New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer urged the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) Monday to “take steps” to ensure the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable (TWC) merger will expand access to Internet connectivity in New York City’s five boroughs, calling Internet connectivity the “fourth utility of the modern age.” If regulators approve the merger, Comcast would be required to abide by TWC’s franchise agreement with New York City -- but it should have a more detailed plan to address connectivity issues in the city, Stringer said. The PSC should also “engage in appropriate oversight” ensuring Comcast meets its commitments to low-income New York residents, he said. The New York PSC should also “carefully examine” Comcast’s net neutrality commitment as part of its review, Stringer said. New York state law has effectively declared ISPs as common carriers, requiring ISPs to “provide publicly offered conduit services on demand to any similarly situated user on substantially similar terms, subject to the availability of facilities and capacity,” he said. Stringer criticized Comcast for being “willing to sacrifice net neutrality in order to squeeze additional payment out of content providers, such as Netflix” and other content providers. The PSC should examine whether Comcast’s agreement with Netflix is “a sign that the company is eroding this principle in a manner that conflicts with the public interest,” Stringer said (http://bit.ly/1pbXX5p).

NARUC Telecom Committee Chairman Chris Nelson repeated NARUC’s previously stated positions on the FCC’s open docket (12-375) on inmate calling services during a meeting last week with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and Clyburn aide Rebekah Goodheart while all three were at the NARUC meeting in Dallas, NARUC said in a filing posted Tuesday. NARUC generally opposes “arguments that would expand the FCC’s jurisdiction to intrastate toll rates or unnecessarily supplant existing State Public Service Commission decisions over this service,” NARUC said. The group said the FCC’s original NPRM acknowledges that intrastate ISC rates are “set by the States” (http://bit.ly/1nyuK9o).

Time Warner Cable told the Los Angeles city government Friday that it’s in the best position to help build the city’s potential municipal broadband network. The city had issued a request for information (RFI) on a municipal network that’s gigabit-capable and can serve a mix of residential, business and government customers. Time Warner Cable told Los Angeles that its current network and planned improvements are capable of delivering the requirements included in the RFI. The operator has invested more than $1.5 billion on its network infrastructure in the Los Angeles area over the past four years, which in conjunction with its new Gigasphere technology “positions us to be able to introduce gigabit-per-second speeds in 2016,” said Peter Stern, chief strategy, people and corporate development officer, in a news release. “Leveraging our existing network allows us to deliver these speeds faster and with less disruption than any other provider” (http://bit.ly/1kDKIcd).

AT&T said it’s officially adding Carrboro, North Carolina, as a target city for its GigaPower 1 Gbps fiber to the home network services. Carrboro’s town government reached an agreement to allow AT&T deployment of the services within town limits as part of the North Carolina Next Generation Network’s (NCNGN) initiative. NCNGN’s five other participant cities have also reached agreements with AT&T -- Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh and Winston-Salem, AT&T said (http://soc.att.com/1jCM3Ff).

Two “progressive” state-level policy groups -- the Progressive States Network (PSN) and American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE) -- said they're combining to more effectively push state-level legislation. “For nearly a generation, conservatives have outpaced us at the business of movement-building in states,” ALICE and PSN said in a joint statement Wednesday. “They have focused hard on it, poured resources into it, and have been ruthlessly efficient at it. Starting now, we will do the same” (http://bit.ly/WkGj8Y). The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is considered the main group advocating for conservative policies at the state level, though ALICE and PSN didn’t mention the group. ALICE Executive Director Nick Rathod will lead the combined group once they're joined in the fall, ALICE and PSN said.

Frontier Communications continues to believe there are “numerous public interest benefits” to its proposed buy of AT&T’s wireline assets in Connecticut, Executive Vice President-External Affairs Kathleen Abernathy and Frontier lawyers told Daniel Alvarez, wireline aide to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in a phone call Monday, Frontier said in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 14-22. The deal, announced in December, will allow Frontier to “expand 10 Mbps broadband services to an additional 100,000 Connecticut homes that lack 10 Mbps service today,” Frontier said. The telco said it committed to making “middle-mile” improvements in the network that include construction of a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer ultra-high specification fiber network. The improved network will increase network capacity in the state tenfold, which Frontier said means it can provide 10 gigabit service to customers in the state (http://bit.ly/1ruE2Ck).

Expectations remained unclear Monday for the outcome of the NARUC Telecom Committee’s expected vote on a net neutrality resolution. The resolution, introduced by committee member and Vermont Public Service Board member John Burke, would encourage the FCC to use the Telecom Act’s Title II and Section 706 as the jurisdictional basis as it creates new net neutrality rules (CD July 14 p6). Burke told us Monday the staff subcommittee on telecom had given a positive reception to the resolution over the weekend, but he was unsure how the full Telecom Committee would act. NARUC General Counsel Brad Ramsay said industry representatives could comment Tuesday, before the committee votes. Burke told us he expects opposition from many of those representatives. Several Telecom Committee members told us Monday they were undecided on their position. Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner James Cawley said he was “genuinely not sure” how he would vote. District of Columbia Public Service Commission Chairwoman Betty Ann Kane said she needed to review revisions to the original resolution before she decided. Telecom Committee Vice Chairwoman Catherine Sandoval, a member of the California Public Utilities Commission, declined to comment on her position.

The Vermont Department of Public Service (DPS) asked the FCC Wednesday to waive the Aug. 10, 2013, deadline that the Wireline Bureau had imposed for the department to file a written description of the process the state’s Department for Children and Families (DCF) would use to provide eligible telecommunications carriers electronic notice that a potential Lifeline subscriber was accepted or rejected due to duplicative support within five days of an application’s receipt (http://bit.ly/1sCV9Si). The Wireline Bureau had imposed the deadline in a February 2013 order conditionally granting the Department of Public Service’s certification to drop out of the National Lifeline Accountability Database (http://bit.ly/1ka7fNL). DCF electronically notifies ETCs if a subscriber has been accepted or rejected within five days of receiving the application, meeting the requirement by Aug. 1, 2013, DPS said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s E-rate draft order to use $2 billion in unused funds for Wi-Fi internal connections is “greatly needed,” but the commission’s “first priority should be focused on making sure each and every school building and public library is connected to the Internet with fiber or the fastest broadband connection available,” said the Nebraska Public Service Commission in a letter filed Tuesday as an ex parte communication (http://bit.ly/1oyJLnT) in docket 13-184. The PSC is concerned about Wheeler’s proposal to allocate funds to schools on a per-student basis instead of based on the cost of a project. Assumptions made in what Wheeler circulated in an order to shift funds from voice and other services towards Wi-Fi “significantly overestimates the savings,” commented the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (http://bit.ly/1oyLwkZ). The phase-out “would equal only about $675 million; nowhere near the additional $3 billion needed to implement the Commission’s $5 billion plan,” the association said. The FCC considers an E-rate order Friday, and it may be a party-line vote (CD July 9 p1) (See separate report above.)

National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) President Colette Honorable nominated Idaho Public Service Commission President Paul Kjellander and West Virginia Public Service Commissioner Ryan Palmer Tuesday to the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services. NARUC nominates seven of the FCC conference’s members (http://bit.ly/U4zbvM).