Sprint got some support for a waiver request to recover costs for providing IP relay (see 1903280018). Organizations representing the deaf and blind agreed the company should be able to recover costs to expand its outreach to “the entire universe of IP Relay users and potential users” and be reimbursed with overhead costs for providing IP relay, said a filing posted Tuesday in dockets including 03-123. Sprint is entitled to reimbursement for R&D to “ensure that IP Relay keeps up with technological advancements,” said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, Association of Late-Deafened Adults, Hearing Loss Association of America, Cerebral Palsy and Deaf Organization, American Association of the DeafBlind. Exclusion of certain IP captioned telephone service “providers from Database cost recovery, based on their supposed ability to 'afford it,' conflicts with the agency’s 'obligation to ensure that rates fall within the zone of reasonableness,'” said Hamilton Relay. It petitioned for reconsideration of a related order.
Video relay service providers got another year to implement an interoperability mandate on a technical standard for an interface with some VRS devices. The deadline was April 29. In 2018, the FCC also delayed for a year the deadline for VRS providers to comply with the interoperability profile for relay user equipment (RUE profile) standard (see 1804270020). The RUE profile was “substantially revised over the last year, and the revised version has been submitted for review under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),” said Tuesday's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau order. “We allow additional time for IETF review, for the Bureau to make a decision on adoption of the revised standard, and for VRS providers to prepare for compliance.” The rules, approved in 2013, “are intended to enable VRS users to make and receive VRS calls and point-to-point video calls irrespective of the VRS providers serving the calling and called parties, and to switch to a different default VRS provider, without changing their VRS devices or software,” CGB said.
CenturyLink won the first task order under the General Services Administration’s $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions program to provide secure connectivity to the NASA. It's to provide “core backbone network services with speeds of up to 100 Gbps” over nine and a half years, the company said Monday.
After Windstream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, telecom services rival Charter Communications sent Windstream's subscribers letters that appeared to come from Windstream, implied it was going to liquidate due to bankruptcy and urged customers to switch to Charter, said a Windstream complaint Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York (in Pacer, docket 19-08246). It alleged Charter intentionally disconnected service to some Windstream customers. The telco is asking the court to enjoin Charter from any claims that the bankruptcy will affect Windstream's ability to serve customers, as well as unspecified trebled damages. Charter didn't comment Monday.
With Windstream's Chapter 11 bankruptcy (see 1902250025), a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals proceeding by inter-exchange carriers on a lower court's ruling about access charges imposed on them by LECs (see 1902200043) was automatically stayed, according to a notice (in Pacer) Thursday in docket 18-10768. Windstream subsidiaries are among the appellees.
Comments are due May 3, replies May 20, on Tata Communications' petition seeking waiver to continue contributing to the USF based solely on its interstate end-user telecom, the FCC Wireline Bureau said in a docket 06-122 public notice Wednesday. The petition said its limited international revenue exemption is in jeopardy because of changes in the jurisdictional mix of its telecom revenue, leaving it facing a "draconian penalty" in the form of its USF contribution burden going up.
The State E-rate Coordinators’ Alliance backs Funds for Learning’s request for relief for applicants that filed a Form 470 application indicating the incorrect internet option. Applicants chose the wrong drop-down option, “despite their best efforts to comply with the administrator’s guidance,” the alliance said, posted Wednesday in FCC docket 02-6. It said similar mix-ups happened in the past. The group urged "meaningful changes to the Form 470 drop-down options, using plain, non-technical language to describe the available choices.”
The deadline for objecting to incorporation of a party's highly confidential and confidential business data services data collected in BDS proceedings into the USTelecom forbearance petition proceeding is April 15, the FCC Wireline Bureau said in a public notice Wednesday. It said it will adopt the protective conditions from the BDS proceedings to ensure confidentiality of the information when it's incorporated.
Having argued the Connect America Fund's Connect America Cost Model (CAM) for distributing funding in the mainland U.S. doesn't work well for Puerto Rico (see 1811230018), Liberty Cablevision of Puerto Rico suggested a different model. In an FCC docket 18-143 posting Wednesday, it said applicants should bear responsibility for determining the number of locations in a given geographic area, and funding should be awarded based on total funding per census block group rather than per location. "An overly granular approach" would mean Puerto Rico would face added delays from having to drill down into precise per location costs, it said. Liberty said bidders should be required to show their methodologies for identifying inhabited or habitable locations unserved by 10/1 Mbps broadband service.
Clarifying junk fax rules would help courts, resulting in earlier resolutions and more consistent treatment of defendants, reducing "unnecessary and unjustified settlements," Akin Gump representatives told FCC Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau staffers, recounted a docket 05-338 posting Tuesday. The law firm petitioned the agency to make clear liability issues between senders and advertisers when that sender commits Telephone Consumer Protection Act violations and deceives the advertiser (see 1903070051). During the meeting, it cited a dozen types of cases that could use such clarification and said without that guidance, similarly situated defendants are receiving different treatment from different U.S. district or U.S. circuit courts.