Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

Citing the alleged failure of private telecom providers to sufficiently deploy advanced broadband services to rural and less profitable markets, the Consumer Federation of America and High Tech Broadband Coalition filed briefs in the Supreme Court Fri. backing federal preemption of state laws that barred municipal entry into the telecom business. In June, the Supreme Court granted review of an 8th U.S. Appeals Court, St. Louis, decision vacating an FCC order. The Commission had denied preemption of a Mo. statute that barred localities and municipally owned utilities from providing telecom services or facilities. Petitions for writs of certiorari had been filed by the FCC, the state of Mo. and Southwestern Bell.

States and municipalities are expressing concern that legislation designed to prevent taxes on access to Internet service eventually could restrict local govt. regulation of telephony and cable service. NARUC, the National Governors Assn. (NGA), National Assn. of Telecom Officers & Advisors (NATOA) and the TeleCommUninty Alliance (TCUA) are among the local interests expressing concern about S-150, the proposed Internet Tax Non-Discrimination Act.

A federal judge ruled Thurs. that Internet voice service between computers, or between computers and phones, couldn’t be regulated by the states. U.S. Dist. Judge Michael Davis, Minneapolis, classified Vonage’s offering as an information service and therefore concluded that Minn. PUC regulation had been preempted by Congress in its protection of nascent Internet activity. The opinion was hailed by Vonage and by voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP) promoter Jeff Pulver, but was criticized by NARUC and the Media Access Project (MAP).

The FCC voted at its agenda meeting Thurs. to allow use of spectrum in the 71-76 GHz, 81-86 GHz and 92-95 GHz bands for commercial services such as high-speed, point-to-point wireless local area networks (LANs) and broadband Internet access. Those spectrum blocks, now used mainly for govt. and scientific purposes, are “well-suited for licensees to offer a broad range of innovative products and services,” the agency said.

With utilities girding to roll out commercial broadband over power line (BPL) services, the FCC may have to confront the issue of classifying the service sooner rather than later, said officials and lawyers we interviewed. However, opinions differed on whether the recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Appeals Court, San Francisco, overturning the FCC’s declaratory order classifying cable modem service as an interstate information service would have a direct bearing on the agency’s thinking on classifying BPL service. Utilities recently unveiled BPL commercial deployment plans ranging from this month to early next year (CD Sept 23 p4).

Advocates of competing plans for mitigating public safety interference at 800 MHz wrangled in an occasionally heated panel discussion Thurs. about possible technical fixes and funding. At the Industrial Telecom Assn.’s (ITA) Private Wireless Summit in Washington, backers of different solutions for alleviating interference showed how far apart the factions continued to be, even as the FCC was set to move ahead as soon as year-end. One of the few factors on which most panelists agreed was that whatever the FCC did in that area was likely to end up in court.

Cisco told the FCC an allocation plan for 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz shouldn’t channelize that spectrum. Cisco told the FCC in a filing that licensees should be allowed to use bandwidths of less than 5 GHz in each direction and expand as their need for capacity grows. In June 2002, the FCC proposed rules for 71-76 GHz, 81-86 GHz and 92-95 GHz that would let commercial users and govt. and scientific operations co-exist. The proposed rules would cover fixed point-to-point operations in that spectrum, with the objective of promoting more spectrum sharing between federal and nonfederal users in the band. Cisco said its idea for 70 and 80 GHz is akin to that of a “spatial pipe,” or a radio link between 2 points that would allow users to use some or all of the spectrum for a single pair of radios or multiple pairs, using any modulation scheme. “By defining such ’spatial pipes’ and recognizing them flexibly, the Commission can enable manufacturers to meet the user’s needs as precisely and as cost-effectively as possible and to provide the maximum possible flexibility for growth,” Cisco said. Meanwhile, a committee of the Wireless Communications Assn. (WCA) recently submitted proposals to the FCC for technical rules for terrestrial fixed operations at 70 and 80 GHz. The WCA’s Above 60 GHz Committee urged the FCC to adopt the proposals quickly “so that the 70/80 GHz frequencies can be employed to bring the public low cost, fiber equivalent wireless broadband connections in the very near future.” The committee includes Cisco, Endwave, Harris, Loea Communications and Terabeam. Among the issues covered in the proposals were interference protection criteria, which commenters have told the FCC in the past would need to differ from those that apply in lower frequency microwave bands because of different radio frequency propagation effects. When comments were previously submitted to the FCC, consensus on this issue was elusive, the WCA panel said. It said its proposal reflected the fact that rain fading will be correlated in these frequencies, in that both the carrier and the interference will fade together in rainy conditions.

One way or another, a court decision that effectively would allow unrelated Internet service providers to piggyback on cable’s broadband lines (CD Oct 7 p1) will not take effect, NCTA officials said confidently Wed. in a press briefing. NCTA Pres. Robert Sachs said that while the decision by the 9th U.S. Appeals Court, San Francisco, had left some cable companies uneasy, for the most part they saw that development as one of many to come along a path toward deregulation.

In long-awaited guidance on wireless-to-wireless local number portability (LNP), the FCC said in an order Tues. a carrier couldn’t bar a subscriber from taking a number along when switching service if the user had an overdue bill. The Commission declined to require wireless carriers to negotiate interconnection agreements with one another for LNP and “encouraged” operators to complete simple ports within 2-1/2 hours of a customer request in line with an industry- established interval.

The 9th U.S. Appeals Court, San Francisco vacated the FCC’s declaratory ruling that cable modem service was an interstate information service because it was bound by its earlier conclusion in AT&T v. Portland that cable-delivered Internet service contained both information service and telecom components. In a per curiam opinion Mon., the 3- judge panel remanded to the Commission for further proceedings portions of the earlier decision that weren’t consistent with the court ruling.