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
The FCC extended the dates for filing comments in its Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking considering changes to its special access pricing flexibility rules for price cap ILECs. The FCC intended that such comments be filed after the results of its mandatory special access data collection were available. However, the data collection has not yet begun. Accordingly, comments will now be due October 6, 2014; reply comments will be due November 17, 2014. There is still no firm due date for responses to the mandatory special access data collection. However, the FCC said it expects to begin collecting data in summer 2014.
The FCC has granted Vonage Holding Corp. a further extension of time, until April 2, 2014, to comply with the ring signaling rule that the FCC adopted as part of its Rural Call Completion Order. (The ring signaling rule prohibits all originating and intermediate providers from causing audible ringing to be sent to the caller before the called party’s service provider has signaled that the called party is being alerted. Originating and intermediate providers must also convey audio tones and announcements sent by the called party’s service provider to the calling party.) Vonage initially received an extension until March 3, 2014 See the Regulatory Mix dated 2/10/14 because it need to install a new media delivery system and could not fully validate and test the new system by the original January 31, 2014, deadline. Vonage requested the second extension of time so it could resolve technical issues that arose during the testing of the new system.