The FCC Media Bureau should deny Adams Cable...
The FCC Media Bureau should deny Adams Cable Equipment’s petition to expand the scope of its recently granted CableCARD waiver, said CEA in an opposition filing Monday (http://bit.ly/15gH2V4). The current waiver -- granted in July (CD July 30 p11) --…
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lets ACE offer its existing inventory of 50,000 set-top boxes directly to subscribers. ACE petitioned the bureau last week (CD Aug 20 p16) to expand the limit to 200,000, allowing it to buy and refurbish older, obsolete models from large cable operators. The petition suggests that ACE’s business plan all along has been to buy boxes from larger cable operators and sell them to smaller ones, said CEA. “Adams’s Reconsideration Petition says that it ‘may not have been apparent’ to the Bureau that 200,000 boxes could be wholesaled on this basis, but does not claim that this figure was unknown to Adams when it filed and lobbied for its Petition.” ACE’s reconsideration filing is “actually a new petition seeking a much broader waiver than Adams initially purported to seek, but it provides no new factual or legal basis and no new arguments,” CEA said. Since the waiver already requires ACE to update the bureau on its set-top box sales, ACE should use the record established by those future updates to file a new waiver request if its sales justify it, CEA said.