The TeleManagement Forum has a variety of old members leaving and new members joining, said a DOJ Antitrust Division notice in Tuesday's Federal Register. Those leaving include Cox Communications, Facebook, NetBoss Technologies, Symantec, Verizon Telematics, Vitria Technology and many others. Among those joining were Alaska Communications Systems Holdings, Xavient Information Systems, MobileAware and Higher Logic, the telco industry service provider trade group said.

The FCC released the FCC Disability Advisory Committee's resolution on making the IoT accessible (see 1612060060). The resolution urges the next FCC to work with stakeholders to address possible accessibility issues in connected devices that may have limited user interfaces. The committee also asked the agency to consider seeking stakeholder recommendations on IoT accessibility issues falling within the regulator's purview.

Correction: The author of the Ernst & Young report on telecom merger-and-acquisition activity was Gaeron McClure (see 1611280016).

More than 226 million actively registered phone numbers are in the Do Not Call Registry as of Sept. 30, an increase of 3 million records from the prior fiscal year, said the FTC in a Friday news release. The commission released a data book that contains information about the registry for FY 2016. The agency said consumer complaints for unwanted telemarketing calls rose to 5.3 million calls last fiscal year, up from 3.6 million in FY2015, while monthly grievances to the FTC about telemarketing robocalls ranged from as low as 134,000 in November 2015 to nearly 266,000 lodged in August.

The FCC released details Thursday on a webinar on unwanted robocalls, to be hosted Wednesday by the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. The one-hour session will start at 1 p.m. EST, the FCC said. The speakers are from CGA, the Enforcement Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis. “The webinar, which is free and intended for all consumers, will provide information about consumers’ rights and the steps they can take to prevent robocalls,” a notice said. “This info session will explain the FCC’s role in addressing this issue and the steps consumers can take to protect themselves from and/or decrease the amount of unwanted robocalls they receive.”

Control4 is “constantly looking” for merger and acquisition opportunities, said CEO Martin Plaehn at a Raymond James technology investor conference. Plaehn referred to “lots of innovation” in the connected home market in physical products, software and cloud-based services. Noting products from video switching company Leaf, which it bought in 2015, and Pakedge Networks, bought this January, Plaehn said Tuesday that his company also looks at businesses that offer incremental revenue opportunity from adjacent categories. On voice control interfaces, Plaehn said voice input adds to the connected home experience, though it can be difficult to manage when controllable devices number more than 100.

The transition team for President-elect Donald Trump named L Brands’ Mark Neuman as another landing team member for the Department of Commerce. Also named: new members to the teams for the Department of Transportation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others, said a news release this week.

Verizon agreed to sell 24 data center sites to Equinix for $3.6 billion in cash, including 29 buildings in 15 metropolitan areas, the companies said (here and here) Tuesday. That will increase interconnection in the U.S. and Latin America, the buyer said. "It enables us to enhance cloud and network density to continue to attract enterprises, while expanding our presence in the Americas," said Equinix CEO Steve Smith. Some 250 Verizon employees will work for the acquirer, Equinix said, and both companies said the deal is expected to be complete by mid-2017. "There could be some integration challenges on the non-Terremark facilities, which we understand had lower growth, utilization and capital investment than other parts of the portfolio," Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche wrote investors. Verizon bought Terremark in 2011 for about $1.4 billion (see reports in 2011's April 4 and Jan. 31 issues). "The network-neutral data center space represents a derivative play on the continued growth of IP and Internet traffic," the analyst wrote.

The Trump transition's Jeff Eisenach cited Latino economic and demographic dynamism in a study Tuesday by NERA Economic Consulting, where he's managing director. "The US Latino population is growing, young, increasingly educated, employed, connected, entrepreneurial, and upwardly mobile in terms of income as well as consumption," said the study. It said: the Latino population grew from 22 million in 1990 to 57 million in 2015 and is considerably younger than the U.S. population average; Latinos are responsible for 29 percent of the growth in real income since 2005; are more likely to participate in the labor force; are more likely to be entrepreneurs; and accounted for 46 percent of U.S. employment growth 2011-15; with $1.3 trillion-plus in buying power. Eisenach is a member of President-elect Donald Trump's FCC landing team, along with fellow American Enterprise Institute scholars Mark Jamison and Roslyn Layton (see 1611210045, 1611280050, 1611230014 and 1611290022).

The LNP Alliance asked the North American Numbering Council to clarify and broaden, if necessary, the role of the LNPA Working Group in the local number portability administrator transition from Neustar to Telcordia/iconectiv. Working group members recently raised questions and concerns about certain LNPA transition technical requirements, including "information about issues with system or carrier/vendor certification," testing process success and failures, transition intervals and operational requirements, said David Malfara, LNP Alliance representative to the group, in a letter posted Thursday in FCC docket 09-109 to Betty Anne Kane, chairwoman of the NANC and the District of Columbia Public Service Commission. But the working group's co-chairs indicated the NANC limited the group's role "to developing test cases," which tends to restrict important discussion, Malfara said. "To the extent there is currently a view that the broader issues listed above cannot be discussed at an LNPA Working Group meeting, we request that the NANC permit that broader discussion among the experts of the LNPA Working Group," he wrote. "This is a critical time for the NANC to clarify and, if necessary, broaden the LNPA Working Group’s mandate for discussion. ... There must continue to be clear direction from the NANC that the LNPA Working Group is chartered with discussing and analyzing the broader set of technical requirements, including issues with system or carrier/vendor certification, operational requirements, testing process issues, successes and failures in the test process, transition intervals, and how such matters will be communicated to carriers and vendors."