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 announced that the following items are tentatively on the agenda for the September 17, 2015, Open Commission Meeting:
• Modernizing Contest Rules – The FCC will consider a Report and Order to provide broadcasters greater flexibility in their disclosure of contest terms.
• Submarine Cable Reliability – The FCC will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to require submarine cable licensees to report outages.
NANPA
The North American Numbering Plan Administration announced (in Planning Letter 486) that as of August 27, 2015, there were 30 577-NXXs available for assignment. Based upon the available supply and the forecasted demand, the 5XX-NXX resource is projected to exhaust in the fourth quarter of 2015. The Industry Numbering Committee (INC) has agreed that the 588 NPA will be used as the next 5XX NPA. 5XX-NXX codes are used for applications which are non-geographic in nature, are not assigned to rate centers and may or may not traverse the Public Switched Telephone Network, but do require an E.164 addressing scheme. The use of this NANP numbering resource is to communicate with both fixed and mobile devices, some of which may be unattended. This resource may also be used for applications enabling machines, which would include but not be limited to wireless devices and appliances, with the ability to share information with back-office control and data base systems and the people that use them. Service is limited only by terminal and network capabilities and restrictions imposed by the service provider.
