The Communications Workers of America said AT&T Southeast should get serious about bargaining a fair contract before the current one was to have expired Saturday night, said a CWA news release Friday. CWA represents 28,000 workers at AT&T Southeast in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. Last week, CWA members at AT&T Southeast authorized union leaders to call a strike if a contract couldn't be agreed, the release said. The CWA bargaining team said AT&T Southeast management continued to demand concessions in job security, healthcare, and working conditions, including a demand for excessive forced overtime, the union said. The telco didn't comment Friday. A separate contract covering workers at YP Holdings also was to have expired Saturday evening. Verizon separately passed a contract deadline with the CWA, which also is criticizing that company (see 1508070029).

The Communications Workers of America announced a series of eight radio ads slamming Verizon’s failure to build out universal FiOS broadband across the East Coast, said a news release from CWA. The 30-second ads began running Friday across Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Verizon allowed its labor contract to expire Aug. 1, leaving 39,000 CWA and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers-represented telecom workers from Massachusetts to Virginia without a labor agreement (see 1507310059), the release said. “Verizon continues to play games with its workers and its customers," said Bob Master, legislative and political director for CWA District One. "Despite our best efforts, the company refuses to engage in a serious negotiation towards a fair contract for its workers. At the same time, its customers continue to suffer because of decaying infrastructure and poor service quality. ... It’s time for them to come to the bargaining table and negotiate.” A Verizon spokesman said the company is disappointed that CWA chose to run the ads, calling the radio spots inaccurate and dishonest. "Verizon’s ongoing investments -- more than $20 billion to deploy FiOS; expanded deployment -- from our initial goal of passing 18 million homes to our current total of more than 20 million homes passed; and consistently providing highly competitive upper middle class salaries and benefits to our unionized workforce, speak volumes compared to union leaders’ stale and empty rhetoric.“

Six Pennsylvania counties filed writs of summons against dozens of carriers to attempt to collect 911 surcharge fees that officials believe went unpaid, said communications lawyer Joshua Wolson at Dilworth Paxson, representing the municipalities. The six counties are Berks, Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster and Washington, and Wolson said he also expects to be filing in York County in the near future. The counties have not finalized an amount that they believe they are owed, but Wolson said it's safe to say it's millions of dollars per county.Delaware County filed a lawsuit alleging the same thing in June (see 1506040042). Among the roughly 30 companies named in the writs are AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast Phone of Pennsylvania, Conestoga Telephone and Telegraph Co., Core Communications, Global Crossing Local Services, Level 3, Verizon Pennsylvania and Windstream Pennsylvania.

General Communication boosted its investment in cloud services in Alaska with the purchase of Network Business Systems, a news release from the company said Thursday. The purchase closed that day and GCI has offered all NBS employees positions, it said.

NTIA plans a one-day regional broadband summit, “Digital New England,” Sept. 28 in Portland, Maine, a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register said. It's part of the BroadbandUSA program and is being hosted in conjunction with Next Century Cities, NTIA said. The summit will present best practices and lessons learned from broadband network infrastructure build-outs and digital inclusion programs from Maine and surrounding states, including projects funded by NTIA's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and State Broadband Initiative grant programs funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it said of the event at Holiday Inn by the Bay, 88 Spring St.

Level 3 received a contract with Pennsylvania, a news release from the company said. Level 3 will expand its current Master IT Services Invitation to Qualify program contract to include security, network and telecom services, the company said. These services are in addition to the existing consulting services awarded under a previous master contract, it said.

San Antonio was selected as the next city to get a Google Fiber network, the company said Wednesday on its Google Fiber blog. At 1.4 million residents, San Antonio is the largest city to get Google Fiber so far, it said. The network will offer up to 1 Gbps and require a build-out of more than 4,000 miles of fiber, the company said.

A ribbon cutting for the D.C. region's first exclusively licensed 24 GHz spectrum wireless fiber link was held Wednesday, said a news release from FiberTower. The ultraGig network meets federal Physically Diverse Network building standards and will provide gigabit service to the Silver Spring (Maryland) Innovation Center, it said. UltraGig is part of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Executive’s Ultra Montgomery program, which aims to expand knowledge-based jobs that depend on high-speed broadband, the release said. The ultraGig network is the result of a partnership between Atlantech Online and FiberTower.

Silver Lake is investing $1 billion in Motorola Solutions, which provides communications solutions to local, state and national public safety agencies, Motorola Solutions said in a news release Wednesday. Silver Lake is a technology investment company. The public safety vendor plans to use the investment to expand its smart public safety products and services businesses through new partnerships, investments and acquisitions, it said. Motorola Solutions also said it intends to repurchase up to $2 billion of stock. The company will fund the tender offer with a combination of existing cash and a portion of the proceeds from the $1 billion investment by Silver Lake. Motorola Solutions stock closed up 6.3 percent to $64.04 Wednesday.

Three coalitions of industry and public interest groups filed amicus briefs with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans Monday supporting Google's bid to sustain a preliminary injunction barring Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood from enforcing his subpoena of the company’s search practices. Hood, a Democrat, filed an appeal with the 5th Circuit in late March. That was after U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate ordered the preliminary injunction because there was a “substantial likelihood” that Google would prevail in its lawsuit against Hood on claims he violated the company’s First Amendment rights (see 1504010029). If Hood is “allowed to continue, the pressure tactics employed by the Attorney General here would send a dangerous message to large and small service providers, as well as the Internet users who rely on their platforms to communicate, learn, and organize online,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology and other groups in a joint brief. “That message would stifle innovation, chill online speech, and flout the public’s First Amendment interest in an uncensored Internet.” The Computer & Communications Industry Association, CEA and Engine also urged the 5th Circuit to affirm the injunction. They said in a joint brief that “although state law enforcement officials are not wholly precluded from enforcing state laws that affect the Internet, Congress unambiguously intended to limit states’ ability to regulate Internet intermediaries’ display of third party content -- which is precisely what Attorney General Hood seeks to do here.” Hood “does not, and cannot, demonstrate any compelling interest in the wholesale gathering of information about a wide and disparate array of protected speech on Google’s various services,” the American Civil Liberties Union and its Mississippi chapter said in a joint brief. “Indeed, the subpoena seeks such a vast amount of information about so many people that by its very nature it cannot be narrowly tailored to any legitimate investigative need. As such, the subpoena is presumptively invalid.”