MCI agreed to FCC conditions for waiving a U.S. benchmark termination rate for Cuba as specified in a 2011 TeleCuba waiver order and 2012 international settlements policy reform order, MCI parent Verizon told the commission in a letter posted Wednesday in docket 10-95. Cuba didn't accept the U.S. benchmark rate of 19 cents per minute for terminating calls, preventing direct U.S.-Cuba calling for years (indirect calls were routed through other countries). Under the 2011 and 2012 FCC orders (here and here), U.S. carriers can exceed the benchmark rate and pay up to 84 cents a minute to terminate calls in Cuba if they adhere to various conditions, including that they reach nonexclusive interconnection agreements with Cuban carrier Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A.. The agreements must state the parties intend to reduce the termination rates toward or below the benchmark rate over time and take at least one significant step in that direction. IDT Telecom and Sprint reached three-year agreements in 2015 (here and here) that generally set termination rates of 60 cents per minute for U.S.-to-Cuba traffic and 15 cents per minute for Cuba-to-U.S. traffic.

Digital literacy and ensuring that “locally relevant content and services are available” are keys to connecting 363 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean already covered by mobile broadband networks but not yet connected to the Internet, the GSM Association said in a report released Tuesday. Affordability and network coverage are the other major barriers to “digital inclusion” in the region, the report said. Some 634 million live in the region and only about 10 percent are outside the footprint of a 3G or 4G network, GSMA said. “Mobile broadband is the primary method of delivering affordable internet access across the Latin America and Caribbean region, delivering a range of economic and social benefits and supporting the UN Social Development Goals,” said Sebastian Cabello, the GSMA’s head-Latin America, in a news release. “But there is also the danger of a widening ‘digital divide’ in the region due to millions being either unable or unwilling to use mobile broadband services. We therefore urge governments to work with the mobile industry to address the barriers to adoption and ensure that the mobile internet is more accessible, useful and understandable for everyone.”

Facebook announced a new collaborative project among operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators and other technology companies that would "reimagine traditional approaches to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure," wrote Jay Parikh, the company's global head of engineering and infrastructure, in a news release. He wrote Sunday that the current infrastructure isn't moving fast enough to meet the "data-intensive experiences like video and virtual reality." In its new Telecom Infra Project, member companies will contribute designs in access, backhaul and core and management areas through a more open framework to get better cost and operational efficiencies, which could lead to faster development of technologies like 5G, he said. In one example, he said, Facebook collaborated on a pilot, based on the project's principles, to provide cellular coverage for the first time to a small Philippines village. Facebook along with members Intel and Nokia would contribute an initial suite of reference designs, while Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom would help define and deploy technology tailored to their needs, he added. Other partnership members include Harman, its website said.

Ericsson is partnering with Amazon Web Services to help telecom providers speed up their use of cloud-based services, the Sweden-based tech provider said in a Monday news release. Ericsson said its work with AWS will help telecoms better improve productivity and efficiency, reduce complexity and risk and better capitalize on opportunities like the IoT and big data analytics. "Ericsson will contribute expertise from its 25,000 R&D engineers and 66,000-person service workforce -- more than 17,000 of whom are consultants and systems integrators, delivering 1,500 projects per year around the world," the company said. Ericsson said AWS, which is providing resources such as professional services and training, is also helping to develop new capabilities like end-to-end security and data traffic management, workload management, and services related to local regulation and compliance requirements.

Four cybersecurity software products from Malaysia's e-Lock Corp. are considered of U.S. origin for government procurement purposes, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a final determination published in Monday's Federal Register. The “source code” is written in Malaysia while the “object code” is compiled in the U.S. "CBP has consistently held that conducting a ‘software build’ -- i.e., compiling source code into object code -- results in a substantial transformation," the agency said. The finished software products are determined to be of U.S. origin, CBP said.

A Pakistani citizen admitted to laundering more than $19.6 million in proceeds from an international telecom fraud scheme in which foreign-based hackers hijacked private branch exchange systems that ran the internal phone networks of businesses and other organizations in the U.S. Muhammad Sohail Qasmani, 47, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, said the FBI in a Thursday news release. It said hackers placed calls on an organization's phone system to identify unused extensions and then illegally reprogrammed the system to make unlimited long distance calls that were charged back to the victimized organization. Qasmani, who was arrested in December 2014 at Los Angeles International Airport, faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The agency identified the scheme's mastermind as Noor Aziz, 53, who's on the FBI's list of most wanted cybercriminals.

The FCC proposed an action to remove its nondiscrimination rules on the U.S.-Cuba route, which currently require all facilities-based U.S. carriers providing services on the U.S.-Cuba route to operate under "identical rate terms and conditions," the commission said in a news release Friday. Cuba is the only country still under the nondiscrimination requirements. "If the proposal is adopted, U.S. carriers would have more flexibility to negotiate rates with the state-owned telecommunications operator ... and to respond to market forces," said the release. The FCC said its action is a result of the State Department's recommendation to remove the requirements based on the recent change in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba. The action seeks comment on removing particular nondiscrimination requirements and "asks whether removal would lead to more direct agreements between U.S. carriers and the state-owned telecommunications operator, and encourage competition on the U.S.-Cuba route."

Trademark holders said some countries don't protect U.S. copyright, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which includes MPAA and RIAA, said the U.S. Trade Representative's office should resume classifying Ukraine as a priority country for not protecting U.S. IP. In the filings we were able to get in the runup to last Friday's deadline for comments to USTR, the Trademark Working Group, while not recommending the office add countries to the priority countries list, said Argentina, Brazil, India, the Philippines and Malaysia -- which TWG called the “slows” -- regularly fail to adjudicate oppositions and cancelations in a “reasonable period of time.” IIPA, in comments it released Friday said Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam should be added to USTR's priority watch list. Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mexico, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates should go on the regular watch list. IIPA members also include the Association of American Publishers, Entertainment Software Association and Independent Television & Film Alliance. Last week's Trans-Pacific Partnership signing was "a timely reminder of the valuable role our government plays in promoting U.S. economic interests abroad, and of the need to seek enforceable commitments from key trading partners to remove impediments to legitimate marketplaces," said IIPA Counsel Steven Metalitz in a news release. "TPP holds the potential to make a critical contribution, along with other trade agreements and Congressionally mandated reviews like the Special 301 Report, to this market-opening drive.” Monday, USTR posted about 30 public comments. The next issue of this publication will report on what tech groups like the Computer & Communications Industry Association, Internet Association and others said.

The new EU-U.S. Privacy Shield that replaces the annulled safe harbor agreement with stronger privacy protections of Europeans' personal data (see 1602020040) "will be a mere political solution to a legal problem" without key surveillance law reforms on both sides of the Atlantic, said Access Now's Estelle Massé, Amie Stepanovich and Drew Mitnick in a long blog post Thursday. They said "robust substantive changes" to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act's Section 702, which permits surveillance of non-U.S. persons, and executive order 12333, which governs spying outside the U.S., haven't been implemented. Instead, EU negotiators relied on "written assurances" from the U.S. that "indiscriminate surveillance" of EU citizens would not take place, which the three described as "word games." Even "overbroad" surveillance programs in some EU member states like France and the U.K. need to be changed, they said (see 1512240011). The activists also said more needs to be done to strengthen transparency, oversight and data protection, which can be achieved through enacting baseline privacy legislation such as the proposed consumer privacy bill of rights in the U.S., plus strong data breach notification laws and vulnerability disclosure frameworks on both sides of the Atlantic. If concerns of the European Court of Justice, which invalidated the old safe harbor framework in October, aren't addressed, the new one will likely be nullified, creating more uncertainty (see 1602030001) for companies, they concluded.

"The path is now clear" for the U.S. to "help bring Cuban telecommunications into the [21st century]," said Jamie Barnett, a Venable cybersecurity and telecom lawyer, in an online memo, referring to a recent policy change of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). The bureau's policy change regarding Cuba -- from a "case-by-case" review of telecommunications license applications to a "general policy of approval" -- became effective in late January, and coincides with recently announced amendments to the Cuban Asset Control Regulations (CACR) made by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Barnett said. OFAC's amendments to the CACR "further relax[ed] the restrictions on the economic activities in, and financing exports to, Cuba," he said. Barnett said OFAC took multiple, incremental steps in 2015 to open up U.S. telecom-based services in Cuba, and its most recent action in January continues that trend. "As both OFAC and BIS have made clear, the purpose of the new rules involving trade with Cuba is to engage the private sector in that country to the largest extent possible while supporting the Cuban government as little as practicable in keeping with this purpose," he said. "In the telecom field, the U.S. government appears to appreciate that major infrastructure projects will be required and that these can be accomplished only by working with the Cuban government." Although providers will need BIS licenses to "bring Cuba telecom into par with the U.S.," and U.S. companies will need to carefully negotiate the remaining OFAC sanctions, "U.S. policy is clearly to promote the modernization of Cuba's telecommunications sector."