Verizon’s fixed 5G offering is a success, Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said Tuesday on an earnings call he billed as the first such in this fifth-generation era. The pilot went live Oct. 1 in parts of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento (see 1810010028). “We've seen performance as we've expected since we started doing … installs,” Ellis said. “The technology works, our customers are getting the experience they expected and we are getting a lot of good learning which will benefit us next year when we rollout the product to that much larger audience.” Ellis said Verizon is well positioned. “True 5G requires an ultra-wideband solution, utilizing millimeter-wave spectrum to address the full array of use cases that 5G enables," as well as deep fiber, lots of small cells, the right spectrum holdings and “mobile edge computing capabilities," he said. "All of which we have been assembling for years.” Verizon is pushing gear-makers to move as quickly as possible on 5G, Ellis said: “We will be ready to deploy both on the network side and the customer side when the equipment is ready.” Ellis said the carrier appreciates FCC work to speed up siting of wireless infrastructure. “Our teams have been engaged with municipalities across the country on getting permits to put up small cells whether for 4G or 5G,” he said. “We are going as fast as we can. And while the federal level rules are helpful, [siting] is still a very local activity municipality-by-municipality.” Verizon reported net income of $5 billion in Q3, compared with $3.7 billion the same period last year, on revenue of $32.6 billion. Verizon had 515,000 retail postpaid net adds, including 510,000 postpaid smartphone adds. “Verizon estimates the market opportunity for 5G Home is about 30 million homes nationwide as the operator expands the availability of the services over the next several years, likely targeting markets where it has the most opportunity to poach subscribers seeking an alternative to limited and/or relatively expensive available broadband options,” said Technology Business Research.

Judges rejected a Sandwich Isles Communications challenge to an FCC order cutting staff-approved access-charge cost recovery for a Hawaiian Island undersea cable. "The Commission found that the equitable considerations relied upon by the Wireline Bureau’s decision no longer justified recovery of 50 percent of the Paniolo cable costs -- the projected growth never materialized," said the unsigned memorandum and judgment Tuesday of Judges Patricia Millett, Gregory Katsas and Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Sandwich Isles v. FCC, No. 17-1036. "The Commission allowed Sandwich Isles to keep the sums it had received in the past. Prospectively, the Commission found that ... Sandwich Isles could only recover $1.9 million annually from the [National Exchange Carrier] Association’s pool." The judges rejected Sandwich Isles arguments. To the extent it "questions the Commission’s 'used and useful' standard, which is used to determine whether a regulated company’s expenses are justified, its argument can be quickly disposed of. Sandwich Isles is attacking a standard regulatory agencies have been using for decades," the panel said. It said Sandwich Isles' primary argument was against the appropriateness of FCC reversal of bureau funding. "Sandwich Isles regards the Commission’s actions as analogous to the Commission reversing its own position without any supporting reasoning. That simply misunderstands administrative law," the panel said. "The Commission is not bound by the decisions of a subordinate body." Plus, the FCC "reasonably explained its decision," the panel said. At oral argument, the judges questioned some Sandwich Isles assertions (see 1809240031). "To be sure, it is quite troubling, as Petitioner contends, that the Commission sat on its appeal, as well as AT&T’s, for six years," the panel said. "But Petitioner was not injured by the delay -- American ratepayers were. Indeed, since the Commission allowed Petitioner to keep the expenses authorized by the Wireline Bureau through 2016, it actually benefitted by the delay. In another situation such a delay might be intolerable but certainly not in this case." A Sandwich Isles representative didn't comment.

Incompas and Sprint asked a court to deny an FCC motion to stay the mandate of the court's partial reversal of a commission order largely deregulating price-cap incumbent telco business data services (see 1810100054). Intervenors USTelecom, AT&T and CenturyLink supported the motion. The commission "fails to articulate any standard for the stay that it seeks," said Incompas/Sprint opposition Monday to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Citizens Telecommunications v. FCC, No. 17-2296. "It likewise fails to identify any timeframe for the stay requested, stating only that the Commission 'proposes to file status updates every 90 days to apprise the Court of developments in the agency’s rulemaking.'" The FCC said an indefinite stay is justified because "the agency is diligently working to address this Court's remand, and there is every reason to believe [it will] proceed efficiently to adopt a new TDM transport rule," the opposition noted. But that isn't the Supreme Court's standard, which requires "extraordinary circumstances" or, when a cert petition is pending, "good cause," Incompas and Sprint said. The ILECs, noting the new rules took effect in August 2017, said a "stay is necessary to prevent pointless and costly industry disruption as the FCC moves forward expeditiously ... to re-adopt on remand the same transport rule in effect." If the court issues the mandate "vacating the 2017 transport rule before the remand proceedings are complete," carriers must "file thousands of pages of new federal tariffs," the intervenors said. "Carriers would also have to puzzle through how to apply the resulting regime, a bizarre regulatory hybrid with conflicting geographic units and jumbled service baskets, in which transport is subject to legacy pre-2017 regulations while interrelated, non-transport data services are subject to the new, lighter-touch regime that this Court has upheld."

The FCC appears likely to adopt a business data service item without major changes, officials told us Monday. A combined draft order and two Further NPRMs are scheduled for a vote at the commissioners' meeting Tuesday. "It's looking pretty quiet," said a commission official. "If there are changes, they're going to be marginal." Still in play is whether rate-of-return incumbent telcos receiving fixed USF support will receive more than one opportunity to elect BDS incentive regulation, the official said. The commission may provide an additional opportunity for carriers to opt into a price-cap regime, said another official. ITTA and TDS Telecom sought an annual opportunity to make the election, or at least more the one transition opportunity the draft contemplates; AT&T opposed a change (see 1810190033).

Verizon Wireless said it's providing service "essentially everywhere it was before Hurricane Michael." Verizon is "back up and running in the Panhandle," said Tami Erwin, executive vice president-wireless operations, Monday. The carrier said it's crucial to avoid further cuts in fiber undergirding the wireless network: "Fiber, damaged in multiple locations from the impact of Hurricane Michael, then from early debris removal and other restoral activities, is stabilizing in the area, but any new fiber cuts risk localized area outages." Providers said 29.7 percent, 26.1 percent and 19.4 percent of cellsites are still out of service in Florida's Bay, Gulf and Gadsden counties, respectively, with the average for 21 affected counties 5.2 percent (down from 5.5 percent Sunday), the FCC reported Monday. There are 55,006 cable and wireline system customers without service in the affected counties, and one TV station, seven FMs and two AMs out. WideOpenWest said Sunday it had restored services to its customers in Panama City Beach and Inlet Beach. Public Knowledge and the FCC last week disputed whether federal and state telecom deregulation hampered service restoration (see 1810170025).

A key problem with U.S. privacy is few stakeholders fully understand the issues, said an expert who has discussed it with members of Congress at their request. "They don't know how it works," University of Pennsylvania communication professor Joseph Turow told C-SPAN. "It's very hard to regulate industries when the industries are the ones who are controlling the information, because the regulators, certainly in the Congress, have very little understanding of how this stuff works." He mentioned companies including or devices from Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Verizon and brick-and-mortar retailers that may use people's information in ways Turow contends many don't understand. He worried about China's social rating-surveillance system slowly being adopted in the U.S. Those who can help privacy-caused ills are "all of the above" -- Congress, the FCC and FTC, states, tech companies and consumers -- Turow said on a Communicators episode to have been televised this weekend. "We have to make our regulators, our legislators understand this." The professor recommends educating students about such issues. Research, including what he's involved with, shows many people don't back trading some personal information for accessing tech services. It's not so much they "buy into" this but are "resigned," he said: "We are being trained to give away our data" and feel "there's nothing else we can do." He agreed privacy policies can be oxymoronic. "Most Americans have no clue really what the phrase 'privacy policy' means," surveys show, he said. They're "written by lawyers, to be read by lawyers, to be understood principally by lawyers," the academic said: Companies can do "almost anything they want to do if they write it in the right way." USTelecom members have long "embraced strong consumer privacy policies," a spokesman responded. "Privacy is a shared responsibility and the burdens and obligations cannot rest only with ISPs. Consumers expect and demand strong privacy protections," so Congress should "develop a national privacy framework" for the entire "internet ecosystem,” he added. The Association of National Advertisers, which earlier this year acquired the Data & Marketing Association, declined to comment. NCTA declined to comment, and the Internet Association didn't comment.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's name was misspelled in a story noting his comments on a Rural Utilities Service broadband pilot program (see 1810180029).

Florida's Bay, Gulf and Washington counties remain particularly hard hit by Hurricane Michael damage, with 40.9 percent of Bay wireless sites, 30.4 of Gulf sites and 17.9 percent of Washington sites out of service, the FCC said Friday. It said one TV station, seven FMs and two AMs reported being off-air. Cable and wireline customers without service were 63,856, down from 103,811 the previous day. The agency deactivated the disaster information reporting system for Alabama and Georgia, but it remained activated in 21 Florida counties.

Net neutrality litigation is about whether the FCC may ensure "light touch" regulation of broadband, not about internet openness, said USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA, the American Cable Association and Wireless ISP Association in a supporting intervenor brief Thursday citing their commitment to an open internet. The Supreme Court's 2005 "Brand X makes clear that the Commission may do so, and the ["internet freedom"] Order demonstrates that the Commission’s decision to follow that path was reasonable," the ISP groups argued to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Mozilla v. FCC, No. 18-1051: The FCC "amply" justified returning to a "flexible" Communications Act Title I regime (see 1810120022). "Petitioners establish no distinction between the Order’s classification of broadband as an information service and the 2002 Commission decision reaching the same conclusion, which Brand X upheld," said the ISPs. "The Commission lawfully preempted state and local regulation of broadband, which is a jurisdictionally interstate service." The order rightly repealed the "unconstitutional" 2015 Title II net neutrality order that "violated" individuals' speech rights, argued intervenor Leonid Goldstein, of Austin. "So long as an agency acts within its realm of authority, its decision to alter a pol-icy decision -- or even reverse course -- is not subject to a special, enhanced standard of review," argued amici Texas, Arkansas and Nebraska. The Title I order "is eminently justified given the highly competitive nature of the broadband market and the importance of removing unnecessary barriers," argued the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and Telecommunications Industry Association. Petitioner network arguments that broadband internet access "can only be rationally classified" as a Title II service are wrong, argued network architect Richard Bennett and others. The court should resolve the legal questions "definitively to put an end to the regulatory 'ping pong,'" argued TechFreedom. Countries "with hard bright line rules do not exhibit increased innovation at the edge," argued scholar Roslyn Layton: "Increased edge innovation is seen in countries with soft net neutrality rules (e.g., Sweden, Norway, Denmark, South Korea)" or "no rules at all." Other amicus filers were: Technology Policy Institute, Tech Knowledge, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, International Center for Law and Economics, Phoenix Center, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Washington Legal Foundation and Southeastern Legal Foundation and Christopher Yoo.

Chairman Joe Simons defended FTC Privacy Shield enforcement efforts, as officials from the U.S. and the EU discuss extending PS. The FTC is committed to maintaining “a robust mechanism for protecting privacy and enabling transatlantic data flows,” he said in Brussels Thursday. Since 2017, the FTC brought eight PS enforcement actions. He cited 39 actions under the U.S.-EU safe harbor, which predated the Privacy Shield, and four actions linked to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative’s Cross-Border Privacy Rules system. The Privacy Shield actions concerned entities falsely claiming program verification, failure to complete the verification process and failure to uphold program standards after leaving. The chairman cited the steady stream of press reports about privacy and data breaches, saying the agency is investigating Facebook and Equifax.