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 Open Meeting for November Includes Business Data Services (BDS) Item

The FCC announced the tentative agenda for its November 17, 2016, Open Meeting.  The items are as follows:

• Mobility Fund: A Report and Order that would adopt rules for the second phase of the Mobility Fund, which would provide ongoing universal service support dedicated to expanding the availability of mobile broadband networks. (see below)
• Roaming Obligations of Commercial Mobile Service Providers and Regulatory Classification of Voice over LTE Service (VoLTE):  A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would seek comment on proposals to implement a unified roaming standard and to classify Voice over LTE.  (see below)
• Business Data Services: A Report and Order and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would allow for light-touch regulation of packet-based Business Data Services (BDS) and retain and update price cap regulation for lower-bandwidth TDM-based Business Data Services to ensure that lack of competition does not unfairly harm commercial customers or the consumers who rely upon these services.  See the Regulatory Mix dated 10/10/16.
• Video Description: Implementation of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010: A Report and Order which addresses the amount of video described programming required to be made available to consumers.

Chairman’s Proposal On Mobility Fund and Roaming

Separately, the Chairman released a Fact Sheet and Blog regarding his proposals for a Mobility Fund II and Roaming and VoLTE (Voice over LTE technology) classifications to be considered at the November meeting. 

Chairman Wheeler’s Mobility Fund II proposal would award a total of $470 million in annual support over five years for winning bidders to preserve and extend 4G LTE in areas where the market can’t sustain or extend service absent government support. Up to $50 million of that amount would be reserved for eligible Tribal Lands.  Eligible areas would include any portion of a census block not fully covered by unsubsidized 4G LTE coverage.  Eligible areas would initially be identified based on Form 477 data but would be subject to a process that will consider stakeholders’ challenges to ensure accurate decisions on the eligibility of particular areas.  Legacy wireless support from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund would be phased-out, with the phase-out ending July 1, 2021.  Mobility Fund II monies would be awarded after a competitive, reverse auction bidding process in which bidding and performance would be assessed by road miles covered.  Bidders would also have to meet certain service requirements such as baseline data speeds of 10/1 Megabits per second (Mbps), latency of less than 100 milliseconds (ms), and rates that are reasonably comparable to urban rates. 

The Chairman’s Data Roaming proposal would adopt a unified “just and reasonable” roaming standard for mobile voice and data.  He also proposes to adopt the same regulatory classification for mobile voice service provided via VoLTE as conventional mobile voice service.  Specifically, VoLTE, which has not been classified and is not subject to any roaming standard, would be classified as a commercial mobile service and a telecommunications service and would be subject to the proposed unified roaming standard.

Oregon Filing Rules For Certain Broadband Providers

The Oregon PUC adopted rules to facilitate the reporting requirements set out in Senate Bill 611, which enacted a property tax exemption for certain companies that invest in offering Gigabit service to a majority of their residential broadband services customers through a "qualified project" as determined by the PUC.  The rules set forth the information exempt companies must file with the PUC each year.  The PUC will use that information when making its own required reports to the legislature.