AT&T and Granite Telecommunications agreed to extend their commercial deal for delivering what they called high quality communications products and services to Granite customers through 2017. Granite is a wholesale customer of AT&T, Granite said Tuesday in a news release. Granite is a participant in AT&T’s IP transition trials in Alabama and Florida. AT&T “is committed to helping Granite and all of our wholesale customers succeed in their growth,” said Rob Dapkiewicz, vice president-wholesale services.

The federal government is unlikely to seek major changes to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework Version 1.0 “in the near future,” said Ari Schwartz, White House National Security Council senior director-cybersecurity, during a NIST workshop Wednesday. NIST is holding the workshop to collect stakeholders' input on their use of the framework since its release in February so the agency can make tweaks. “We feel that the framework is an excellent product” that currently requires only minor updates, Schwartz said. Information and communications technology sector stakeholders have said in comments to NIST that it’s still too early to fully evaluate the framework because the sector is still working to adapt the framework for sector-wide use (see 1410140173). AT&T Assistant Vice President-Global Public Policy Chris Boyer cautioned NIST during the workshop “not to rush too quickly” to make major changes to the framework. The Version 1.0 framework still needs time to “ferment,” particularly given ongoing work within the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) Working Group 4 to adapt the framework for the communications sector, Boyer said. AT&T was an early adopter of the NIST framework and is an active participant in CSRIC Working Group 4’s efforts, Boyer said. The telco is “optimistic” that the FCC’s overall efforts on cybersecurity “are turning in the right direction,” he said. CSRIC Working Group 4 remains on track to release a final report and recommendations on communications sector use of the NIST framework in March (see 1409240046).

Bright House Networks said it will increase speeds on its most popular high-speed data Internet packages starting in December. It plans to offer download speeds of up to 150 Mbps for new and existing customers, it said Tuesday in a news release. Its standard service will move from 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps, and Lightning 90 service will move from 90 Mbps to 150 Mbps, it said. Speeds for Lightning 30 and Lightning 60 services also will increase, Bright House said. The increases come at no additional charge to existing customers who have subscribed to these packages, it said.

The FCC International Bureau released a filing manual aimed at providing instructions for filing annual traffic and revenue and circuit capacity reports. A traffic and revenue report must be filed by any U.S. international authorization holder, “whether or not it provided any International Telecommunications Service during the preceding calendar year,” it said in the filing manual released Friday (http://bit.ly/1tRlwZy). Circuit capacity reports must be filed by any U.S. international carrier that owned or leased bare capacity on a submarine cable between the U.S. and any foreign point on Dec. 31 of the reporting period, it said. There are filing instructions for affiliated corporations and for merged entities. The earliest dates that the FCC will accept filings will be specified annually by the bureau in a public notice, it said.

EarthLink will use Bandwidth’s nationwide emergency services network to manage 911 routing for all of its business and residential endpoints, Bandwidth said Thursday. The emergency services network is operationally efficient, “allowing EarthLink to leverage Bandwidth’s consolidated nationwide database of customer endpoints and nationwide emergency call routing platform,” Bandwidth said. “The end result is a more efficient way of servicing customers, while providing them extremely reliable emergency services.” Bandwidth’s network “meets all of the public safety requirements for our customers and also allows us to deploy the next-generation IP voice applications that our customers demand,” said John Dobbins, EarthLink executive vice president-network operations, in a news release (http://bit.ly/1DFjz3z).

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will seek to define privacy at a Nov. 12 event in Washington, it said Wednesday. The public meeting will include discussions “with industry representatives, academics, technologists, government personnel, and members of the advocacy community,” the PCLOB notice said (http://1.usa.gov/1rqFBOZ). “While the Board will address the definition of privacy in the context of government counterterrorism programs, it is also interested in what conceptual interests are involved in the protection of privacy, how the impact of technology has affected privacy, what privacy interests have been identified by government privacy officials, what lessons have been learned in the private sector, and what the best way is for government to address privacy concerns.” Stakeholders can submit comments on the topic, PCLOB said. It will be 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Washington Marriott Georgetown Hotel. The event is expected to include four panels, but panelists haven't been announced.

A series of defendants agreed to pay nearly $10 million in a settlement with the FTC for allegedly using text messages to lure customers into a "robocalling" scam. Many customers received illegal robocalls, phony "free" merchandise offers "and unauthorized charges crammed on their mobile phone bills," the FTC said Wednesday in a news release (http://1.usa.gov/1t5fylY). The first set of defendants is required to pay $7.8 million, and the second set must pay $1.4 million, it said. Another set of defendants must pay $100,000 plus proceeds from the sale of certain assets, after an $8 million judgment was suspended "due to the defendants' inability to pay," FTC said. The defendants are banned from illegally telemarketing consumers through robocalling, it said. The commission also dropped charges against two defendants in the cases.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence updated its surveillance assessment and recent shifts in practices, in an 11-page report (http://1.usa.gov/1t2TKqU) released Friday. It included four principles on collection of surveillance intelligence -- that such activities should be guided by statute or executive order, that they should incorporate privacy and civil liberties concerns, that collection of foreign private commercial and trade information should happen only in the name of security concerns and that such activities should be “tailored as feasible.” There should be limits on the use of data collected in bulk, it said. The report provided details of progress in response to President Barack Obama’s ambitions on surveillance overhaul, as outlined in January. “In the coming months, we will continue to work to complete this review,” ODNI said in an accompanying blog post (http://1.usa.gov/ZD7tZl).

A report by NTIA shows that broadband adoption has progressed faster than any other communications technology, but efforts to increase adoption aren’t complete. The data in the report released last week (see 1410160046) shows home adoption is still growing “despite the fact that the remainder of non-adopting households are some of the most difficult to reach,” NCTA said in a news release (http://bit.ly/10enCWs). Data also shows that relevance is a difficult and “entrenched” problem “that requires creative solutions targeted at the diverse communities that are affected,” it said, referring to the finding that 48 percent of non-Internet households claimed not to have an interest in home broadband. While the report acknowledges expense as a reason for non-adoption, it "fails to unpack the variety of hardware, software, and service components that together make up the expense of adopting broadband.” Without data on these expense elements, some may wrongly attribute the totality of such costs solely to ISPs, “when in reality such expenses can be related to several factors,” it said.

The FCC International Bureau formally terminated docket 04-398, following up on a 2004 notice of inquiry seeking data and analysis on the effect of foreign mobile termination rates on U.S. customers. “With the passage of time, this Notice and the record in this proceeding have become outdated,” the bureau said Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1v9IzNy). The FCC also recently revised reporting requirements “to track more effectively the different settlement rates for fixed and mobile networks,” the bureau said.