FCC action on the National Broadband Plan can be expected to start “in a matter of days,” Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said Wednesday. At a commission forum, he acknowledged some government plans “stay on the shelf” but promised “that’s not going to happen on this particular plan.” The plan gives the agency a great deal to do, and the bureau is “moving out on that sharply.” Bureau officials outlined recommendations in the plan. The FCC seeks to increase its involvement with cybersecurity, said Chief Jeff Goldthorpe of the Communications Systems Analysis Division. “It’s an area where we frankly don’t have much of a track record.” On the proposed public-safety network, Deputy Chief David Furth said relying on current commercial networks and infrastructure won’t meet public safety’s “specific needs for network reliability, resiliency and nationwide coverage that includes remote as well as populated areas.” The plan asks for $12 billion to $16 billion in government grants and broadband-user fees to build and maintain infrastructure, he said. Public-safety networks will be more economical and up-to-date technically if they're built at the same time as commercial networks, Furth said.
Adam Bender
Adam Bender, Deputy Managing Editor for Privacy Daily. Bender leads a team of journalists and reports on state privacy legislation, rulemaking and litigation. In previous roles at Communications Daily, he covered telecom and internet policy in the states, Congress and at the FCC. He has won awards for his reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW). Bender studied print journalism at American University and is the author of multiple dystopian sci-fi novels. Keep up to date with Bender by reading his blog and following him on social media including Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn.
The FCC may not be able to turn the National Broadband Plan into action as fast as the report to Congress envisions, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell warned in an interview. Congress may never act on some recommendations, and it could revise others, said Powell, who co-chairs the industry advocacy group Broadband for America. The FCC’s part depends on completing long and “messy” rulemaking proceedings “that may or may not come out the way that is envisioned,” he said. Powell also sought a targeted revamp of the Telecom Act.
Leading members of the House Commerce Committee asked AT&T and Verizon to explain their claims that the new healthcare law will increase the telephone companies’ costs. In letters sent Friday to CEOs of the two telcos and two other companies, Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak, D-Mich., said the subcommittee plans a hearing at 10 a.m. April 21 on the matter. “We request your personal testimony at this hearing,” they told AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.
Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., believes it’s time for Congress to update telecom laws to account for technological convergence, he told us Wednesday. The House Communications Subcommittee chairman said he intends to work on comprehensive reform in the next Congress starting in January that would address some of the concerns raised by Verizon Executive Vice President Tom Tauke in a New Democrat Network keynote Wednesday. The company is “very much on target” when it says the time has come to overhaul the Telecommunications Act, Boucher said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in another interview that her bills on broadband information and early termination fees (ETFs) would answer Tauke’s call to better inform and empower consumers.
A Universal Service Fund revamp passed by Congress would do more than an FCC overhaul of the fund, and would leapfrog possible limits to the commission’s legal authority, said House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., at a National Journal event Tuesday on Capitol Hill. The National Broadband Plan suggests an overhaul that wouldn’t require legislation. A USF bill may be passable on a bipartisan basis, said Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. Both legislators reaffirmed support for the FCC plan, but Stearns said he has concerns about how the FCC sees its role in spurring the marketplace.
Passage of health care reform legislation over the weekend frees Congress to finish the oft-delayed satellite TV reauthorization and may also loosen bottlenecks that held back other legislation, industry officials said Monday. But Congress won’t necessarily intensify telecom legislation efforts, they said. An ongoing debate among Hill leadership is whether, in the wake of passing health care, they should lay low or come out swinging, said an industry lobbyist.
FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett played defense to skeptical police and fire department officials on the agencies’ recommendations for establishing a nationwide, interoperable public safety network. At a conference Friday of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), Barnett urged public safety to back calls in the National Broadband Plan for $12 to $16 billion in additional funding. But officials said they care more about getting spectrum “real estate” than money. Many officials said they were worried they can’t rely on shared commercial networks in emergency situations.
The House passed by voice vote a bill to extend by one month the deadline to finish satellite-TV reauthorization. The bill was introduced Tuesday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sander Levin, D-Mich., and also includes temporary extensions for other expiring items. It was voted on under suspension of the rules, which meant it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The bill was co-sponsored by House Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Reps. George Miller, D-Calif., and James Oberstar, D-Minn. The Senate approved a five-year reauthorization as part of a jobs bill last week (CD March 11 p5). That bill awaits a House vote, but the chamber doesn’t plan to consider it until after it finishes work on health care reform, said a Democratic aide.
People seem to “get” that the National Broadband Plan is a “call to action,” said FCC broadband plan Executive Director Blair Levin at a Brookings Institution event Wednesday. The team set out to write a document that was both “visionary and practical,” and “the kind of advice companies would get if they had millions of dollars on the line,” he said. Levin believes the FCC achieved that. Everyone who’s reacted to the plan likes “large pieces” of it, which is good because Levin hoped people would love 80 percent, be indifferent to 10 percent and hate 10 percent, he said. Relatively little has been said about the national purposes section of the report, he said, but Levin expects that part will have the most material impact 10 years from now. Quick action is most likely to occur on recommendations the team made to the FCC, said Levin. “On the key issues affecting the FCC -- USF and intercarrier [compensation] -- there was a fair amount of acceptance of the need to go forward and that there is a framework now to go forward.” And President Barack Obama has explicitly supported the FCC’s proposals on spectrum and public safety, he said. “Congressional action [is] always more difficult to predict,” but the team “designed the plan so that the core recommendations could be done without Congress for the most part,” Levin said. Broadband Plan General Manager Erik Garr hopes the level of discussion on facts and outcomes at the commission continues. He described the broadband plan proceeding as “the most open and transparent planning process we could physically do.” The team “wanted to walk the walk” and be an example of an effective open government, said Phoebe Yang, general counsel for the team. The team worked nonstop until the end, said Levin. “For the last 75 days, the four of us have pretty much worked every single day.”
House members of both parties support privacy legislation, Neil Fried, the Commerce Committee’s minority counsel, said at a Broadband Breakfast event Tuesday. But Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., of the Communications Subcommittee has yet to share a discussion draft of his bill. Republicans “would welcome the opportunity to work with him,” but “it’s hard to do until we actually have a draft legislation in front of us,” Fried said. The Senate has tried to pass privacy legislation but failed, noted Danny Sepulveda, an aide to Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., of the Senate Communications Subcommittee. “The difficulty of privacy legislation is that it cuts across so much jurisdiction,” he said. “There really is no way to write a privacy bill that’s just for websites, because you're talking about the delivery” of several kinds of services, Sepulveda said. But privacy rules are important, and congressional committees will have to study the matter, he said. “People need to feel like the Internet is a safe place for them to go.” It’s in industry’s best interest to improve privacy controls, said David Quinalty, an aide to Ranking Member John Ensign, R-Nev., of the Senate Communications Subcommittee. Congress “can help foster” industry discussions about best practices, but it shouldn’t write laws that could stifle innovation, he said.