The Perkins School for the Blind was certified to administer the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program (NDBEDP) for Arizona, Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, said the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau in a public notice Friday. It said Access Technologies was certified to administer the NDBEDP for Oregon, and the South Dakota Department of Human Services to administer the NDBEDP for South Dakota. The certifications are effective July 1, it said.

The "Title II-reversal story" that helped cable stocks rally "has begun to unravel," said analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Thursday. He noted he upgraded cable stocks after the Republican election victory on the expectation that Title II would be reversed, preferably through legislation to mandate net neutrality principles and clarify agency authority. But Republicans used the "nuclear option" and pushed through a Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal the FCC's broadband privacy rules, he said. "Unfortunately, that scorched-Earth strategy appears now to have been a terrible miscalculation," Moffett wrote. "Predictably, ramming the ISP Privacy reversal down the throats of the Democrats poisoned the well for any cooperation on telecom matters, let alone something as politically volatile as Net Neutrality or Title II." He noted the FCC has proposed to reverse the Title II reclassification and return to Title I broadband, but whether it will "have the stomach to follow through in the face of what is likely to be absolutely withering opposition is unclear." Even if the FCC does roll back Title II, "it would be a temporary solution at best," given legal questions about net neutrality under Title I, and the possibility that a return to Title II "would simply be one Democratic FCC away," he wrote.

A civil rights coalition pressed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and an aide on its three top priorities: "strong support for stand-alone broadband as a component of the Lifeline program, limits on media concentration, and caps on predatory prison phone rates." The advocates urged Pai to "commit to implementing the [2016 Lifeline] modernization order on schedule and to support a robust program in his remarks and policy proposals," said a filing on a meeting posted Wednesday by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Media and Telecom Task Force in docket 11-42. The conference "believes that media concentration leads to fewer owners, fewer entrepreneurial opportunities and fewer jobs, whereas actions to tighten the media ownership rules will lead to more owners, more jobs, and more opportunities for people of color and women." The coalition cited "the importance of capping prison phone rates" and urged Pai to address inmate calling once an appellate court acts on current litigation.

Linksys added a bridge mode and parental controls to app-enabled routers, it announced Tuesday. Router users can configure the company’s Velop mesh Wi-Fi networking so they can keep their existing ISP-supplied router or gateway in place for other services such as IPTV, said the company. Other features that will work by enabling bridge mode: dynamic tri-band selection for the best Wi-Fi connection, a guest network, Amazon Alexa support and automatic firmware updates.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's decision overturning the FCC's junk fax rule (see 1703310018) "radically conflicts with decades of the Supreme Court's and this Court's Chevron step one precedent," a group of intervenors said in a petition (in Pacer) for rehearing en banc filed Friday with the court. The 2-1 decision was wrong in saying the FCC didn't have authority to issue a rule requiring senders of junk faxes to include notices on those faxed advertisements of how recipients can opt out, the intervenors said. The court's reasoning ignores the general conferral of rulemaking authority Congress gave the FCC through the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the intervenors said. They also said the court's relying on the idea that a statute with a requirement in one specific situation is intended to preclude an agency from imposing that requirement in other situations ignores court precedent.

Entities seeking state oversight of the FCC's deaf-blind equipment distribution program were listed by the Consumer and Governmental Affairs bureau in a public notice in docket 10-210 in Wednesday's Daily Digest. There were competing applications for certification as the program's administrative entity in only three states: Georgia, Montana and Pennsylvania. The commission on Aug. 4 converted the $10 million annual pilot program, also called "iCanConnect," to a permanent program. The Perkins School for the Blind submitted the most applications, covering 22 states and territories; the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youth and Adults was second with eight applications.

IP Captioned Telephone Service should be migrated to automated systems over time, Sorenson Communications and its subsidiary CaptionCall told the FCC. Company officials discussed various IP CTS issues, including the FCC's pending decision on rates, eligibility standards and the development of "Automatic Speech Recognition ('ASR')," said a CaptionCall filing posted Tuesday in docket 03-123 on meetings with an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai and other commission staffers. Noting FCC concerns about growth in overall telecom relay service (TRS) funding, the filing said the company recognized that changes to the IP CTS rate methodology may be needed. "CaptionCall agrees that, over the long term, the only sustainable course is to migrate nearly all IP CTS calls to an entirely ASR-based relay service, with human communications assistants needed only in circumstances that ASR cannot adequately handle," it said. "However, it will take some years before ASR technology evolves to that point of providing functionally equivalent service on a scalable and commercially robust level." Hamilton Relay met with FCC officials to discuss methods for improving IP CTS while ensuring only eligible people use the service. "Among the options discussed were the enforcement of existing rules, reinstatement of third-party certifications with possible enhancements to those certifications, while grandfathering those users who previously obtain[ed] third party certifications during the period when such certifications were not required, and annual re-registration and self-certification renewal requirements," said a filing. Hamilton urged the FCC to issue a Further NPRM to explore the issues, voiced continued support for the multistate average rate structure (Mars) for calculating IP CTS and some other TRS rates, and said the agency's proposed Office of Economics and Data should study the effectiveness of the MARS methodology before making changes.

A new "overlay" area code, 640, was assigned in New Jersey to the 609 area code for the state's central and southeastern regions, including Atlantic City, Hammonton, Princeton and Trenton, announced Neustar, the North American Numbering Plan administrator. "Neustar forecasts that numbering resources in the 609 area code will be exhausted by the third quarter of 2018," said a company news release Tuesday. "The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has directed all local exchange service providers to activate the new area code to ensure the availability of numbering resources in a manner that is most efficient and least confusing for consumers, while minimizing possible disruption to consumers and businesses."

The FCC fined Advantage Telecommunications $1 million after deciding the Florida-based long-distance company violated rules against "slamming" (changing consumers' phone service without authorization) and "cramming" (charging for unauthorized fees). The commission received more than 150 complaints against Advantage from consumers, other agencies and the Better Business Bureau, said an FCC news release Tuesday. It said the vast majority of affected customers were small businesses. "Slamming and cramming are deceptive business practices that result in consumers paying for services they never requested and then expending great time and personal effort to return to their preferred carriers," said a commission forfeiture order, which called the practices "even more egregious" because they were "coupled with deceptive marketing and billing." The commission found "Advantage’s telemarketers engaged in deceptive marketing practices by pretending to be calling on behalf of consumers’ existing long distance carriers and misrepresenting the true nature of sales calls," said the order. "We also find that Advantage violated the Commission’s truth-in-billing rules by failing to clearly and plainly describe charges on consumers’ telephone bills." Commissioner Michael O'Rielly partially concurred and partially dissented. Advantage didn't comment.

Pointing to federal decisions to commercialize spectrum that are "often tied up in a years-long federal bureaucratic process," Ligado CEO Doug Smith in a Forbes column posted Friday said such decisions should be made "in a reasonable time frame." "If we are serious about sustaining U.S. technological leadership, government must make decisions like this in a reasonable time frame so that industry stakeholders can continue investing in both our infrastructure and our country," he said, saying approvals are "sometimes ... caught in a bureaucratic morass." Ligado repeatedly pushed for FCC approval of its proposed LTE system and for issuance of an NPRM regarding allocating 1675-1680 MHz for shared commercial use (for example, see 1701300066, 1703200032 and 1701300066). The FCC didn't comment Monday.