The FCC is considering expanded exemptions to ex parte rules to cover some discussions with tribal nations and with the toll-free numbering and reassigned numbers database administrators, said a draft NPRM in Friday's Daily Digest. It also seeks comment on a proposed requirement that all written ex parte presentations be submitted before the sunshine period begins and that replies to them be filed by the first day of the sunshine period. The commission said it still encourages tribal nations to file comments and replies into the record, but it understands their interest in consulting on a government-to-government basis without concern about documenting such consultations on the rulemaking record in every case. The proposed exemption would be limited to consultations with tribal leaders or their representatives, and not individual tribal members or tribally owned businesses. The agency asked for input on whether any information a tribal government presents during an exempt consultation would need to be disclosed on the record for the FCC to rely on it when making a decision. The proposed program administrators exemption would extend to them the same exemption covering consultations between FCC staff and the interstate telecom services fund administrator, Universal Service Administrative Co. and administrators for the North American numbering plan, local number portability, telephone relay services numbering and pooling involving their administrative functions. The role between the FCC and the toll-free numbering administrator or reassigned numbers database administrator "is substantially the same" as it is between the agency and those other administrators, thus the exemption extension would harmonize the rules, it said. The FCC said the current sunshine period rules have meant staff difficulty at times evaluating all relevant filings in the limited time before an agency meeting. Free Press Vice President-Policy Matt Wood tweeted he's "not too alarmed" by the proposal because the intergovernmental and administrative privileges the FCC has are expanding but also harmonizing. "Sure, I'd like to know what USAC says to the FCC [but] I worry more about what this FCC says to USAC, not the other way round," he said. He said speeding up filings for meetings on the day before sunshine starts is "pro transparency." Smaller filers and nongovernmental organizations might find it harder to comply than big companies, but the latter meet more often with the FCC and the staff review time rational "is pretty compelling," he said.
Charter Communications should expect public interest groups to oppose its ask that the FCC set a May sunset to the data caps and interconnection conditions from its purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks (see 2006180050). The cable ISP could face watered-down opposition compared with what it faced to get regulatory OK, with some groups telling us it's question of available resources. The commission might be hesitant to act on the petition before the November election, we were told.
Wireless interests made pitches for requiring 3.7 GHz licensees to make available time division duplexing synchronization with citizens broadband radio service operations in the adjacent band, in docket 18-122 replies posted Tuesday to responses to the petitions for reconsideration of the FCC C-band order. The C-band transition cost catalog is useful only if accurate, and getting additional comment won't delay the move, NCTA said, saying the Wireless Bureau should at least continue to revisit and seek occasional comment on the catalog to ensure the cost amounts stay reasonable. It said the FCC should make clear CBRS operations are entitled to interference protection and new 3.7 GHz licensees need to work with CBRS operators in good faith to prevent and mitigate that interference, including by making TDD available to CBRS operators. The Wireless ISP Association and NTCA also backed requiring flexible use licensees in the C band making TDD synchronization information available to adjacent CBRS band users. Charter said no one disputed the benefit of TDD synchronization, so requiring it would provide certainty. Intelsat said it can't be responsible for interference to earth stations post-transition if rules don't protect against flexible use operations' interference. It urged reconsidering technical specifications for telemetry, tracking and control (TT&C) filters. Recapping meetings with staff for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, NAB and content companies urged either all integrated receiver/decoder (IRD) equipment costs be allocated as a satellite cost, with satellite operators paying installation costs to MVPDs, or bifurcated, with the equipment costs a satellite operator expense and costs of installation allocated to the MVPD and in the lump sum. They said the average estimated cost of installation of an IRD is $900 when installed by the MVPD or a contractor. In a back-and-forth over Eutelsat's petition, SES filed. If carriers, which ultimately will pay moving costs, don't object to reimbursement criteria, it's hard to see what legitimate grounds those non-C-band users stand on, it said. Eutelsat said the opposition doesn't refute its core argument the move would proceed more smoothly with the FCC being absolutely clear about what are reasonable and necessary reimbursement costs. T-Mobile urged rejecting recon petitions seeking more protections for incumbent earth station users, TT&C/gateway sites and CBRS.
Despite telecom industry arguments it needs longer (see 2006230022), a 24-month nationwide implementation of the 988 suicide prevention hotline seems feasible, experts told us. Others see meeting that deadline being a big challenge, though everyone agrees the FCC isn't likely to budge further, having already compromised from an 18-month implementation deadline. The commission didn't comment. The draft order directing providers to have 988 operational by July 16, 2022, will be voted on at the July 16 commissioners' meeting.
Despite a rift between two of the parties challenging the FCC's C-band order in federal court, PSSi's effort to get SES' appeal dismissed isn't expected to significantly affect the consolidated challenges to the order, we were told. A lawyer involved in the FCC proceeding said SES isn't really a petitioner but a conditional cross-petitioner. The company has told the court it won't file a petitioner's brief.
The FCC is getting broad satellite industry agreement for better defining spectrum sharing rights between non-geostationary orbit fixed satellite service (FSS) systems authorized in different processing rounds. There's little consensus beyond that in replies Wednesday on SpaceX's petition for revised spectrum-sharing rules among NGSOs (see 2006160045). Most agree the FCC needs to clarify the relationship between licensees authorized in different processing rounds and revisit the mechanism to determine the order in which licensees select “home” spectrum in the absence of coordination, SpaceX said. The company urged "a swift rulemaking" because any delay would perpetuate the lack of clarity in rules while the clock is ticking on NGSO operators' deployment milestones. Amazon's Kuiper said due to lack of agreement, next should be a notice of inquiry to gather more ideas to inform an NPRM. "The time is ripe" for a rulemaking to define spectrum sharing rights among different processing round NGSOs, giving superior rights to earlier round systems while providing opportunities for new entrants and system expansion, O3b said. SpaceX's approach would discourage coordination between parties, while merging processing rounds or relying on ITU priority to determine relative spectrum rights conflict with FCC policy, it said. Also critical, OneWeb said there's general agreement licensees from earlier NGSO FSS processing rounds should be entitled to some interference protection from applicants in subsequent ones. Telesat said there's no general agreement on defining and implementing interference protection, and whatever route the FCC goes shouldn't depend on sharing beam pointing information in real time, which couldn't be implemented for systems that assign frequencies dynamically and would require competitors to exchange highly sensitive proprietary information. The FCC should get input via an NPRM regarding how to define sharing procedures for NGSO FSS systems, Kepler Communications said. It said using ITU priority as the basis for spectrum sharing would go against long-held FCC position that applications should all have equal access to available spectrum.
Its $1.4 billion purchase of Sprint's Boost Mobile complete, Dish Network is now in the retail wireless marketplace, it said Wednesday. It said it would keep the Boost brand, and reinstituted a shrinking payments plan. It said its "$hrink-It!" plan starts at $45 a month for 15 GB and goes down by $5 after three on-time payments and another $5 after six on-time payments. It said Boost's previous shrinking payments offering ended in July 2014.
The end of the FCC's Keep Americans Connected (KAC) pledge -- which was to have expired Tuesday -- won't necessarily mean a universal end of ISPs offering a safety net of modified broadband subscriber terms during the pandemic, companies and consumer advocates told us. They expect a patchwork response of a rollback of some terms and more emphasis on setting up payment plans. Resumption of data caps is expected, as reported in a previous installment in this series of stories about the novel coronavirus (see 2006180002).
Petitions for reconsideration of the FCC C-band order (see 2005270031) got a flurry of amens and oppositions, in docket 18-122 postings Monday. Eutelsat said Intelsat's recon petition is an attempt to protect its tracking, telemetry and control while hurting terrestrial buildout, and delaying telemetry, tracking and control gateway earth station consolidation from December 2021 to December 2023 will limit the efficiency of the transition and otherwise delay provision of 5G services. It said the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization's recon petition is trying to impermissibly expand reimbursement costs beyond what's needed for the transition. Inmarsat and Hughes/EchoStar agreed with Eutelsat the FCC should clarify the order to make clear that reimbursements to C-Band operators are for only reasonable and necessary costs, and that satellites built using reimbursed funds are dedicated to serving the U.S. only in the band for the entirety of their useful lives. SES said Eutelsat's recon petition was "a transparent effort to undermine the transition" of SES and other eligible satellite operators as it tries to "graft new, arbitrary conditions onto the standards for reimbursement of relocation costs." Intelsat also opposed Eutelsat's petition and said requiring satellite operators to buy satellites with a C-band-only payload providing coverage solely to the contiguous U.S. would deviate from industry practice, introduce significant new cost burdens and inefficiencies and create inevitable delays. Intelsat said the FCC will have oversight of the relocation payment clearinghouse to prevent reimbursement of unnecessary costs. Boeing also opposed Eutelsat's recon petition. Some petitions, such as Charter's, reargue issues the C-band order fully addressed, while Intelsat's makes requests that would introduce uncertainty in the transition process, CTIA said, urging they all be denied. AT&T, also urging they all be rejected, said they improperly seek preemptive determinations on the reasonableness of specific transition reimbursement claims, which are decisions the FCC delegated to the clearinghouse. T-Mobile and Verizon also said they all should be denied. NCTA said Intelsat's recon petition raises valid red flags about out-of-band emissions and the FCC should clarify that new 3.7 GHz service licensees must protect incumbent earth stations from harmful interference and cooperate in good faith with earth station operators to remediate harmful interference. Also to be clarified are respective roles of 3.7 GHz service licensees and satellite operators in preventing and resolving harmful interference to earth stations from new 3.7 GHz service licensees during and after the transition period, the association said.
The FCC is sending contradictory messages how it will calculate C-band earth station lump sums in the band's repurposing, saying the sums will be based on estimated average costs for relocation but also on the number or types of antennas or technology upgrades needed by each specific such station, said ACA Connects. The latter formula runs contrary to the C-band order, said a docket 18-122 posting Friday on a Wireless Bureau call. ACA said bureau assertions the payment clearinghouse will verify the need for a component part of an earth station operator’s lump sum election have no order basis. It said the FCC is proposing a lump sum amount available to MVPD earth station operators "significantly lower" than the group's estimates of $764,500 each. Cox told the bureau the order mandates lump sum amounts reflect average, estimated costs of relocating incumbent earth stations to the upper 200 MHz of the band. It said the modulation and encoding technology upgrades proposed in satellite operators’ plans are a direct result of the transition. Citing Intelsat's C-band order petition for reconsideration (see 2005270031), NAB said if the FCC decides satellite operators don't have responsibility for ensuring same-quality service to earth station users after the transition, it must clearly state flexible use operators must remediate any harmful interference. There can't be any ambiguity about that earth station operators and their viewers and listeners need protection through and after the move, the group said.