The FCC solicited comments on a petition for rulemaking from the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) and others seeking to revise the agency's rural healthcare USF program. Initial comments are due Jan. 14, replies Jan. 29, a Wireline Bureau public notice in docket 02-06 said Tuesday. The program needs to be modernized to "address disparities in health[care] availability and health outcomes between rural and non-rural areas," said a recent joint filing by SHLB and several regional telehealth organizations (see 1512080051). The groups proposed an increase in the discount percentage in the Healthcare Connect Fund for rural healthcare providers, the establishment of mechanisms for short-term relief if program demand exceeds the set cap, and an expanded definition of the word "rural."

Large ILECs received a modest extension until Jan. 8 to file "direct cases" in an FCC Wireline Bureau tariff investigation of their special access contracts terms and conditions (see 1510160060). In an order in Tuesday’s Daily Digest, the bureau partially granted a request from incumbent telcos, which had asked for an extra 12 weeks or at least 60 days beyond Friday to file their cases (see 1512100030). “While we do not find the duration of the incumbent LECs’ specific requests for extension warranted, we find some extension of time is justified given the significant size and complexity of data in the business data services data collection, and given our interest in ensuring a full and complete record for evaluating the pricing plans under investigation,” said the bureau, which gave parties filing oppositions to the cases a Feb. 5 deadline and rebuttals until Feb. 26. The ILECs said they needed more time to analyze a recently released industry data set and to incorporate it into their cases. But XO questioned the ILEC claims and said competitors and consumers would be harmed by the delay (see 1512140024), and Sprint filed opposition to the ILEC request on Monday in docket 15-247. CLECs and business customers say ILEC contracts often contain lock-up terms and conditions that harm competition, which the incumbents dispute (see 1510080051).

XO Communications urged the FCC not to extend a Friday deadline for large telcos to submit their direct cases in the Wireline Bureau tariff investigation of their special access contract terms and conditions (see 1510160060). AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and Verizon last week asked for a 12-week extension, or at least an extra 60 days, to file their cases because the commission had just recently placed in the record certain data they said they needed (see 1512100030). “The tasks that the ILECs claim they will undertake relating to the Data do not warrant additional time,” XO said in an opposition posted Monday in docket 15-247. “Further, delaying the investigation, especially on the grounds proffered by the ILECs, would prejudice XO and other competitive carriers, as well as consumers, who continue to be harmed by the lock-in provisions of the tariffed special access plans under investigation.”

Securus Technologies and others objected to an FCC motion asking a court to keep a judicial freeze on challenges to a 2013 commission order capping interstate inmate calling service rates. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to dismiss as moot the challenges to the 2013 order when a 2015 FCC order restricting interstate and intrastate ICS rates and fees takes effect. The FCC recently asked the court to continue to hold the case (Securus v. FCC, No. 13-1280) in abeyance until the D.C. Circuit resolves petitions for review of the agency's recent order, or until a related filing period expires (see 1512080069). That FCC suggestion "is inappropriate under basic mootness doctrine,” said a joint response from Securus, other ICS providers and correctional authorities. They said the FCC acknowledged that the 2015 rules will, when they take effect, supersede the interim interstate rate cap and rules in the 2013 order. “Yet rather than acknowledge that eliminating the rules now under review will grant petitioners and intervenors the relief they seek and moot these cases, the FCC asks this Court to continue to hold these cases in abeyance,” they said. “The FCC’s real intention seems to be to keep the rules from the 2013 Order in a state of suspended animation so that they can be brought back to life in the event the 2015 Order is struck down in whole or in part.” If the 2015 order is vacated, the parties can debate then whether the 2013 order is automatically revived without further agency action, said Securus, joined by petitioners the Arizona Department of Corrections, CenturyLink, Global Tel-Link, Mississippi Department of Corrections and South Dakota Department of Corrections, and by intervenors the Arkansas Department of Correction, Barnstable County (Massachusetts) Sheriff’s Office, Indiana Department of Correction and Telmate.

Deutsche Telekom disputed Cogent's rationale for suing DT in a U.S. court because the German company allegedly refused to remedy congestion in Internet connections between the two companies. "Cogent sends multiple times more data traffic into our network than we do in the opposite direction," a Deutsche Telekom spokesperson emailed us Friday. "Why should we solely be responsible for paying the cost of the increase in capacity of the network interconnection? This responsibility must be shared by partners jointly." Cogent filed suit Tuesday against Deutsche Telekom in federal court in Virginia for alleged breach of contract. It argued DT was attempting to leverage its market power and "extract a toll" by allowing Cogent traffic congestion and service degradation (see 1512090070).

FairPoint Communications asked the FCC to allow it to recover $4.2 million in annual costs that it said it currently couldn't under USF and intercarrier compensation (ICC) transformation rules. FairPoint, which receives USF support as a price-cap telco but is regulated as a rate-of-return carrier under the ICC transition, is the only telco being penalized by the rules, which were designed to prevent duplicate recovery, the company said in a petition for declaratory ruling Thursday in dockets 10-90 and 01-92. "There is no duplicate recovery," FairPoint said, but it's only receiving part of what it is due. "FairPoint should not be paid twice for the funding formerly received as [local switching support], but it should be paid once."

The FCC Wireline Bureau extended its urban rate survey due date to Friday, for those providers required to complete it. The deadline had been Tuesday, but the online filing systems were unavailable for about 25 hours early this week due to a technical problem, said a bureau public notice posted in docket 10-90 Wednesday and the Daily Digest on Thursday. The bureau said it sent notifications on or about Nov. 3 to those providers required to complete the survey.

Major ILECs asked the FCC to extend their deadline for submitting “Direct Cases” in the Wireline Bureau’s tariff investigation of their special access contract terms and conditions (see 1510160060). In a joint request Thursday in docket 15-247, AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and Verizon said they needed more time to incorporate into their tariff analyses the data set that the commission put in the record Dec. 4. The ILECs said they wouldn’t be able to access those data for purposes of the investigation until Dec. 16, just two days before the Direct Cases are currently due, and it will take several weeks to analyze and incorporate the data. “For the reasons discussed in the separate Motion for Extension of Time filed by USTelecom and ITTA (see 1511100068), a twelve-week extension would be necessary, at a minimum, for a comprehensive geospatial analysis of the data and is therefore the most appropriate extension of time,” they said. “The Commission should extend the deadline for Direct Cases by at least 60 days, however, which is the minimum amount of time necessary for a useful, albeit less comprehensive, analysis of these data.”

The FCC put a draft order on the USTelecom forbearance petition on its agenda for the Dec. 17 meeting, following up on its inclusion on the tentative agenda (see 1511250047). The draft order would grant several requests for ILEC regulatory relief, said a senior FCC official who recently previewed the item (see 1511240070). Meanwhile, in last-minute lobbying in docket 14-192, ILEC interests pressed for relief from what they consider "outdated" legacy regulations, including requirements to share their networks with competitors, while CLEC interests and Public Knowledge generally voiced opposition.

AT&T challenged BT arguments in the FCC special access rulemaking in docket 05-25. In a filing Thursday, AT&T said it was responding “to what apparently is becoming a seasonal activity -- BT complaining that it is unfairly impaired in its ability to compete for enterprise customers, because it is paying more for special access services in the United States than what it charges for similar services in the United Kingdom.” AT&T said it had “previously submitted facts to debunk BT’s baseless claims, and outlined in detail the fatal flaws in the underlying assumptions of BT’s claimed analysis of like-for-like services. BT’s latest filing -- which continues its past practice of disregarding all prior critiques of its methodological flaws and simply repeats its hollow (and refuted) allegations -- is similarly specious. For example, there is no information in BT’s submission that would allow a determination as to whether the circuits being compared by BT are actually like-for-like circuits.” AT&T cited other examples of what it said were BT's dubious data comparisons. BT's Nov. 23 filing summarizing a meeting with FCC officials said it discussed “UK regulation of bottleneck services including broadband and business access services” that “had resulted in the lowest prices for superfast and basic broadband services amongst the countries compared including the US, UK, France and Germany.” It said the price finding was made by British regulator Ofcom. The London-based company said the regulation hadn't caused it “to disinvest in broadband or the communications market”; instead, BT had announced plans to upgrade homes and small businesses to speeds of up to 500 Mbps. BT suggested AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had acknowledged that regulation addressing bottlenecks increases business investment by citing the importance of Mexican government reforms to AT&T plans to invest $3 billion in Mexican mobile networks. “AT&T cannot claim regulation enhances investment wherever it seeks to enter markets and compete, but claim the opposite is true in markets where it seeks to defend its monopoly power,” BT said. “This is not a credible position.”