The FCC Wireline Bureau is ready to authorize Connect America Fund Phase II support for Mid-Hudson Data alongside its participation in New York's state broadband program, said a public notice in Tuesday's Daily Digest on docket 10-90. Mid-Hudson must file required documents including a letter of credit by Jan. 21. The FCC is authorizing more than $640,000 in CAF-II support for Mid-Hudson over 10 years for the 459 locations in 73 census blocks.

Reducing pole attachment rental fees won't close the digital divide and regulators should look elsewhere to solve broadband under-deployment, said the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to the FCC Monday in docket 19-126 and an updated white paper. NRECA wants the FCC to focus instead on better identifying gaps in broadband service, prioritize government funding to areas with the lowest population densities and provide enough money to meet growing speed and data needs.

GCI Communications urged the FCC to reconsider a recent rural healthcare order's "reliance on prescriptive rate ceilings" and let competitive bidding determine rural rates, it posted Monday in docket 17-310. Several parties petitioned for reconsideration in November (see 1911130022). "If the commission does retain its over-regulatory approach, it should address specific concerns with the RHC order's tier-based regime for setting rural rates," the cable-telco said. "GCI agrees with petitioners that the commission's tiers fail to account for the unique logistical and economic realities of delivering services in rural Alaska."

Comments are due Feb. 5, replies March 6 on an FCC NPRM that would deregulate much of the obligations that ILECs have to unbundle and make available for resale local loops, dark fiber transport and other network elements, said a notice in Monday's Federal Register on docket 19-308. Commissioners voted 3-2 to move the rulemaking forward in November despite calls for a delay by competitive LECs (see 1911220052).

Intrastate carriers and VoIP service providers must contribute to a telecom relay services fund to support IP captioned telephone service starting July 1, says Monday's Federal Register. Commissioners voted in November to modify cost recovery rules for the TRS fund (see 1911150011). The rule is effective Feb. 5.

Opposition comments are due Jan. 17, replies Jan. 27, to an FCC petition for reconsideration by Virgin Islands Telephone (d/b/a Viya) from early December, said a filing for docket 18-143 and Thursday's Federal Register. The petition asks the agency to clarify the weighting that buried coax cable and buried fiber would contribute to scored bids in the Uniendo a Puerto Rico and Connect USVI funds (see 1912100043).

Comments are due Jan. 10 on a streamlined submarine cable landing license application from RTI Solutions, RTI HK-G, RTI Connectivity and GU Holdings for a license to land and operate within the U.S. a non-common carrier fiber cable network connecting Hong Kong and Guam, the FCC said Friday in a public notice (report SCL-00256S). The applicants "will not sell capacity indifferently to the user public but instead will provide the RTI Group with capacity to support a wholesale business in Asia and the Americas, offering bulk capacity to particular carrier, enterprise and government customers," including Google, the notice said. It said GU is an indirect, majority-owned subsidiary of Google.

The FCC updated its reporting requirements for disruptions of submarine cable communications, in an order posted Friday in docket 15-206. Adopted a week earlier, the order responds to petitioners' requests to exclude planned maintenance from outage reporting requirements (see 1609090001). The FCC said its new rules seek to preserve the benefits of reporting on significant outages, especially ones with national security implications, while minimizing costs and administrative burdens. Commissioner Mike O'Rielly concurred in part and approved in part, he said in a statement. He supported the parts of the order that reduce burdens "by exempting planned submarine cable maintenance, when customers have been notified, from our reporting requirement." He concurred with the rest, saying there's no justification for the remaining "burdens." He didn't dissent, he said, because "I am giving these decisions the benefit of the doubt" partly due to how quickly submarine cable service has transitioned into "a fairly dynamic sector, experiencing significant change with all the data traffic traversing the globe." He said it could be helpful to have a better record of when outages occur. The FCC should facilitate deployment of more submarine cables, O'Rielly said, so "if a submarine cable is cut, there will be other cables in geographically diverse areas to carry the traffic." He said he wants the agency to promptly answer applications for such deployments.

The FCC Wireline Bureau granted a waiver to the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet) after the consortium included incorrect calculations on an E-rate program application for 2013-14, in an order posted Monday in docket 02-6. Ryan Palmer, chief of the bureau's Telecommunications Access Policy Division, said MOREnet acted in good faith, and the bureau found no evidence of waste, fraud or abuse of the USF program from the group's actions.

The National Exchange Carrier Association sent its 2020 modification of average schedules to the FCC Wireline Bureau Monday, in a letter posted Monday to docket 19-371. The price modifications are effective July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021, NECA said.