Comments are due Sept. 8 in dockets 25-256 and 25-257 on two Consolidated Communications applications to discontinue legacy voice services at locations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, said a public notice in Friday’s Daily Digest. The application will be granted automatically Sept. 22 unless the FCC notifies the company otherwise.
Intrepid is dropping its petition asking the FCC to preempt a contract that Cottage Grove, Minnesota, has with another provider for deployment of fiber-optic infrastructure there. In a motion to withdraw posted Friday (docket 25-248), Intrepid said it and the city have settled, "and there is no longer a 'controversy' requiring resolution by the Commission." In its petition, Intrepid said Cottage Grove granted exclusive access to another provider and was denying Intrepid access to its right of way.
Comments are due Sept. 5, replies Sept. 12, on Crown Castle's proposal to sell its fiber network business to Fiber FinCo. That company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Front Range, a joint venture between investors DigitalBridge Group and Sweden’s EQT. Filings should be posted in docket 25-174, said a Friday order by the FCC Wireline Bureau. Crown Castle sought agency clearance in May.
A pair of submarine cable repair ships should arrive at the Point Barrow repair site in the next few days to deal with a damaged subsea fiber line, Alaska's Quintillion said Wednesday. The company said in January that the damaged line could result in "prolonged" outage of its service to North Slope and northwest Alaskan communities (see 2501220001). When the ships, the IT Integrity and the CanPac Valkyrie, arrive at the repair site, crews will start locating and recovering the damaged cable, Wednesday's update said. Repair and testing could take up to a week, with cable burial extending potentially for an additional two weeks, it added.
NTCA representatives spoke with an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr about small providers' need for greater clarity as they move away from time-division multiplexing-based interconnection. They discussed how to “facilitate and expedite the voluntary migration of small rural providers from legacy voice services to cloud-based and hosted VoIP services,” said a filing posted Thursday in docket 17-97.
Comments are due Sept. 22, replies Oct. 21, on the questions raised in the pole attachments NPRM adopted by the FCC at its July meeting (see 2507280053), said a notice for Friday's Federal Register. The docket is 17-84. Among the questions asked in the NRPM is whether Section 224 of the Communications Act, which governs pole attachments, also covers light poles.
The FCC should minimize foreign ownership reporting burdens on regulatees without reportable foreign ownership, said USTelecom in a reply comment filing posted Wednesday in docket 25-166. “To the extent the Commission can streamline the certification process for entities with multiple licenses, such as allowing bulk submissions, it should do so.”
Transaction Network Services (TNS) told the FCC that publishing call identification information in a public call placement service (CPS) raises the risk that it will be “intercepted and abused by bad actors.” TNS weighed in this week in the FCC proceeding closing a “gap” in the commission’s Stir/Shaken authentication rules (see 2508180029).
The FCC Wireline Bureau Tuesday rejected a petition by Mercury Broadband seeking a waiver of Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund rules. Mercury said in May (see 2505200063) a potential $25.1 million in fines for the surrender of multiple RDOF census block groups was "neither reasonable nor proportionate.”
Northstar has agreed to pay $15,000 and implement a compliance plan as part of a settlement with the FCC Enforcement Bureau over allowing its license to operate a submarine cable system to expire and failing to maintain current information in the FCC’s records, said a consent decree Monday. Northstar’s license expired Oct. 1, and the company continued to operate it without FCC authorization before requesting at the end of that month special temporary authority to operate without a license. Northstar’s STA grant expires Aug. 25. Under the compliance plan, Northstar has to create a compliance manual and training program and file compliance reports with the FCC for three years.