Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Mexico’s New Broadband Affordability Plan

The legislature in New Mexico approved a broadband affordability plan, which it labels as LITAP (Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program). This plan is intended as a direct replacement of the expired federal Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP).

Like the ACP plan, the New Mexico plan would provide a $30 monthly subsidy to qualified households, with up to $75 for those living on tribal lands. The total subsidy is capped at $10 million in the first year, and up to $45 million in future years.

The plan will be funded by the existing State Rural Universal Service Fund (SRUSF), which is administered by the Public Regulatory Commission. This program has historically been funded by surcharges on customer bills for telephone, VoIP, or cellular service. The SRUSF is currently being used to subsidize telephone bills, carrier support for access charges, and for broadband programs to help bring broadband to rural areas. The current surcharge on customers is $0.61 per month for 2026, down from $1.13 in 2024. It’s estimated that when the LITAP plan goes fully into effect, the surcharge might climb to $2 per month.

One feature of the legislation is that this new broadband subsidy will supersede the existing subsidies for telephone service. The legislation requires any ISP that uses the revised program to participate in the Lifeline program. The federal plan currently provides a $9.25 monthly subsidy for eligible households, and up to $34.25 on qualifying tribal lands.

Households will be eligible for the subsidy if they participate in two New Mexico plans for need-based health care assistance, or for “at-risk” students in the home. LITAP will also be available for any customer who is eligible for the federal Lifeline program. When fully funded at $45 million, the new fund will subsidize approximately 120,000 households.

The legislation was prompted by a recognition by legislators that affordability is the largest barrier to residents buying broadband. This makes sense in the state since New Mexico is ranked 46th in terms of household incomes. The state has also consistently been in the top three of states with the highest level of poverty.

This is the first state plan I’ve seen that largely mimics the now-defunct federal ACP subsidy. New York has a plan that requires larger ISPs to offer $15 rates to qualified low-income households. Hopefully the New Mexico plan will be welcomed by ISPs in the State, particularly those who are building grant-funded networks. This plan will make it far easier to achieve needed customer penetration rates.

It seems unlikely that the new plan can easily be challenged in court. The SRUSF was created in 1999 and has been providing subsidies for telephone bills since its inception.

Perhaps this will prompt other states to do something similar. There are a lot of other states that already have a Universal Service Fund for telecom that is based on surcharges to customers.

AI Needs Quality Upload Speeds

The pandemic exposed a huge weakness in cable company networks when it became clear that their networks did not have enough upload capacity to support people working and schooling from home. That period when people struggled to work from home might have been the trigger to convince millions of people that fiber was superior to cable technology. The cable companies reacted quickly and goosed upload speeds to the range of 30-40 Mbps. Since then, they have slowly been upgrading to much faster upload speeds using mid-splits and DOCSIS 4.0.

A recent article from Ookla suggests that the same need for faster upload speeds might be coming for cellular networks due to the way that people are starting to use AI in daily life. The article provides some examples of ways we might use AI in the near future. A person might scan a menu in a restaurant, and AI can provide real-time feedback to estimate the calories in each dish or highlight foods that might trigger an allergic reaction. This would require quickly uploading a picture of the menu to provide quick feedback. That’s not a data-intensive transaction, but consider instead using AI to provide real-time feedback to somebody walking around in a foreign city. AI could translate signs and describe the nature of stores or shops as they come into view.

 

U.S. cellular companies have allocated the smallest percentage of bandwidth to upload compared to the major cell providers around the world. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have allocated between 6.6% and 7.1% of total bandwidth capacity to upload. In contrast, China Telecom and China Unicom have allocated over 16% of bandwidth to upload.

In writing this blog, I took a speed test on AT&T and got a speed of 381/11 Mbps on my cellphone. I note this is the fastest download speed I’ve ever received on AT&T, by a lot, and shows the impact of the AT&T’s recent introduction of the spectrum acquired from EchoStar. I took several other tests with similar results, and at my house, the upload speeds are only about 3% of total bandwidth.

American cellular carriers seem to be in a race to claim the fastest network for bragging rights, and this has led them to maximize download speeds to an extreme degree. I doubt that many people are complaining except for folks who are trying to stream video from their phone. When I swap my phone over to WiFi, the upload speed in my Charter connection is more than 10 times faster than the AT&T cellular upload connection.

The article points out that carriers have options to boost upload speeds. The one that is discussed the most in the article is to convert cellular networks to dynamic TDD (time division duplexing), which would allow the phone to assign bandwidth available to the phone to either download or upload, according to the immediate need.

But that fix alone wouldn’t solve the problem, because a carrier would need to beef up the entire network in the upload direction to handle larger volumes of uploaded data. There are other interesting limitations. For example, if a carrier uses shared spectrum like CBRS for uploading, then setting a faster upload would have to be coordinated with the other major users of the spectrum to synchronize the network clocks.

The Ookla article also demonstrates that handsets can be a limitation by showing the upload speeds that can be achieved on different generations of Samsung Galaxy phones. with lower upload capability on older phones.

The slow upload speed on my tests might be an anomaly, but before AT&T introduced the new spectrum, my upload speeds were rarely faster than 5 Mbps. Ookla says that median upload speeds in the second half of 2025 were 18 Mbps for AT&T, 21 Mbps for Verizon, and 27 Mbps for T-Mobile – all slow in comparison to fiber and upgraded cable technologies.

Are Spectrum Licenses Property?

There is an interesting lawsuit in the U.S Court of Appeals for the case of Ligado Networks, LLC v. United States.  Ligado Networks filed a suit that alleges that the U.S. government unlawfully took its licensed spectrum without due compensation in favor of use by the Department of Defense. The spectrum involved in the suit is L-band spectrum, which sits next to spectrum actively used by DoD for GPS.

The government is arguing in the case that it has the right to take back spectrum when it’s needed for defense purposes. The government is arguing that Ligado doesn’t have a relevant property interest in the spectrum.

For some background, Ligado was granted the spectrum in 2020 by the FCC to use for a satellite-based 5G cellular network. The DoD opposed that license award at the time, and after the FCC awarded the spectrum, the DoD effectively cancelled the Ligado use of the spectrum in opposition to what the FCC had recently ordered. Ligado declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025, citing the loss of the spectrum that would have been the basis for its business.

Ligado is arguing that what the government is doing is a taking, and that the government could claim any spectrum without compensating the spectrum owner.

USTelecom wrote a brief in the case in support of Ligado Networks. USTelecom argues that its members spend billions of dollars to buy spectrum, and billions more to build networks that use the spectrum. They argue that the government’s actions in this case undermine the ability of carriers to rely on spectrum, which will dampen the willingness to spend a lot of money for spectrum that could be taken away at any time.

The suit should be of interest to WISPs since there is a possibility that the FCC could reclaim CMRS spectrum to meet the Congressional mandate to to find more spectrum for  cellular auctions. The WISP industry has been working hard to protect that spectrum, but this case has to make them nervous.

USTelecom further argues that the government could use the same logic to argue that it could take back rights-of-way or other uses of public lands. In case that sounds far-fetched, the Supreme Court of Georgia recently ruled that local governments can withdraw contracts that granted rights-of-way, by relying on an argument that no contract can last forever, with no end date. The Georgia rights-of-way will likely be renegotiated. But the principle is bad news for telcos, cable companies, electric companies, wireless companies, and the many businesses that rely on maintaining rights-of-way to support long-term infrastructure. The same logic can hold for public lands.

A judge ruled in November that the Ligado suit can continue to examine the issue of whether spectrum licenses are property. This is a suit worth keeping an eye on.

USTelecom’s 2025 Wish List

Jonathan Spalter, the President and CEO of USTelecom wrote an open letter to the White House and Congress with its wish list for government action in  2025. USTelecom is the trade association and lobbying arm representing the biggest telcos and cable companies. The most interesting thing about the list is that most smaller ISPs will agree with almost everything on it.

Champion Networks of the Future. This asks the federal government to make it easier to tear down copper telco networks. It’s an interesting request because, for the most part, the big telcos are already doing this. They are really asking the federal government to intercede in states that want to see customers provided with an alternative option for basic communications before they lose a copper telephone line.

Secure and Reform Universal Service. USTelecom recognizes that the existence of the Universal Service Fund is in jeopardy due to open court cases that could kill or maim it. This is a request for Congress to pass legislation that reinforces the mission of the USF and that also fixes the broken funding mechanism that gets funding today from telephone services.

Put the Pedal to the Metal on Broadband Deployment. This is support for moving quickly with BEAD grants while relaxing some of the BEAD rules such as requiring low rates. The big ISPs assume a lot of this funding will go to them. Some of the reforms that USTelecom wants can be done by NTIA, but others will need action by Congress.

Review All Legacy Regulations. USTelecom asks to eliminate outdated regulations and reporting, a reasonable request. Unfortunately, some of the silliest outdated requirements come from Congress and legislation is needed to kill some old requirements.

Break the Federal Permitting Log Jam. This has been on the list for twenty years. Getting permits on federal land can be nearly impossible. There has been announcements from the last several White Houses that supposedly addressed the issue but that haven’t resulted in any meaningful change.

Model Efficient, Effective Cybersecurity. This is the hardest wish to accomplish and undoubtedly comes from the recent Chinese hacking of our telecom networks. I have to wonder if this is too big of a challenge to fix with centralized government edicts – and if telcos really want the government telling them how to handle cybersecurity. But it definitely must be addressed.

What’s interesting is what is not on this list. There is no request to eliminate heavy FCC regulation, because the big telcos already know they now have a friendly FCC.

Broadband Usage 3Q 2024

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the third quarter of 2024. OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

I think one of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the third quarter of 2020. These are the average amount of data used combined for all residential and small business customers. Over the last four years the average monthly download and upload usage has increased roughly 53%.

The average U.S. broadband customer used 35 more downloaded gigabytes and 5 uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers, this equates to over 4.8 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than a year earlier.

This table raises an interesting question if the growth in broadband usage is slowing down. It would be rash to draw that conclusion by only comparing the third quarters of 2023 and 2024, but a slowdown would be obvious over the next several quarters.

The growth in what OpenVault calls power users is even more dramatic than overall bandwidth growth. Below is the percentage of broadband customers who use more than 1 terabyte of data per month and those using more than 2 terabytes. These numbers show the potential harm created when ISPs place data caps on monthly usage.OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • The report shows that the average rural customer uses only slightly less average broadband than urban households.
  • Median household broadband usage was 389.3 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less. The higher overall average is explained by the large number of power users.

The report includes a section that shows there is no longer a strong correlation between household incomes and data consumption as was seen in past years. Interestingly, in the third quarter, the group with the highest average download usage was households with incomes under $50,000.

 

Breaking the Blog Streak

It was bound to eventually happen that I would miss a day of posting a blog – but I never imagined it would happen this way. I live in Asheville, NC and we were nailed by Hurricane Helene. I feel like one of the lucky ones in that the family and our house is fine. We’ve heard that 72 local people lost lives and there are still more missing. Immediately after the storm hit a week ago, we lost power, Internet, cell service, and soon thereafter water.

We knew Helene was bringing rain. Before the storm, NOAA had forecast this area with 12 to 15 inches of rain – we got that and more. The flooding was terrible and there will be a long recovery. There are towns and neighborhoods that were fully submerged, and some are completely gone. The nearby River Arts district, home of artist studios, breweries, restaurants, and businesses has been devastated.

There is major damage to infrastructure. The water mains between the City and the reservoir were washed away. Restoring water means first rebuilding the roads that are gone. There are bridges gone that have closed the Interstate highways. There are places along Interstate 40 where much of the road has disappeared. There are numerous mudslides to clear. There are tons of neighborhoods that are now isolated since their roads were washed away.

The unexpected part of the hurricane was the wind. The forecast called for peak gusts of 40 miles per hour. But Helene strengthened in the gulf before reaching shore. I’ve been through other hurricanes, and I would guess that the peak winds were 70 miles per hour, maybe a little more. After two solid days of rain before the winds got here, tens of thousands of trees came down. I’ve seen streets here that were reminiscent of hurricane damage in the Caribbean with poles down everywhere.

We’re a tourist town, and any tourists unlucky enough to be here took it hard. Most hotels had to evict guests when power and water failed. There were no restaurants open downtown, no cell service, and a limited number of places with minimal WiFi. The airport closed and all roads leaving the City were blocked.

Everybody expected to lose power – a common event in a city of trees. But people were shocked when cellphones died and for three days the only calls that could be made were to 911. Even now, a week later, I’ve not seen more than two bars of cell signal. I’ve often seen cellular touted as a backup when landline broadband is down – but when the fiber networks that feed cell sites are decimated, the wireless coverage leaves along with normal broadband.

My neighborhood got power back on Wednesday night thanks to the 15,000 technicians that have converged on the area. But there is still more work to be done, and folks a block away still don’t have power. We’re all hoping that the ISPs will now be following the electric repairs and fixing our broadband connections. I’m still having trouble with basic things like opening and responding to an email. It’s hard to hold a cell call for very long.

Everybody is concerned about the next few months. It sounds like water is going to be out for weeks, maybe longer. It turns out that having water to flush toilets is a big problem. The grocery stores and gas stations are reopening, but we know with damaged Interstates that it’s going to remain a challenge getting food, fuel, and necessities. It’s hard to imagine how folks in the cut-off neighborhoods will cope until somebody rebuilds their roads.

There is always a bright side to balance out gloom and doom. We’ve been having neighborhood cookouts to make sure that everybody gets some hot food. Neighbors are all helping neighbors, and there is a renewed sense of community. I’ve met and made new friends that will long outlast any bad memories of the storm.

Appealing the Net Neutrality Order

On May 31, a group of major industry trade associations sued the FCC to block the recently enacted net neutrality rules. Petitions were filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit, Fifth Circuit, Sixth Circuit, and Eleventh Circuit. On the same day, a group of trade associations, including NCTA–The Internet and Television Association, CTIA, USTelecom, ACA Connects, WISPA, and others, petitioned the FCC asking for a stay of the order.

On June 7 the FCC refused to stay it’s order. The order will go into effect on July 22 unless it’s put on hold by an Appeals Court.

The case has been assigned to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, using what is described as a random process. The tactic of suing a federal agency like the FCC in multiple jurisdictions is a form of judge shopping, where the carrier associations are hoping to end up in an appeals court where they think they have a better chance to win. The FCC also petitioned the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7, and  asked for a change of venue to the D.C. Circuit – which is the Court that has heard all of the earlier versions of the net neutrality issue. Historically, it has been normal for the D.C. Circuit Court to hear cases related to federal agencies.

Carriers are banking their case on the recently popular major-questions doctrine. This is a legal argument that bars federal agencies from resolving questions of vast economic and political significance without clear statutory authorization. This has been used in recent cases like West Virginia v. EPA that limited the extent to which the EPA could regulate greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The Supreme Court said the EPA went too far past its Congressional mandate in its attempt to regulate power plant emissions.

For the last forty years, the courts have given deference to decisions made by federal agencies, using a ruling in the 1984 Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council case that said that regulatory agencies have the right to regulate based upon the general mandate to regulate given by Congress.

There has been a tug of war between regulators and regulated industries since regulatory agencies were created. Courts have sometimes ruled that regulators have gone too far, such as happened in the case of Brown & Williamson v. FDA where the FDA tried to halt the sale of tobacco and nicotine products to minors, and where the Supreme Court struck down the attempt.

The carrier lawsuits also regurgitate the arguments made in earlier net neutrality cases that say the FCC doesn’t have the authority to impose Title II regulations, which is what enables net neutrality. Courts have ruled several times on the ability of the FCC to declare broadband as a Title II service. Interestingly, courts relied on the same argument to say that the Ajit Pai FCC had the authority to decide that broadband is a Title I information service. The Courts basically said that the FCC has the authority to regulate this kind of question based on the law that created the agency.

It will be interesting to see if the case gets remanded to the D.C. Circuit Court. The FCC makes a strong argument that the D.C. Court has a long history of wrangling with the complexities of FCC regulation, which will mean a more efficient process. Another court will have to catch up and understand the long history of wrangling between the FCC and ISPs.

We’ll also have to see if a Court puts any or all of the net neutrality order on hold during the appeal process. In the lawsuit challenging the first net neutrality order, the Courts put much, but not all of the order on hold. A Court will have to act quickly to make this decision by July 22.

New Privacy Law in California

The State of California often leads the country in addressing regulatory issues. This makes sense since the State has a population of nearly 40 million and an economy that would be the fifth largest in the world if California were a separate country.

There was a new law enacted on the last day of the California Legislature was signed by Governor Gavin Newson this month. The bill makes it easier for people who want to scrub information about themselves from the Internet. The State passed privacy legislation in 2018 that gives people the right to ask companies to remove personal information from the Internet or databases. However, it turns out that the process of extracting one’s identity from the Internet is a lot of work, and in many cases is nearly impossible.

One of the main problems is that there is now a huge industry of companies that make a living selling and reselling personal data. One of the provisions of the California privacy law in 2018 was that data brokers had to register with the State if they sell information on California citizens. Over 500 companies are now registered as data brokers on the California Attorney General’s website. Some are well-known companies like credit bureaus, but most are companies that the public has never heard of. Many data brokers are specialists who work for marketing companies, politicians, large corporations, or law enforcement.

The new law is Senate Bill 362 – Data Broker Registration: Accessible Deletion Mechanism, and was sponsored by Senator Josh Becker of Menlo Park. The purpose of the law is to make it easier for folks to decouple from the Internet. The new law would allow consumers to make a single request to be removed from the Internet and databases – a web version of the Do Not Call List for telephone calling. Data brokers would have to respond quickly to such a request and would have to recheck their databases every month to make sure that personal information isn’t reposted.

Privacy advocates are calling this a landmark law that gives rights to the public to take control of their own data and to stop other companies from monetizing data about them.

Of course, the data brokers had a long list of reasons why the law shouldn’t be enacted. They say that this would slow down the process of people being verified when they go to a new website. They claim this would starve non-profits by cutting them off from databases of likely donors. They claim that it would make it harder for law enforcement to investigate people. They warn that people who ask to be removed from the lists won’t like the consequences.

Obviously, the legislators thought differently. In the discussions leading to the passage of the bill, there were discussions about how companies can now buy tracking data from our cellphones to keep track of where we are, what we do, and where we shop. They say that the databases allow people to stalk others, including the possibility that folks with strong political views can track their opponents.

Some data about all of us is already public. Things like voting registration, home ownership, and other interfaces with governments are public. What a lot of folks find troubling is that data brokers also buy information from credit card companies, ISPs, telephone companies, and other sources of information that most people do not want to be openly shared.

Generally, laws that start in California eventually get discussed and considered elsewhere. I’m guessing that this is something that the public will really like. I’ll be honest – just knowing that there are over 500 data brokers sharing our data makes me uneasy.

A Tale of Two Markets

I wrote a blog the other day that got me thinking about the huge disparity in regulating two distinct but highly intertwined industries – broadband and voice. Before you stop reading because you might think voice is no longer relevant, voice regulation includes the cellular business, and in terms of revenue, the voice market is larger than broadband. JD Powers reported in April of this year that the average household is spending $144 for cellular per month.

I call these industries intertwined because the players at the top of both industries are the same. The big ISPs are Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon. The biggest voice players are AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Comcast and Charter are making aggressive moves to develop a wireless business, and T-Mobile is aggressively selling broadband.

The two markets are intertwined in a household. Most people connect their cell phones directly to landline broadband when they are home. The primary use for cell phones is to connect to the Internet. My twenty-something daughter is amazed that I predominantly use my cell phone to actually talk to people.

This handful of giant companies control the lion’s shares of both the voice and broadband industries. Yet we’ve decided to regulate the two business lines completely differently. You must admit that this it’s an odd national decision to regulate AT&T’s voice business but not its broadband business, particularly considering how intertwined the two businesses are. Comcast and Charter are proof of the link between the two industries since the companies will only sell cellular plans to customers who are buying broadband.

A regulatory expert from another country would look at the U.S. regulatory environment with incredulity. They would instantly wonder how we can treat the two industries so differently since they engage in such similar business lines, particularly since the same companies lead both markets.

The average American has no idea of how differently we treat the two industries and would be just as confused as a foreign regulator expert. It’s really hard to explain the difference in regulations since that quickly devolves into a discussion of things like Title II regulation, and the average person listening will quickly have no idea what you are talking about.

The easiest way to explain the difference in regulation is that we don’t regulate according to common sense but base regulation on the original legislation that established regulations for each industry. Voice is still regulated because, in the past, various pieces of federal legislation, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically mention voice. There were also laws that specifically defined how to regulate cable TV – but there has never been a definitive legislative declaration that broadband must be regulated.

This all started when interest in home broadband mushroomed. AOL, CompuServe, and others created a robust ISP industry that took off rapidly when DSL and cable modems increased speed to the point that people could do useful things with broadband. In those early days, there was a lot of discussion about regulating broadband, but the consensus among legislators was that regulators should leave the fledgling new broadband industry alone until it grew large enough. No doubt, this hands-off approach was whispered into the ears of legislators by lobbyists for the big ISPs.

With no direction from Congress, the FCC and various States tried to find ways to regulate broadband over the last few decades. But as hard as it is to believe, we weren’t even able to define what broadband is without legislative direction – is broadband a telecommunications service or an information service? All of the wrangling about regulating broadband ultimately comes down to this simple designation.

Regulation gets really bizarre the deeper you go into the details. Cell phones calls are regulated for voice, but the broadband on a cellphone is considered to be an information service. What is the regulatory regime of a cell phone call that is handed off to a broadband network through WiFi but then eventually reconnected with the cellular network? The average cell phone user regularly bounces between regulated and unregulated functions.

The title of the blog refers to A Tale of Two Cities, which opened with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”. That’s as good of a description of our odd regulatory environment as anything else I can think of.

New FCC Role – Device Security

Depending upon the survey you believe, U.S. homes have an average of thirteen to twenty-two connected devices in their home. That can range from computers, TVs, security cameras, game boxes, baby monitors – it’s a huge list these days.  A concern for anybody with connected devices is that somebody will hack them and cause problems in the home. I’ve seen many articles that describe how people have hacked home cameras to watch families or hijacked computers for various nefarious reasons.

The White House announced a new initiative in July that would create a certification for connected devices that meet cyber safety standards. The authority to handle this program was given to the FCC. Being labeled as the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, device makers can send devices to the FCC to be certified as meeting basic security standards. This is similar to the Energy Star efficiency sticker that comes with home appliances.

This is a voluntary program for device makers, but the hope is that companies will seek the approval label to be able to more easily market their products.

The next step for the FCC will be to open a rulemaking to determine the devices that are eligible for the certification and the standards that must be met. During the announcement of the initiative, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel mentioned devices that might apply, like smart refrigerators, microwaves, thermostats, fitness trackers, and baby monitors. It’s likely that many other kinds of devices will be added to the list. The FCC says it will work closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create the cyber standards.

NIST has developed a Profile of the IoT Core Baseline for Consumer IoT Products. That NIST document says that connected devices should have features like the following:

  • A clear way to identify the specific device, such as a device serial number.
  • The ability to change the configuration of a device and to be able to reset it to the default security settings.
  • Devices should protect stored data and encrypt or otherwise secure transmitted data.
  • A device should give access to settings only to authorized users.
  • A device should have the ability to receive, verify, and apply software updates.
  • A device should be cybersecurity aware and have the ability to detect and capture evidence of any changes to software or security settings.
  • Manufacturers of connected devices should have full documentation of the security measures present.
  • The product developer should be able to receive and respond to queries about cybersecurity from device users.

Security experts have been making similar recommendations for many years and have requested that the government create and enforce standards. Since Congress has never passed a law about device security, a voluntary process sounds like a good first step to get this started.

Chairman Rosenworcel said she hoped the agency could develop standards by the end of 2024. The proceeding to determine how this should work ought to be interesting reading.

Like with everything at the FCC, I have to wonder how this gets funded. I would expect that the fees charged to those seeking the certification would cover the cost.