Week ending August 21, 2026

Joshua Tabler, a telecom field engineer in Camas, Washington, filed a Section 1.401 petition on Wednesday asking the Commission to create a “Protected IP Communications” service category for fire alarm and elevator emergency circuits. It landed in WC 25-304 the same week six individual comments arrived in WC 25-209, the fourth docket of the same all-IP cluster.

A petition to put a floor under life-safety circuits in the IP transition

Tabler’s petition starts from the installed base rather than the network. NFPA 72 fire alarm signaling and ASME A17.1 elevator emergency telephone requirements were written around POTS performance parameters — guaranteed loop current, central office battery, a supervised electrical loop the panel can monitor continuously. Copper retirement removed those parameters without replacing them. “The Commission’s regulatory framework has, in effect, pulled one leg from the table without providing a replacement,” Tabler writes.

The de facto bridge is the analog telephone adapter, and the petition spends most of its length on why it is inadequate for the application. An ATA “does not report loss of connectivity to the alarm panel or the monitoring center in real time; it does not carry its own battery backup sufficient for extended power outages; it does not prioritize the life-safety traffic it carries; it has no cybersecurity controls — no encryption, no authentication, no anomaly detection.” The specific asks follow from that list: a 99.999% uptime floor, TLS 1.3 on all life-safety signaling, MFA on management interfaces, mandatory incident reporting, 24 hours of battery at every node carrying a protected circuit, a defined priority traffic class, network-level supervision, and a UL/NFPA/ASME-coordinated “Listed Life-Safety IP Communicator” standard replacing the off-the-shelf ATA. Section 214 approvals would be conditioned on the carrier identifying affected life-safety circuits and offering transition assistance first.

The petition also argues the gap cannot be closed at the state level or in the NG911 proceeding. NG911 in WT 21-479 covers the consumer-to-PSAP path and, in Tabler’s reading, “does not address the transport of life-safety signaling from installed building systems (fire panels, elevator emergency phones, alarm communicators) through carrier networks to monitoring centers.” State commissions that once policed POTS quality of service lost that authority when the replacement service became an information service. “No patchwork of state regulations can impose uniform, nationwide requirements on carriers operating IP networks across state lines.” He cites Sections 201, 202, 214, 251 and 255, Title III, and the NET 911 Improvement Act.

Six individual comments also came in on WC 25-209, “Reducing Barriers to Network Improvements and Service Changes,” between Monday and Wednesday.

NCLC takes the numbering NPRM to the state attorneys general

Patrick Crotty of the National Consumer Law Center spoke on a numbering panel at the National Association of Attorneys General 2026 Robocall Summit on August 19, alongside Edward Krachmer, Deputy Division Chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau’s Competition Policy Division. NCLC’s ex parte, filed Friday across WC 26-49, 20-67, 13-97 and 07-243, says the discussion covered FCC 26-17 and that Crotty reiterated NCLC’s positions on “certification requirements for resellers of phone numbers, reporting requirements for numbering assignments, and number cycling.”

Reseller certification and assignment reporting both push recordkeeping obligations down to entities that today obtain numbers without direct access to numbering resources. Number cycling — aging intervals and reassignment practice — overlaps the reassigned-number rules already running under CG 17-59. NCLC filed the underlying reply comments jointly with NASUCA, Consumer Action, the National Consumers League and CFA.

CGB clears the petition backlog and gets three dismissals handed back

On Monday, CGB Chief Eduard Bartholme signed an Order on Reconsideration reinstating applications for review from Anderson + Wanca, Career Counseling Services and Cin-Q Automobiles that the Bureau had dismissed with prejudice in May under DA 26-465. All three petitioners attached sworn declarations that no mailed notice of the pending dismissal ever reached them. The Bureau granted reconsideration on the notice showing and expressly declined to reach the substance: “we express no opinion on the merits of the underlying applications for review.” It separately denied Akin Gump’s motion for extension of time to oppose the Cin-Q petition, filed seven days after the opposition deadline, noting that “[i]t is the policy of the Commission that extensions of time shall not be routinely granted.”

On Wednesday the Bureau announced its intent to dismiss twenty-four more petitions filed between 2003 and 2023, on the ground that they “have gone without advocacy for several years.” Two of the twenty-four sit in CG 17-59 rather than the TCPA dockets: Pragmatic Deliveries’ November 2021 petition to revise the Reassigned Number Database technical requirements, and Hustle, Inc.’s March 2022 petition for waiver of the RND fee requirements. Both predate the current database’s operating history by enough that dismissal is the likely outcome, but the objection mechanism is the same one that just produced DA 26-862 — a letter in the docket within 45 days of Federal Register publication, and the petition stays alive.

Honorable mentions

Atlantic Carrier Group, a pre-launch New Jersey CLEC, asked the Commission under Section 0.459 to withhold the identity of its sole principal from the robocall mitigation program description accompanying its Robocall Mitigation Database certification, arguing that public association of that name with ACG before launch “would expose the principal to a substantial risk of retaliation or other adverse employment consequences” because the principal is currently employed elsewhere in the industry. The request covers Section 2 of the program description and nothing else.

The FTC settled with doxo for $2.1 million on Monday over search ads and landing pages that presented the bill-payment intermediary as the official payment channel for Labcorp, AT&T and state toll authorities. Co-founders Steve Shivers and Roger Parks are named. The Commission published a companion consumer alert on bill-pay impersonators the same week.

NfinityLink Communications requested an extension of its September 8 removal, replacement and disposal deadline under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, File No. SC-EX0001502 in WC 18-89.

Looking ahead

The 45-day objection clock on DA 26-867 starts at Federal Register publication; whether anyone files for the two RND petitions is the thing worth checking, since DA 26-862 just demonstrated that a single letter reverses the outcome. Expect more ex parte traffic on FCC 26-17 now that the reply round is closed and the NPRM is being worked in panels rather than filings. Tabler’s petition needs a public notice seeking comment before it becomes a proceeding — WCB has discretion on timing, and Section 1.401 petitions from individual engineers frequently sit. And FTC-2026-0859, the Commission’s proposed policy statement on suppression of accuracy in AI systems, has an open comment file that started moving the day this window opened.