Legislative Update

By Ray Warner, Manager - Industry Affairs

Technology Related Proposed Legislation

Video Franchise

This bill was signed into law by Governor Reynolds on April 28. The bill updates the Video Franchise rules and states that no franchise is needed for OTT services.

House File 250

Consumer Data Protection

This bill that was signed into law by Governor Reynolds on March 28 and provides consumers with the right to know what companies have processed of their personal data. The bill would be applicable to Iowa businesses that control/process personal data of over 99,999 consumers or control/process personal data of 25,000 consumers with 50% of their gross revenue obtained from the sale of personal data. While it would be preferred that a uniform standard be established at the federal level, Iowa is only the sixth state in the nation to provide consumers with rights to their personal data.

Senate File 262

Ransomware

This bill that was signed into law by Governor Reynolds on May 11 and makes ransomware use illegal in Iowa and outlines criminal penalties if doing so. The bill makes exceptions for law enforcement, training, education, and research purposes. Not only is this bill a crucial step in providing cyber protection for Iowa businesses, but it is also a big step forward in advancing Iowa as a technology-forward state.

House File 143

CYISM

This bill establishes a cybersecurity simulation training center at Iowa State University to conduct cyber threat and mitigation research and training. The center will be available to businesses, state agencies, students, and educators for training exercises, case studies, competitions, and cybersecurity workforce development efforts.

Senate File 402

Cyber Affirmative Defense

This bill was signed into law by Governor Reynolds on May 3 and it stipulates that if an entity follows a set of industry-recognized guidelines in their cybersecurity protection procedures and experiences a data breach, it qualifies for protection from a tort claim alleging that the entity’s failure to implement reasonable information security controls resulted in a breach of data that exposed restricted or personal information.

Senate File 495

View other legislative updates at the federal level by viewing Aureon Core

Network Updates

April showers bring May flowers. Just as accurate as Spring thaw brings construction season. Locates, fiber cuts, and outages are always a challenge. We can’t control the person on the backhoe. All we can do is control how we design and implement a redundant network. That helps us ensure that the Friday afternoon push by the contractor running late on his project, causing a fiber cut for one more bucket of dirt, doesn’t interrupt services for our shareholders and clients.

Scott Johnson Senior VIce President –Engineering Operations

Over the past four years, we have significantly improved the electronics and our fiber footprint to help improve our uptime. This year is no different. We are placing 135 miles of new transport fiber—some to replace smaller older count fiber sections. Other projects are to help create more redundancies and opportunities. Not only is redundancy top of mind but so is our ability to support the ever-growing need for more bandwidth. We recently upgraded our core ring to 300G. PoP site NNIs are being upgraded to support the increase in 10G requests from our wireless carrier clients. Aureon has also increased the bandwidth to the carrier MTSOs (Mobile Telephone Switching Offices). The upgrade was needed to support the aggregate delivery of the traffic we deliver to each wireless carrier client.

The push for migrating services out of our Merchant’s building in downtown Des Moines to our new site at 616 10th St. is in its final phase. We will have completed moving all the ITC switch traffic from the Nortel DMS tandem to our new Ribbon platform by the second week of May. I have much gratitude to all that participated in this move. We couldn’t have done this without all your cooperation and support. The action took many maintenance windows over the last eight months to complete. Once this is complete, we can focus on moving shareholders from TDM to SIP and support Stir/Shaken. Please don’t hesitate to contact your ITC Account Manager if you would like to schedule that conversion for your network.

Another area of focus for the migration is our video product. We have successfully migrated all our encoders out of Merchants as of the last week of April. We anticipate migrating the remainder of the video network to 616 by the end of June. You may have seen many maintenance window notices over the last few weeks. The maintenance is necessary as we migrated a subset of encoders/channels each night. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we move this to a new, more robust PoP site. There are many other aspects to this migration — too many to list. The final goal is to be lights out by 12/31/23. Please reach out with any questions. Until the next time, enjoy the May flowers and hopefully we can avoid the backhoe bucket.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS & UPDATES

Microsoft Cloud Services

Aureon offers widespread support, deployment, and usage of Microsoft’s cloud services such as Microsoft 365. In addition to Microsoft 365, Aureon can also help your organization by installing and supporting other Microsoft solutions including: Azure, Exchange Online, Audio Conferencing, Defender for Office 365, Power BI Pro, Visio and Microsoft Project. As well as Office suite, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Office, and Microsoft Teams to keep your teams operating efficiently.

Click the image to view Product Manager Chris Peterson as he explains how the products benefit your business.

STIR/SHAKEN

Aureon offers STIR/SHAKEN to support Traced Act compliance on the IP portions of your network. STIR/SHAKEN is the FCC’s mandated framework for identifying and stopping unlawful robocalling, by ensuring your company has protection against originating these types of calls, and to reduce effects of the calls that may attempt to terminate to your voice customers.

Click the image to view Product Manager Jessica Schlesselman as she explains how this product benefits your business.

Hardware & Software Solutions

Aureon collaborates with numerous vendors, such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, to provide clients with various hardware and software solutions. Because of our partnerships, Aureon must maintain specific manufacturer training certifications. Our preparation brings additional knowledge to what Aureon offers our clients. Additionally, keeping our list of vendors from expanding to an enormous number allows Aureon to keep management costs down and time to implementation to a minimum.

Click the image to view Product Manager Chris Peterson as he explains our products and how they benefit your business.