Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission will hold an Open Meeting on the subjects listed below on June 13, 2014.

The FCC will hear:

• a presentation with an update on the efforts to transition circuit-switched networks to Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The presentation will include a status report on the voluntary experiments proposed by AT&T designed to assess how the transition to IP networks affects users.
• a presentation with an update on the continuing efforts to launch new and diverse voices to the American public via increased access to Low Power FM radio stations.

The FCC will consider:

• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by ADX Communications of Escambia and Pensacola seeking review of Media Bureau decisions granting assignment applications.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by The Curators of the University of Missouri seeking review of the Media Bureau’s dismissal of its rulemaking petition to reserve Channel 252C2 in Columbia, Missouri, for noncommercial educational use.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by Smile FM seeking review of the Media Bureau’s dismissal of its application for a new noncommercial educational FM station at Yates, Michigan.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by TJN seeking review of a decision by the Media Bureau dismissing its application for a new noncommercial FM station at Gold Beach, Oregon.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by Dr. Glenn W. Cherry and Charles W. Cherry, II, seeking review of several decisions by the Media Bureau.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by Chicago Public Media seeking review of a decision by the Media Bureau granting a new noncommercial educational FM station in Antioch, Illinois to BVM Helping Hands.
• A Memorandum Opinion and Order concerning an Application for Review filed by World Revivals, Inc., seeking review of a several decisions by the Media Bureau.

Matrix Telecom, a telecommunications company headquartered in Irving, Texas, will pay $875,000 to resolve an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau into whether the company failed to complete long-distance calls to rural areas on a just, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis.

Matrix will also implement a three-year plan to ensure compliance with FCC requirements designed to combat the serious problem of long-distance calls failing to complete in rural areas.

“Our nation’s telecommunications laws are based on the fundamental promise that all Americans should be able to call each other wherever they may be located,” said Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the Enforcement Bureau. “Rural America should not be treated differently, and we will continue to enforce the law to fulfill this promise.”

In its consent decree with the Enforcement Bureau, Matrix has agreed to:

• Make a payment of $875,000 to the US Treasury;
• Develop and implement a comprehensive compliance plan designed, among other things, to ensure future compliance with applicable laws;
• Designate a senior corporate manager to serve as a compliance officer focusing on rural call completion issues;
• Cooperate with the FCC and rural local exchange carriers to establish a testing program to evaluate rural call completion performance whenever complaints or data indicate problems;
• Notify intermediate providers (companies that Matrix uses to deliver calls) that may be causing call completion problems and analyze and resolve such problems as soon as practicable;
• Cease using intermediate providers that fail to improve their performance;
• Report to the FCC any noncompliance with the consent decree within 15 days; and
• File an initial compliance report in 90 days and annual reports for three years.

To remain relevant, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must stay on top of current technologies and serve as a model both for industry and other federal agencies. The FCC loses credibility when it seeks to impose rules or standards on the private sector but does not adhere to the same or similar commitments in its own operations. To this end, I suggest that two important areas are ripe for improvement:

1. Direct access to 911. Our employees and any visitors must dial 9-911 to reach help in an emergency. I asked that the agency look into options for fixing this problem. Since then, we have learned how simple reprogramming our telephone system would be. While the new dialing procedures may require some minor education of staff, this can be done relatively quickly. Also, we should hold ourselves to the same cost-benefit standards that we apply to regulatees.
2. Transitioning to IPv6. Where is the FCC in its transition? Well, it issued a consumer guide on IPv6 in 2012 to encourage the private sector to quickly move to the new standard. But the agency itself has a ways to go. In fact, only 12% of its linked subdomains are IPv6 operational. For an agency that just proposed rules and questions that aim to micromanage the way the Internet works, this is seems ironic. I am hopeful that as the FCC modernizes its website and IT infrastructure, it will also quickly complete the transition to IPv6.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules to implement the Broadcast Television Incentive Auction. The two-sided auction will use market forces to recover spectrum from television broadcasters who voluntarily choose to give up some or all of their spectrum usage rights in exchange for incentive payments, in order to auction new spectrum licenses to wireless providers.

The Incentive Auction will help meet consumers’ skyrocketing demand for mobile broadband services.

Across the country, in both rural and urban areas, consumers and businesses expect to have access to wireless connectivity anywhere, anytime. Today, there are more connected devices than there are people in the US, and about 60 percent of Americans use data-hungry smartphones. By making more spectrum available for mobile broadband use, the Incentive Auction will benefit consumers by easing congestion on wireless networks, expediting the development of new, more robust wireless services and applications and helping fill in coverage gaps particularly in rural America.

Broadcasters that choose to participate in the auction will bid to receive some of the proceeds from auctioning that spectrum to wireless providers. The auction is a once in a lifetime opportunity for broadcasters, but the decision of whether or not to participate is entirely voluntary.

The adopted rules establish the foundation for the incentive auction. Based on these rules the FCC will develop and seek additional public input on detailed, final auction procedures in the pre-auction process.

There are four parts to the rules implementing the Incentive Auction:

1. The reorganized 600 MHz Band, including repacking and unlicensed operations;
2. The Incentive Auction process and design;
3. The post-auction transition for all incumbents in the 600 MHz band; and
4. Post-transition regulatory issues, including channel sharing.

Specifically, the report and order addresses the 600 MHz band plan, incentive auction design, post-auction transition, and post-auction regulatory issues.

New Cingular Wireless PCS, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T, and Unrestricted Subsidiary Funding Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sprint, and together with AT&T have filed an application pursuant to section 310(d) of the Communications Act of 1934, seeking to assign 19 A and B Block Wireless Communications Service (WCS) licenses to AT&T from Sprint.

The proposed transaction involves only the assignment of spectrum; no subscribers would be transferred. AT&T states that the proposed license assignments would facilitate the transition of WCS spectrum to mobile broadband use and allow AT&T to make more efficient use of spectrum to provide new and better services to customers.

Preliminary review indicates that, as a result of the instant transaction, AT&T would be assigned 10 to 20 megahertz of WCS A and B Block spectrum in 713 counties in all or parts of 153 Cellular Market Areas across parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Post-transaction, AT&T would hold 36 to 165 megahertz of spectrum in total in these 713 counties.

When the Federal Communications Commission voted to restrict television broadcasters’ use of joint sales agreements (JSAs), we warned that this decision would lead to “less ownership diversity” and “more television stations going out of business.”

Unfortunately, just two months later, this is coming to pass. Now, Sinclair Television Group announced its intent to surrender to the Commission for cancellation three television station licenses in the Charleston, South Carolina and Birmingham, Alabama markets. Sinclair reported that it was unable to find a viable buyer for any of these stations. As a result, it appears that these three stations will soon be going dark.

So what has the Commission’s decision wrought? Instead of increasing the number of African-American-owned television stations, we are driving stations off the air. This will mean job losses, less service to South Carolinians and Alabamians, and less ownership diversity. We do not see how such an outcome possibly serves the public interest, and we hope that the Commission will take action immediately to correct its misguided restrictions on JSAs.

America needs to fully enter the digital age -- and that starts with our nation’s schools and libraries. I saw that for myself in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Sioux Falls is no anomaly. It’s amazing what schools and libraries across South Dakota have done with so little. Even though promoting broadband across 77,123 square miles is the definition of a high-cost endeavor, South Dakota schools have received about 30% less per student than New Jersey schools. And while the Siouxland Libraries stretch their resources so thinly that some rural libraries only operate three hours a day, library officials told me that they’ve given up applying for E-Rate funding because the process is so burdensome and the rewards for rural libraries so few.

In sum, the E-Rate program just isn’t meeting the needs of rural America. E-Rate’s funding formula favors larger, urban school districts that can afford to hire consultants to navigate the administrative process and draw every dollar E-Rate makes available to them. In contrast, E-Rate offers smaller, rural schools and libraries less funding, even when broadband costs more for them and they don’t have the resources to hire outside help.

A sad refrain I’ve heard over and over is that applying for E-Rate funding just isn’t worth the effort. That’s a digital divide we shouldn’t tolerate. The FCC needs to reform E-Rate to make it more user-friendly and target the needs of students and library patrons. A student-centered E-Rate program would cut the red tape. It would end funding inequities and focus E-Rate on connecting citizens young and old to digital opportunities.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) announces that on June 2, 2014, it will commence a 45-day public trial of a new registration system for Google’s TV band database system.

TV band databases support the operation of unlicensed devices on unused spectrum in the TV band (TV white space or “TVWS”).

Currently, Spectrum Bridge, another approved TV band database administrator, is managing the registration of protected entities on Google's behalf.

Google has now developed its own protected facility registration procedures to replace its use of the Spectrum Bridge procedures. This is a limited trial that is intended to allow the public to access and test Google’s new registration procedures to ensure that those procedures properly register certain facilities entitled to protection and that its modified database system provides protection to such registered facilities as specified in the rules.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced that the following items will be on the tentative agenda for the next open meeting scheduled for June 13, 2014.
Technology Transitions Presentation: The Commission will hear a presentation with an update on the efforts to transition circuit-switched networks to Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The presentation will include a status report on the voluntary experiments proposed by AT&T designed to assess how the transition to IP networks affects users.
Expanding Community Access to Radio: The Commission will hear a presentation with an update on the continuing efforts to launch new and diverse voices to the American public via increased access to Low Power FM radio stations

Memorial Day weekend also marks the 200th year anniversary of the first official telegraphic message sent over a long distance.

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse famously telegraphed, “What hath God wrought!” from Washington, DC, to Baltimore, the first official telegraphic message sent over of a long distance. Coincidentally, 18 years later to the day, Abraham Lincoln would send nine telegraph messages to Union generals, becoming the first President to regularly use electronic communications. Eighty years ago, Congress passed a law largely to deal with the network revolution Morse unleashed -- the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC.

Fast forward to today, and the Commission is grappling with the transition to the next network revolution -- the digital revolution that is being fueled by ubiquitous high-speed connectivity and increasingly powerful computing devices. June’s open Commission meeting will be highlighted by an update on our efforts to facilitate the transition from the circuit-switched networks of Alexander Graham Bell to a world with fiber, cable and wireless Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

Soon, the Commission will receive a status report on proposed experiments and how best to deploy next-generation networks, while preserving enduring values like universal access, competition and consumer protection. The Commission will also hear a presentation on progress made in processing Low Power FM applications from the October 2013 window.