The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily blog of telecom related regulatory activities, is a snapshot of PUC, FCC, legislative, and occasionally court issues that our regulatory monitoring team uncovers each day. Depending on their significance, some items may be the subject of a TMI Briefing.

FCC TTY to RTT Transition

At its December Open Meeting, the FCC amended its rules to allow phone companies to replace support for an outdated form of text telephone communications, known as TTY, with support for real-time text (RTT) to provide reliable telephone communications for Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, deaf-blind, or who have a speech disability. The order responds to AT&T’s petition asking the FCC to initiate a rulemaking that would authorize the industry-wide substitution of RTT for TTY technology to meet accessibility requirements on wireless networks. To fulfill this requirement, RTT services must be both compatible with existing TTY services and interoperable with RTT applications on other networks. The FCC also adopted a notice asking questions about next steps in the process of integrating these services into telecommunications relay services and the need for certain RTT features for people with cognitive disabilities and who are deaf-blind.

District of Columbia

Verizon has informed the PSC that it will participate in the FCC’s broadband Lifeline program and plans to offer Lifeline-supported broadband in areas where it offers FiOS Internet access service starting in mid-2017.

Pennsylvania

The PUC granted, pending further review of the merits, a Petition for Reconsideration of certain portions of the PUC’s order relating to implementation of relief for the 717 area code. TMI Briefing Service subscribers see Briefing dated 10/28/16. The Petition was filed by the Joint Industry Members. The Joint Industry Members request specific alterations to the implementation schedule to avoid unintended anti-consumer consequences such as implementation errors and customer confusion. The Petition suggests that instead of adopting trigger dates the PUC should set specific dates as proposed by the industry for permissive 10-digit dialing, mandatory 10-digit dialing, and the first code assignment from the new NPA. The Petitioners also ask the PUC to ensure that there is sufficient time for customer education and to allow customers to adjust to the new dialing pattern.