The FCC Wireline Bureau said Monday it extended the gift rule waiver deadline to June 30 for E-rate and Rural Health Care program participants. The original deadline of Sept. 30, 2020, was previously extended to the end of this year (see 2009030063).

CenturyLink agreed to pay $500,000 over a December 2018 multistate outage that lasted nearly 37 hours and failed to deliver 11 911 calls in Arizona, the FCC Enforcement Bureau announced Monday (see 2002060026).

InnoCaption received conditional certification to provide IP captioned telephone service using only automatic speech recognition, said the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau in a news release Friday. InnoCaption joins MachineGenius and Clarity as the only three providers to receive such certification (see 2006040045).

E-rate applicants and service providers may submit an invoice up to 120 days after the Universal Service Administrative Co. issues a letter approving a post-commitment request or granting an appeal of a previously denied or reduced funding request, said a new order by the FCC Wireline Bureau. The order in Friday's Daily Digest also allows relief to be requested regardless of whether applicants or providers were unable to file an invoice while awaiting a post-commitment decision and file a waiver request. It also waived the existing invoice rule for program participants that were unable to submit an invoice while awaiting a post-commitment decision and filed a pending request for a waiver during FY 2016. This is "the right thing to do right now," said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement. She also expressed disappointment the commission didn't take more action.

Alaska Communications Systems agreed to an increase in its takeover price of 20 cents a share, or about 6.6%, to about $320 million cash, from a previously amended deal also with Macquarie Capital (see 2011050054), ACS said Thursday.

FCC staff granted Long Distance Consolidated Billing's petition for reconsideration of two orders saying LDCB changed six consumers' service providers without proper authorization verification (see 1903210047). The decision partly was based on existing rules at the time of the verifications. The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau warned that LDCB will be in violation of carrier change rules if it continues to use third-party verification scripts that "fail to confirm that the person on the call is authorized to make a carrier change and wants to make such change.”

Reconsideration petitions on Minnesota clearing Frontier Communications’ bankruptcy reorganization are due Dec. 28, the Public Utilities Commission said Tuesday. Answers to petitions are due 10 days later. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) raised concerns about the OK (see 2011200040) before the PUC posted the final order Monday (see 2012070057). The commission asked for comments filed in that period to be refiled, in Tuesday’s notice. Consumer complaints about Frontier rose in Minnesota and some other states in recent years (see here).

Fifty-one percent of American households used the internet for telehealth in 2019, NTIA reported Monday. Families with annual incomes exceeding $100,000 were more likely to use the internet to access health records or communicate with health professionals. The percentage of households in urban areas doing so increased by 4 points from 2017 to 2019, while rose in rural areas grew by 6 points. Despite still lagging behind white households, use of telehealth services by Hispanic and Native American households grew the most.

USTelecom and Lumen separately urged caution in the supply chain security order set for an FCC vote Thursday (see 2011190059), in calls with aides to the five commissioners. The draft “correctly defines the scope of obligations and responsibilities in that they apply only to eligible telecommunications carriers (ETC) and reimbursement participants,” USTelecom said in a filing in docket 18-89, posted Monday. A requirement to replace equipment should kick in “only if Congress appropriates the funding required for removal and replacement,” it said. Take a “broad approach” on reimbursement, Lumen said: “Although Congress has yet to appropriate funds to support the reimbursement program, legislators are actively pursuing legislation that would continue to advance this important policy.”

Comments are due Jan. 4, replies Jan. 19, on four requests to extend the deadline to fully implement secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) requirements, said an FCC Wireline Bureau public notice Friday in docket 17-97. AT&T, Lumen, UScellular and Verizon sought extensions (see 2011230044).