The New York State Public Service Commission said a new area code -- 332 -- was assigned to Manhattan. The new area code is needed to meet the increasing demand for residential and business phone numbers in the New York City borough, said a Tuesday PSC statement. Phone companies are required to file an implementation plan by mid-January and the area code -- which will be an overlay -- will likely be assigned to new phone customers starting in Q2 2017, it said. The North American numbering plan administrator projected Manhattan would run out of available central office codes in late 2017, the PSC said. Once the new area code is in effect, New York state will have 18 area codes.

Georgia Public Service Commissioner Stan Wise's (R) son, Adam, was recently named executive director of the Georgia Telecommunications Association (GTA), a PSC spokesman verified Wednesday. Because of the potential for a conflict of interest, Stan Wise made it clear in a statement that he plans to recuse himself from any votes on GTA member companies: "Although this commission rarely presides over issues involving independent telephone companies, in order to remove any conflicts of interest real or perceived, I will recuse myself on all matters in which the Georgia Telecommunications Association is a petitioner, an intervening party, or any case involving a member of GTA." The association is made up of 29 independent telephone company members. GTA didn't comment.

USA Fiber partnered with Montgomery County, Maryland, and its ultraMontgomery program to interconnect fiber networks and connect about 570 miles of fiber, said a Tuesday news release from USA Fiber. USA Fiber engineers, builds and operates dark fiber networks and said it agreed to interconnect its new Ashburn, Virginia, to Baltimore core fiber route to the county's communications network, FiberNet, which connects more than 450 buildings in Montgomery County.

Douglas County, Nebraska, updated its dispatch platform, reducing equipment costs by 67 percent, said a news release from Motorola Solutions Monday. The Motorola Solutions virtual dispatch platform lets dispatchers have easy access to all of the county's centrally shared resources, it said. Instead of buying equipment for each of the 32 dispatch positions, the platform lets video cards and data processing applications be stored on one server and shared among multiple users and dispatch centers, it said.

Approval of Charter Communications' buys of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable will be delayed, possibly until June, largely because of California’s investigation into implications of the acquisition, said a California Public Utilities Commissioner Michael Picker's scoping ruling. The ruling sets a timetable for the decision, with the proposed decision scheduled for May 13 and the final decision June 10, which can be amended by an administrative law judge. Assuming no additional delays in the FCC proceeding, the FCC decision will be rendered on or before the middle of March, the ruling said. The Office of Ratepayer Advocates responded, on behalf of the protesters, that it's unlikely the FCC will meet its current mid-March deadline "for various procedural reasons and because the FCC has issued a lengthy and detailed information request that is unlikely to be complied with by Joint Applicants and reviewed by FCC staff in time for a mid-March decision," the ruling said. Protesters also said there may be contested issues of material fact in this proceeding that require evidentiary hearings, and whether such disputed issues exist won't be known until after the protesters have concluded at least a preliminary phase of discovery. Tuesday, RBC Capital analyst Jonathan Atkin said the delay of about two months is just a “procedural precaution” to give all opponents the chance to voice their concerns. Atkin said he's still 85 percent sure the deal will be approved because it “does not represent significant broadband market concentration and the FCC/[Department of Justice] can put in prophylactic safeguards to ensure a fair balance between programming and carrier interests.” Administrative Law Judge Karl Bemesderfer is the presiding officer in the case and will hold hearings on the proposed merger in May, the ruling said. Charter didn't comment Friday.

The California broadband workshop NTIA hosted last week (see 1511170062) underscored that while the state has made progress, there's still work to be done to close the digital divide, said a blog post from NTIA. Even with companies headquartered in the state -- Apple, Google and Intel, for example -- there remain remote areas with tribal lands that lack basic communications infrastructure and desert towns where students don't have Internet access to complete their homework, it said Thursday. Comprehensive mapping data from the California Public Utilities Commission shows 98 percent of urban households in the state have access to wired broadband speeds of at least 6 Mbps downstream, but that number drops to just 43 percent for rural households, NTIA said. The commission said the limited reliability of wireless service in many rural areas means wireless connections rarely fill the gap.

The Vermont Public Service Board agreed to open a proceeding on an ongoing contract negotiation dispute between Springfield Area Public Access Television (SAPA) and Vermont Telephone Co. (VTel), in a PSB order in docket 8609. SAPA has been trying to sign a contract with VTel since January 2012 to be the access management organization for VTel's cable TV system in several towns in the state. SAPA has asked the PSB for assistance multiple times since then, but VTel asked the board to delay beginning any proceeding pending SAPA's review of a new offer from VTel. SAPA and VTel had no comment Wednesday.

The Alaska Plan as a whole, including the rate-of-return and competitive eligible telecommunications carriers portions, needs to move forward, General Communication Inc. (GCI) said in an ex parte notice posted Tuesday by the FCC Wireline Bureau in docket 10-90. The plan will provide a stable environment to continue to improve broadband deployment in the state, GCI said. But GCI said Alaska Communications' proposal is "unrealistic, lacked notice as it applied across all forms of universal service support beyond the high cost support being considered in these dockets and suffered from potential substantive legal defects," the filing said. Alaska Communications on Thursday filed an ex parte report with an attached proposal for closing the middle mile gap in Alaska. The proposal said only by addressing the middle mile gap can the FCC fulfill its statutory duty to ensure that all Americans have access to "reasonably comparable, affordable, advanced broadband capability."

FirstNet is working to create and put into place a bring-your-own-device policy, it said in a blog post Monday. That BYOD policy needs to ensure that the device can be adequately controlled and be secure while still providing an acceptable user experience on the network, FirstNet said. It must also operate in real time to analyze BYOD access and identify anomalies. Because of many questions arising through the request for proposal process, FirstNet said it wrote the post to explain its plans to support personal devices through a BYOD policy that's being developed as part of the overall network architecture. An effective BYOD policy requires ongoing and active device technical support and expertise to manage a growing range of devices, operating systems and user devices, it said.

Maine's need for state FirstNet coverage is far bigger than original estimates, FirstNetME reported through its data collection Monday. The updated map shows far more red regions, indicating more high-priority areas of the state than originally thought. But FirstNetME also went a step further and identified high-, medium- and low-priority coverage needs across specific areas. For example, airports and military fall under the high-priority category, federal lands and railroads the medium-priority category, and parks and beaches the low-priority category.