The North American Numbering Council will meet June 29 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the FCC, said a commission notice in Tuesday's Federal Register, with a proposed agenda.
Verizon competed a $4.5 billion buy of Yahoo’s operating business, the carrier said Tuesday. Verizon combined Yahoo and AOL assets to create new subsidiary Oath, Verizon said. Oath brands include AOL.com, HuffPost, Tumblr and various Yahoo services. It's "a critical step in growing the global scale needed for our digital media company,” said Verizon Media and Telematics President Marni Walden. The deal originally was valued at $4.83 billion, lowered after the companies agreed to share liability from data breaches (see 1702210024).
Cisco’s global IP traffic forecast shows the wisdom of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s bid to increase the agency’s use of data and economic analyses, American Enterprise Institute Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy Visiting Scholar Daniel Lyons blogged Monday. Pai proposed in April to launch an FCC Office of Economics and Data (see 1701310062 and 1704050047). Cisco forecast rising use of content delivery networks, smartphones and video streaming as drivers of IP traffic (see 1706080021), which shows “network congestion, which has largely disappeared from the public debate with the 4G revolution, may reemerge as a policy issue,” Lyons said. Pai is “correct to seek more data-driven policy recommendations" within the FCC, and the agency “should seek similar input from the engineers who actually run the networks and understand these trends in real time,” he said.
Digital Realty will buy DuPont Fabros in a $7.6 billion data center deal, the companies said in a Friday news release. The all-stock transaction is expected to close in the second half of this year, subject to customary conditions including shareholder and regulatory approvals, they said. The deal enhances the companies’ ability to serve top metropolitan areas, expands the companies’ products and provides cost efficiencies, they said. “The addition of [DuPont] should enhance [Digital Realty’s] growth prospects, as it's acquiring an asset that's growing at +10% per year, with recent momentum including a 28.8 MW lease signed by who we believe to be [Apple],” Wells Fargo analysts wrote investors Friday. “Our sense is this customer relationship will only grow.”
High-quality broadband, satellite communications and various devices play roles in e-health, early replies in FCC docket 16-46 showed Thursday. Comments were due later that day. "Reliable, secure, high-speed, high-bandwidth, low-latency broadband access is critical to enabling access to care and modern healthcare technologies," said Baxter. "As healthcare organizations transition from wired to wireless, and as data moves from within an organization’s private network to the broadband network, the cybersecurity, privacy, legal, and other risks grow. ... Guidance, tools, and policies" can help, it said: "Broadband-enabled services are used in all healthcare settings." Initial comments show such solutions "always depend upon a reliable and secure broadband connection of sufficient speed and capacity," wrote the Satellite Industry Association. SIA touted satellite broadband as a telehealth solution. Nokia said medical research shows health "benefits of self-monitoring in the areas of activity, weight and blood pressure and sleep." Initial comments on a public notice urged the FCC to hike rural healthcare funding; the USF healthcare connect fund has $400 million yearly (see 1705250035).
The FCC certified Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youth and Adults as administrator of the annual National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program ("iCanConnect") in Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, New York, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. A Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice Tuesday in docket 10-210 also said the Georgia Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is certified for Georgia, the Affiliated Blind of Louisiana Training Center for Louisiana, the Perkins School for the Blind for Montana, the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired for New Jersey, the North Carolina Division of Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing for North Carolina, and the Wisconsin Bureau of Aging and Disability Resources for Wisconsin. Certifications take effect July 1, said the PN, which noted the bureau will continue to make certification announcements on a rolling basis after reviewing applications and supplemental materials.
The FCC North American Numbering Council meets June 29, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., in the Commission Meeting Room, the agency said in a Monday public notice. The main agenda items include reports from various working groups within NANC.
A federal district court judge entered eight orders against an " intertwined web" of Florida-based individuals and companies, settling charges they "bombarded" consumers with illegal robocalls about credit card services, said the FTC in a Monday news release. The FTC and the state attorney general's office initially filed a 2015 complaint (see 1506290049) with District Court in Orlando. They alleged defendants doing business as Payless Solutions illegally pitched thousands of consumers nationwide, including seniors, with a credit card interest rate reduction program. Instead, the defendants charged consumers up front $300 to $4,999 without providing services in return, the agency said. Over the past year, the commission unanimously approved seven proposed orders that were filed with the court, which in May also approved a default judgment against three of the defendants. The orders "permanently" ban most of the defendants from robocalling, telemarketing and providing debt relief services, except for the three not charged with robocalling, the agency said. The stipulated orders have monetary judgments totaling nearly $6 million, but will be either completely or partially suspended based on defendants' inability to pay, said the FTC. "If they are later found to have misrepresented their financial condition, the entire amount of the respective judgment will become due." The Better Business Bureau said on its website that Payless Solutions "appears" no longer to be in business.
Prolonged reviews of telecom facilities by the Missouri State Historic Preservation Office are often the fault of those seeking clearance, the SHPO told the FCC. “Many projects that come to the Missouri SHPO for review are missing information regarding previous investigations, sites, and resources within the APEs [areas of potential effect],” the office said in a filing in docket 17-79. “At least fifty percent of projects submitted to our office for review are missing information regarding buildings previously identified as eligible or listed in the National Register, archaeological sites, or previous cultural resource investigations with in the APEs. Sometimes … multiple submissions from the consultant are necessary to get a report that is complete.”
A federal district judge in California approved default judgments against Aaron Michael Jones and nine companies the FTC alleged earlier this year blasted consumers with billions of illegal telemarketing robocalls, the agency said Friday. “The FTC estimates that in making the illegal robocalls, Jones and the companies he controlled called numbers listed on the Do Not Call (DNC) Registry at a rate of more than 100 million per year.” The court orders permanently ban Jones and the companies from all telemarketing activities, “including initiating robocalls, calling numbers on the DNC Registry, and selling data lists containing consumers’ phone numbers and other information,” the FTC said in a news release. Jones was ordered to pay a $2.7 million fine. Jones couldn't be reached for comment.