The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily blog of 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 Regulatory Bulletin.
TELECOM
FCC
IP Transition
The FCC issued an IP Transition Guide for consumers addressing such issues as: What is the IP Transition; Why Does the IP Transition Matter; Why Are There Experiments for the IP Transition; Will I Know If My Provider Is Conducting an Experiment in My Area; and Will the IP Transition Affect Me If My Provider Does Not Conduct an Experiment. The guide also addresses other experiments and research on the IP transition, the FCC’s plan to hold a series of workshops on the transition, and how consumers can give feedback on the IP transition, including how they can file complaints about the IP Transition.
Separately, Public Knowledge and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) challenged AT&T’s designation of certain portions of its trial proposal (see TMI’s earlier Blog article “AT&T Proposes TDM-to-IP Transition Trial” posted 4/4/14) as confidential or highly confidential. Specifically, they challenge AT&T’s confidentiality claim for: (1) the timeline of its proposed trials; and (2) the percentages of Carbon Hill’s population that will have access to wireline and/or wireless services under AT&T’s proposed trial. They argued that the trials’ timeline is “neither highly confidential nor confidential, but is critical to assessing the public interest impacts of the proposed trials. The percentages of Carbon Hill’s population that will have access to a wireline broadband alternative and/or LTE wireless service should not be treated confidentially because AT&T has already disclosed this information to the press outlet TR Daily. This information must therefore be made available for public review and discourse.”
Utah
The PSC has invited interested parties to supplement their comments or file additional comments on its draft proposed Lifeline rules in light of the technical conference held on April 8, 2014. The PSC intends to receive any comments and modify the proposed rule as appropriate before submitting the proposed rule to the formal rulemaking process. See the Regulatory Mix dated March 31, 2014. TMI Regulatory Bulletin Service subscribers, see Utah Bulletin dated December 24, 2013.
