away from the transport networks or negotiate new business agreements with the ILECs.
The U.S. is outpacing other countries in the race toward 5G in "the allocation of spectrum" but is playing catch-up in other areas such as fiber deployment, said Commerce Department Deputy Chief of Staff Earl Comstock Wednesday. Comstock spoke on a panel on 5G and supply chains at the annual Bureau of Industry and Security conference (see 1907100013). The spectrum "is not perfect" and the administration is still working to "find the right spectrum in the right spaces," he said. "We have made available to our companies far more than any other country."
A California Senate panel cleared a VoIP deregulation bill at a Wednesday hearing after sponsor Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Lorena Gonzalez (D) accepted several committee amendments to scale back the controversial measure that's opposed by the California Public Utilities Commission. Two senators voted no. Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee members also supported an amended bill responding to Verizon's throttling traffic of Santa Clara County firefighters during the Mendocino Complex Fire last year.
Commissioners approved bidding procedures for the third high-band auction this year and the largest FCC auction in history based on megahertz to be sold. Discussion during Wednesday's meeting sparked confrontation between Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who partially dissented, and Chairman Ajit Pai. The auction starts Dec. 10.
The Senate Commerce Committee pulled the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act from consideration before its planned Wednesday markup during a committee executive session. S-1822 is one of several measures seen as potentially influencing the direction of a yet-to-be-released FCC order on collecting more-granular broadband coverage data (see 1907050044). Commissioners are expected to vote on the pending order at their Aug. 1 meeting (see 1906120076).
The FCC voted along party lines Wednesday for partial pre-emption of San Francisco's Article 52 open-access rule, with dissenting Democratic commissioners complaining of regulatory overreach. Geoffrey Starks called the declaratory ruling “not sound law and not good policy." Jessica Rosenworcel said it's "an affront to our long history" of local control. The Republicans and Starks, meanwhile, backed the related NPRM asking about other ways the FCC could boost broadband deployment in multi-tenant environments (MTE), though Mike O'Rielly said he did so with reservations.