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.

Broadband Opportunity Council Progress Report

The Council reported that the 25 participating agencies have made considerable progress toward completing their commitments.  These actions further the goals of modernizing federal programs to expand program support for broadband investments; empowering communities with tools and resources to attract broadband investment and promote meaningful use; promoting increased broadband deployment and competition through expanded access to federal assets; and improving data collection, analysis, and research on broadband.  Read the report here.

FCC Deployment of Small Cell Infrastructure

The FCC has extended the time for filing comments and reply comments in its proceeding on actions it could take to help expedite the deployment of next generation (5G) wireless infrastructure.  TMI Briefing Service subscribers see Briefing dated 1/4/17.  Comments are now due March 8, 2017, and reply comments are due April 7, 2017.  The previous dates were February 6, 2017, and March 8, 2017, respectively.

FCC Universal Service Monitoring Report, Including Broadband

The FCC’s Wireline Competition released the 2016 Universal Service Monitoring Report.  The report includes data through September 2016 and is designed to monitor the impact of various universal service support mechanisms and the method used to finance them. The report includes data on industry revenue, USF funding requirements, contribution factors, voice and Internet subscribership, and the low-income, high-cost, schools and libraries (E-rate), and rural health care support mechanisms. The appendix provides additional information about high cost support, including the accepted Connect America Fund support for fixed and mobile services, authorized rural broadband experiments, and information on broadband deployment by ILECs. 

Among other things, the Report indicates there was a 4% increase in the number of census blocks where rate-of-return ILECs offer fixed service with at least 4 Mbps/1 Mbps speeds, and there was a 10.7% increase in the number of census blocks where rate-of-return ILECs reported offering fixed service with at least 10 Mbps/1 Mbps speeds. During this time period, price cap ILECs saw a significant increase in the number of census blocks where they reported the deployment of 4/1 Mbps and 10/1 Mbps — an increase of 32% and 23.7% respectively.