New Jersey gave a green light to Altice’s $17.7 billion takeover of Cablevision. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities OK’ed a settlement among the BPU, the parties and the New Jersey Division of the Rate Counsel that includes conditions for maintaining customer service, establishing a low-income broadband service, upgrading the network and protecting jobs in the state. The conditions are similar to what was proposed last week in New York state (see 1605200070), which is the last remaining regulatory OK required by Altice and Cablevision. PBU President Richard Mroz said he's confident the settlement will benefit Cablevision customers and employees, as well as seniors and families with children. Under the conditions, Altice will be prohibited from cutting customer-facing jobs for two years. It will upgrade network speeds to 300 Mbps by no later than year-end 2017. Within 15 months of the deal closing, it will provide 30 Mbps broadband to low-income households with no data cap, modem fee or self-installation charge for $14.99 monthly. It will double the download speed of Cablevision’s $24.95 low-cost plan to 10 Mbps within 120 days of closing and continue to sell the service for two years. Also, the ISP must offer a broadband product without a data cap for three years. In a declared emergency like Superstorm Sandy, Altice must provide free Wi-Fi and access to hyper-local news and weather to all New Jersey residents. It must partner with utilities to speed power restoration, provide backup customer support, and have network redundancy and backup powering ready to go. And it must write a storm readiness communications plan, including public service announcements. Altice agreed to “abide by and honor any final orders with respect to any pending appeal or declaratory judgement, whether issued by the FCC or by a court of competent jurisdiction,” a condition said. The settlement includes a “most favored nation” clause ensuring that New Jersey doesn’t get a worse deal than any other state that approved the transfer of control. Cablevision has 783,058 customers in New Jersey. “Altice is pleased with the approval order by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities for the acquisition of Cablevision, which recognizes the benefits that the proposed merger will bring to consumers in New Jersey,” an Altice spokeswoman said. “The transaction is expected to close on track in the second quarter.”

Wireline broadband covers 95 percent of California households, said a California Public Utilities Commission report released Tuesday. And 90 percent of all households are served by broadband with speeds of at least 6 Mbps downstream and 1.5 Mbps upstream, said the CPUC. About 340,000 households (3 percent) are unserved in the state, which means they have either no provider or have service slower than 768 kbps downstream and 200 kbps upstream, it said. Most unserved households are concentrated in the north coast, mountains, Central Valley or desert regions, it said.

A federal court hinted it may side with ISPs in a case about whether a state commission can compel disclosure of subscriber data to a third party. In a Friday order (in Pacer), the U.S. District Court in San Francisco temporarily banned the California Public Utilities Commission from enforcing a May 3 ruling compelling top ISPs to disclose subscription data to The Utilities Reform Network (TURN) as part of a state investigation of market competition (see 1605130025). The data involves carrier market share and includes Form 477 data that carriers report to the FCC. In their complaint (in Pacer), AT&T, Comcast, CTIA, Verizon and other industry plaintiffs said the data is confidential. Friday, the court granted the telecom companies a preliminary injunction. Judge Vince Chhabria said the ISPs don’t have to provide the data “until cross-motions for summary judgment are adjudicated,” and set a hearing on the cross-motions for Aug. 4 at 10 a.m., with a ruling to follow shortly thereafter. “The plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success,” Chhabria wrote. “Although the FCC materials cited by the plaintiffs are not crystal clear on whether federal law allows a state commission to disclose this kind of data to a third party pursuant to a protective order, those materials suggest the answer is ‘no.’” The judge sympathized with the CPUC’s desire for the data. “Nobody disputes that the state commissions themselves need this kind of data,” he said. “The issue presented by this preliminary injunction motion is whether the state commissions may require the data to be disclosed to third parties.” The CPUC didn’t comment Tuesday.

Frontier Communications should disclose complete Connecticut network modernization plans to the state’s Office of Consumer Counsel, the OCC head told the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. OCC has access to that information under the 2014 PURA order approving Frontier’s acquisition of AT&T wireline customers, said Consumer Counsel Elin Swanson Katz in PURA oral argument on the access live-streamed Tuesday. The information will assist PURA in an investigation of whether Frontier is meeting transaction commitments on network upgrades. But Frontier has objected to sharing confidential parts of its business strategy with OCC because of the office’s role in municipal broadband procurement processes. A division called the Office of State Broadband (OSB) advises municipalities on broadband procurement, and if it knew Frontier's confidential business strategy -- but not that of other companies submitting proposals to municipalities -- it could advantage the other companies, testified Frontier outside counsel Daniel Venora. “It would be like giving our information to Cablevision or Comcast.” Frontier supports a May 12 ruling by PURA to restrict access to the confidential Frontier material only to OCC staffers who don't perform any OSB duties, he said. But the OCC believes the plan isn't practical, said Katz. The OCC has 12 staff members, and soon will have only 10 due to two planned retirements, she said. “Because of the size of our office, everyone works on everything,” including OSB matters, she said. “To wall off staff isn’t possible even if I were amenable to it.” Legally, the OCC head can’t delegate her authority to selected staff members and remove herself from the process, added OCC principal attorney Joseph Rosenthal. Katz said she felt personally offended by Frontier. “A new duty should not be interpreted to limit our rights,” said Katz. “This is nothing less than a personal attack on my integrity," she said: "This is saying I can't be trusted to handle confidential information, which is frankly offensive and unwarranted given OCC’s unblemished record in handling confidential information,” including major infrastructure plans and energy procurements. It “absolutely, 100 percent, is not” a personal attack on the OCC, said Venora. Since closing the AT&T deal in 2014, Frontier had major problems migrating customers from AT&T, an experience that Frontier CEO Daniel McCarthy described Monday as far worse than the transition issues in California, Florida and Texas (see 1605230046).

Verizon fought a Communications Workers of America challenge to an extension granted by the New York Public Service Commission in the state’s probe of copper service quality. The PSC secretary last week granted Verizon’s request to extend its deadline for filing testimony until 45 days after the end of the East Coast strike (see 1605120048). But CWA said the PSC acted too quickly to grant the request for more time (see 1605180042). The PSC didn’t take more time because the telco’s request was reasonable, Verizon said in a filing Monday. Meanwhile, Verizon and the CWA continued federal mediation to resolve the six-week-old East Coast strike, which analysts say has dented the company's wireline revenue (see 1605200060).

With the 360 area code nearing phone-number exhaustion, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission approved a plan to make available a new area code, 564, to the western part of the state starting in fall 2017, the commission said in a news release Thursday. The WUTC also OK'd mandatory 10-digit dialing for western Washington area codes by fall 2017. It said the North American Numbering Plan Administrator projects the 360 area code will be out of numbers by early 2018.

Charter Communications urged a federal court to allow its IP transition case against the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to proceed. The company supported an April 21 magistrate judge report recommending that the U.S. District Court in Minnesota deny the PUC’s motion to dismiss Charter’s complaint challenging state authority over interconnected VoIP services. The PUC objected to that recommendation on May 5 (see 1605060027). Charter’s complaint alleged the PUC overstepped its authority by imposing state regulations for traditional phone services on VoIP services. The case began in March 2013, when Charter transferred overnight 100,000 Minnesota customers to an affiliate that provided VoIP phone service that wasn't certified by the PUC. The agency has argued that interconnected VoIP is a telecom service subject to state regulation, but Charter and intervenor the VON Coalition have said it’s an information service and subject only to FCC regulation. “It is well-established that federal law preempts state public utility regulation of services classified as ‘information services’ under the Communications Act,” Charter said Thursday in a formal response (in Pacer) to the PUC’s objections. The FCC hasn't resolved the classification of interconnected VoIP, it said. The court’s decision on the motion won't be a ruling whether states can regulate interconnected VoIP, but will commence the trial phase of the case.

New York state officials pressed the FCC to keep Connect America Fund auction support in New York and other states where price-cap ILECs declined commission offers of Phase II broadband-oriented support. Reallocating the declined support to other states "would not ensure the deployment of broadband services in those New York communities the FCC previously had identified as unserved or underserved by broadband," said representatives of Empire State Development and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a filing in docket 10-90 about a call with an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel before lobbying restrictions took effect a week ahead of Wednesday's planned CAF II auction vote. In other recent auction filings: the Massachusetts Broadband Institute asked the FCC to consider favoring bids that leverage other state investments and build off of successful projects under the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP); Commissioner Karen Charles Peterson of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable also urged the FCC to give special consideration to eligible recipients of BTOP funding and other state-funded broadband projects; and ViaSat opposed "self-serving" proposals from electric utility interests under which the FCC would "abandon the use of market-based mechanisms that would efficiently allocate limited [CAF] support to the most cost-effective service providers in favor of a complex 'points' scheme that would favor comparably inefficient fiber-based providers, delay the initial selection of winning bidders and invite numerous post-selection challenges, dramatically increase funding requirements, and consequently give rise to a 'funding gap' that would leave hundreds of thousands of households without access to critical broadband services."

North Carolina’s new law on transgender use of public restrooms “has positioned the state as a leader against LGBT rights,” CTA wrote Gov. Pat McCrory (R), urging him to “revisit” the recently passed legislation. The Wednesday letter was co-signed by 13 other trade groups, including CompTIA, the National Association of Manufacturers and the tech group Tech Titans. The groups’ member companies “thrive by attracting the best and brightest employees,” the letter said. “The potential talent pool of employees not only includes LGBT employees, but a younger generation of Americans who believe all Americans should be allowed to marry, adopt and use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. With the obvious anti-equality tone and impact of this law, millions of existing and potential employees are less likely to want to live or work in North Carolina. Thus, while this law stands, our members are less likely to want to invest or locate in North Carolina.” The governor’s office didn’t comment. Various tech and telecom interests have been opposing legislation like North Carolina's (see 1604140016).

The 5th U.S. Court of Appeals withdrew its original April 8 opinion (see 1604110058) vacating a 2015 lower court injunction that barred state Attorney General Jim Hood from enforcing his subpoena looking at Google's search practices. The 5th Circuit replaced it Wednesday with a revised opinion that also vacates the injunction. The 5th Circuit also denied Google's petition for a rehearing on the injunction. Google petitioned for a rehearing last month after Hood withdrew his subpoena (see 1604280046). Hood opposed Google's petition, saying Google was seeking declaratory relief that would have “virtually the same effect” as the injunction issued by District Judge Henry Wingate (see 1605090051). “We cannot say at this early stage of a state investigation that any suit that could follow would necessarily violate the Constitution,” the 5th Circuit said in its revised opinion. “As underscored by Hood’s apparent need to gather considerable information before he can determine whether an enforcement action is warranted, the prospect of one is not sufficiently imminent or defined to justify an injunction.” The court said it has “no opinion on the reasonableness of the subpoena or on whether the conduct discussed in the parties’ briefs could be held actionable consistent with federal law.” The 5th Circuit's revised opinion is "substantially the same" as its previous ruling, Hood said Thursday in a statement. "At that time, [the 5th Circuit] lifted the injunction against the state and rejected Google’s misguided attempts to use the federal courts to derail an investigation into potential violations of Mississippi state law. We look forward to presenting our case for dismissal of Google’s remaining claim in district court, and we will continue working to protect Mississippi children and families."