Telecom Alert - California 911 Outage Reporting Bill; UMFUS Auction; CA Bill Seeks to Prohibit Throttling During Emergencies; FCC Enforcement for Unauthorized VHF Programming; Tribal Workshop Cancelled - Vol. XVI, Issue 27
California 911 Outage Reporting Bill
Only July 10 the California Assembly Committee on Governmental Organization will consider Senate Bill 670, which if passed would require providers of telecommunications services that provide access to 911 service to notify the Office of Emergency Services whenever a community isolation outage occurs limiting the provider’s customers’ ability to make 911 calls or receive emergency notifications, within 60 minutes of discovering the outage. The bill would make the office responsible for notifying any applicable county office of emergency services and the sheriff of any county affected by the outage. All notifications would remain confidential. For more information, please contact Wes Wright (wright@khlaw.com; 202.434.4239).
UMFUS Auction
The FCC will consider a Public Notice at its July 10th Open Meeting that would establish application and bidding procedures for Auction 103, which is the incentive auction of Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service (UMFUS) licenses in the Upper 37 GHz (37.6-38.6 GHz); 39 GHz (38.6-40 GHz); and 47 GHz (47.2-48.2 GHz) bands. Auction 103 will be the Commission’s third auction of high-band 5G spectrum and its largest spectrum auction in history. The auction is scheduled to commence on December 10, 2019. For more information, please contact Wes Wright (wright@khlaw.com; 202.434.4239).
CA Bill Seeks to Prohibit Throttling During Emergencies
The California Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities, and Communications will consider Assembly Bill 1699 this week, which was recently amended to prohibit mobile internet service providers from degrading, for at least 48 hours, the lawful internet traffic of first response agencies during an emergency. During the 2018 Mendocino Complex fire, the Santa Clara Fire Department’s data services were throttled by Verizon, which impacted its ability to provide emergency services. For more information, please contact Greg Kunkle (kunkle@khlaw.com; 202.434.4187).
FCC Enforcement for Unauthorized VHF Programming
The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau issued a Citation and Order against a radio vendor for programming a licensees Land Mobile VHF radio system with the wrong frequency. The licensee was authorized to operate on certain VHF spectrum, but its radio vendor programmed the wrong VHF frequency into the licensees radios, which prompted the Bureau’s citation. The Citation and Order noted that if the vendor continues to program incorrect frequencies into radios, he may be fined up to $20,134 per day. For more information, please contact Tim Doughty (doughty@khlaw.com; 202.434.4271).
Tribal Workshop Cancelled
The FCC’s workshop to evaluate opportunities to develop more robust communications infrastructure and services in Tribal Communities has been cancelled (Vol. XVI, Issue 25).
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