Telecommunication

The Federal Communications Commission approved updates to various Commission rules for hearing aid compatibility and volume control on wireline and wireless telephones. Under the Hearing Aid Compatibility Act, the Commission is required to establish rules that ensure access by people with hearing loss to telephones manufactured or imported for use in the United States.

With today’s action, the Commission continues its efforts to ensure that tens of millions of Americans with hearing loss have access to and can benefit from critical and modern communication technologies and services. With the Order, the Commission adopted a revised volume control standard for wireline handsets to provide a more accurate measurement of voice amplification. The Order also implements a provision of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act to apply all the Commission’s hearing aid compatibility requirements to wireline telephones used with advanced communication services, including phones used with Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services. Compliance with these provisions must be achieved within two years.

The Federal Communications Commission eliminated the requirement that US providers of international telecommunications services file annual Traffic and Revenue Reports. The FCC also streamlined the requirements for filing Circuit Capacity Reports. These actions minimize the costs to both industry and the Commission while providing the Commission with the information it needs to fulfill its statutory obligations and protect US consumers and carriers.

The Report and Order finds that the costs of the traffic and revenue data collection now exceed the benefits of the FCC collecting the information from international service providers on an annual basis. Instead, the Commission will rely, as necessary, on targeted data requests to international service providers, in combination with third-party commercial data sources, to achieve its statutory objectives. Today’s action also concludes that the benefits of the Circuit Capacity Reports continue to justify the estimated costs of this data collection. However, the Commission streamlines the reporting by eliminating the requirement that carriers file circuit data for terrestrial and satellite facilities. The data from the Circuit Capacity Reports that will continue to be collected are necessary for the Commission to fulfill its statutory obligations, including those related to national security and public safety, and will continue to play a vital public interest role for other federal agencies.

There's widespread agreement that prisoners in the US pay far too much for phone calls, but several of the Federal Communications Commission's attempts to cap those prices have been blocked in court. One of the biggest obstacles is that phone companies have to pay large "site commissions" to prisons and jails in order to win the exclusive right to offer phone service to inmates. Prison phone company Correct Solutions Group has a contract with the Union Parish Detention Center that requires it to pay the jail a commission of 60 percent of the total gross revenue of phone calls.

Call prices have sometimes hit $14 a minute because of the high per-minute rates and various fees applied to inmate calls, according to the FCC. In October 2015, the FCC voted to impose caps of 11¢ to 22¢ per minute on all interstate and intrastate inmate calling prices. The October 2015 ruling did not ban site commissions, but the FCC wanted the new limits to encourage a shift away from the payments. If the FCC's proposed caps had fully taken effect, inmates would today be paying much lower prices, and prisons and jails would likely have had to accept lower commission payments. But after voting to limit prices, the FCC repeatedly had to go back to the drawing board when judges threw out certain parts of the price cap rulings.

[Commentary] No matter how valuable the Lifeline program is in theory, it’s wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. It allows the telecommunications carriers who profit from the program to verify eligibility for their participants — and too many are turning a blind eye. Lifeline was poorly structured and badly executed from the start. The goal of providing low-income Americans help regaining their economic footing with phone and broadband service is worthwhile and admirable — but that doesn’t mean that any plan doing that is worthy of unequivocal support.

Sidestepping the problems in this terribly run program is a disservice to all participants as well as those footing the bill, and will endanger the program’s existence if we allow it to continue. I’ll remain engaged on this issue and committed to serious changes. In the meantime, I encourage my party, as well as my friends from across the aisle, to join me in pushing for oversight and accountability regardless of its political convenience.

[Commentary] There is one aspect of criminal justice reform that the current administration has tragically ignored: the broken market for inmate calling services.

Inmate calling is a horribly malfunctioning system that not only adversely impacts inmates and their families, but our society as a whole. Providers of inmate calling services compete and win business not based on being the lowest-cost bidder, as is customary for most requests for proposals to governmental agencies. Rather, they win contracts based on which of them is willing to pay the most in kickbacks (they call them “commissions”) to those correctional facilities. The result is not the lowest cost service for inmates and their families, but instead, rates for phone calls that have been as high as $14 per minute.

The FCC should end the practice of picking and choosing, ignoring and punting, while an unarguably dysfunctional market regime preys on the most vulnerable. The FCC can and should adopt targeted rules to address the costs of interstate calls. States and localities can and should reform their practices to cap rates and eliminate kickbacks. And Congress can and should enact a legislative solution that provides a firm legal foundation for further inmate calling reforms. Private litigation could also attack these practices, and some lawsuits have already been filed. But policymakers should also work to help new services and technologies enter the marketplace, to increase competition and lower prices. There is no good policy reason why an inmate’s family should have to use the most antiquated and expensive systems to communicate with loved ones when viable alternatives exist. The time to act is now.

Two senators are pushing a robocaller to explain how he ran his operation, which was subject to the largest-ever fine handed down by the Federal Communications Commission on the matter.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) and Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection Jerry Moran (R-KS) sent a letter to Adrian Abramovich on Oct 11, asking him to explain how his robocalling operation worked and what he’s doing to mitigate any harm he may have caused. In June, the FCC fined Abramovich $122 million for his robocall company, which allegedly conducted almost 100 million illegal automated calls attempting to lure individuals into buying vacation packages and time shares. To whom Abramovich directed the calls is unclear, but robocall scams often target vulnerable groups like the elderly who may not be aware of what they’re agreeing to. The FCC said that Abramovich’s calls were uniquely problematic because they “disrupted the operations of an emergency medical paging provider.” “For lawmakers, the FCC’s identification of an alleged spoofing mastermind offers the opportunity to learn specific information about operations, partners, and the business model, which may provide valuable insight for future legislation,” Chairman Thune said.

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still mostly an island deleted from the present and pushed back a century or so—with little clean water, little electric power, and almost no telecommunications. For telecom, the biggest problem is the lack of power, because most of the island’s transmission lines were knocked out.

“We have to reconstruct the power grid as if we were dropping into the middle of the desert and starting from scratch,” says Luis Romero, vice president of the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Alliance. “Then on top of that would go the telecommunications services.” Puerto Rico’s telecom carriers, who are fiercely competitive, have banded together “to provide communication to people in despair,” Romero says. “But basically we’re on our own here.” And no one knows what’ll happen when the diesel that’s keeping all those generators humming runs out.

Public Knowledge, Consumer Federation of America, and New Networks Institute filed an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit requesting the Court to overturn and remand the Federal Communications Commission’s recent Business Data Services deregulation Order. Public Knowledge argues that the agency’s competition analysis, which found that duopoly competition -- real or potential -- is “sufficient” to discipline market power and high prices in the BDS market, is ludicrous. The Commission’s analysis is inconsistent with competition law and unsupported by the record, and the Order will lead to higher prices in the BDS market, which consumers will ultimately pay.

September 2017 will long be remembered for devastating storms. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria each caused billions of dollars in damage, claimed the lives of many Americans, and disrupted millions more. They also reminded us how important communications networks can be during emergencies—and that the Federal Communications Commission has a role to play in helping keep people safe.

I recently had the chance to see these factors at play firsthand. I traveled to South Florida with Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to survey the impact of Hurricane Irma. I then flew directly to Indiana, where I resumed my ongoing tour of U.S. communities impacted by the digital divide...Next Generation 911 offers great potential for the future of public safety. But too many jurisdictions are struggling with how to transition from their legacy systems to NG911. There are significant costs involved, not to mention other issues, like the need for enhanced training of 911 call takers and ensuring that NG911 deployment is standards-based. All of us need to think creatively about how to address these issues going forward.

Hurricane Maria has had a catastrophic impact on communications networks in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The Federal Communications Commission has been doing a lot to assist with repair and restoration—and that work continues. That’s why I am proposing that the FCC use its Universal Service Fund to help with these efforts. Responding to natural disasters has consumed the bulk of the FCC’s time and attention this season. But there are other important areas under our jurisdiction, and we’ll cover some of them at our upcoming meeting on October 24.