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.”

Cogent sued Deutsche Telekom in a U.S. court for alleged breach of contract, charging DT was "congesting its Internet connections with Cogent." DT "has interfered with the free flow of Internet traffic between Cogent customers and Deutsche Telekom customers by refusing to increase the capacity of the interconnection ports that allow the exchange of traffic,” said Robert Beury, Cogent chief legal officer, in a news release Tuesday evening. “The congestion results in degraded service to customers of both companies. Deutsche Telekom is using its market power as the dominant provider of residential Internet service in Germany in an attempt to extract a toll, directly or indirectly, from companies in the U.S. that provide Internet services that Deutsche Telekom’s customers want to use. This particularly harms smaller U.S. companies that cannot afford to locate Internet servers in Europe where they can directly connect to Deutsche Telekom and avoid the congestion.” The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Virginia Tuesday. DT didn't comment.

The FCC Wireline Bureau gave an interim USF waiver extension to Allband Communications Cooperative. In an order released Monday and included in Tuesday's Daily Digest, the bureau extended by six months Allband's waiver to continue to receive the lesser of high-cost USF support based on its actual costs or the annualized total high-cost support that it received in the first six months of 2012. The bureau gave Allband a three-year waiver in July 2012, and in December 2014 Allband filed a petition for a further, 12-year waiver. In June of this year, the bureau extended the original waiver until the earlier of Dec. 31 or until action is taken on its 12-year waiver request.

The FCC asked a court to continue to put off consideration of a Securus Technologies challenge to its 2013 order capping interstate inmate calling service rates. In a motion filed Monday, the commission asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to continue to the hold the earlier case in abeyance until it resolves any petitions for review to the agency's recent broader ICS order, or until the filing period for such petitions expires. In October, the FCC voted to cap interstate and intrastate ICS rates at even lower levels, restrict ancillary fees and discourage ICS provider "site commission" payments to correctional authorities (see 1510220059).

The FCC should further modernize its Rural Health Care program to "address disparities in health[care] availability and health outcomes between rural and non-rural areas," said a joint filing from the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) and several regional telehealth organizations. The filing was posted by the commission Tuesday in docket 02-60. 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." The groups also suggested the commission update its analysis of eligible healthcare providers, consider minimum levels of connectivity needed by the providers and recalibrate the Rural Health Care Program cap based on the analysis. The filing said rural healthcare providers face the highest costs for connectivity and are the least able to afford such connections, that a higher subsidy under the Healthcare Connect Fund is needed and that the fund doesn't "adequately promote and sustain open consortia." In "this rapidly evolving environment, it is vital for the Commission to ensure universal service for rural health care continues to efficiently and cost effectively promote access to affordable modern broadband," the filing said.

AT&T plans to expand its gigabit Internet service to homes, apartments and small businesses in parts of 38 additional metropolitan areas across the country, the company said in a Monday news release. The 38 metro areas include cities in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.