Capital investment in broadband in the U.S. increased 4.2 percent in 2010 from the previous year to $66 billion, USTelecom said Thursday, based on a joint study with the Yankee Group. Broadband providers invested more than $1 trillion on networks from 1996 through 2010, the study said. Wireline’s share continues to outpace expenditures by cable operators and wireless carriers, the group said. Wireline was responsible for 42 percent of broadband capital expenditures last year, compared to 30 percent for wireless and 19 percent for cable. Wireline capital expenditures, at $27 billion, are down from the heydays of investment in 2000 and 2001, when the U.S. fiber backbone was under construction, though investments have held steady at above $60 billion annually since 2005. “A lot of that was speculative capital that came into the market” 10 years ago, USTelecom Vice President Patrick Brogan told reporters. A dollar invested today also goes further than one spent then because of improvements in technology, he said. “This doesn’t represent a single penny of taxpayer money -- this is all private sector investment,” said USTelecom President Walter McCormick on the same media call. “The levels of investment are really at historic levels. This is a uniquely American success story.”

Carriers, E-commerce companies and trade associations have joined forces to form the Download Fairness Coalition to push for a national tax framework. The group seeks to end what it calls discriminatory and multiple state and local taxes, officials said during a conference call Thursday.

OMAHA, Neb. -- Industry and public interest advocates have yet to devise a comprehensive proposal addressing all the problems of the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a commission roundtable. “We want to see more from stakeholders in this program, and we want to see it quickly.” The chairman led a public forum on the pending overhaul late Wednesday at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to close a day-long set of discussions. He reiterated the four corners of his reform program: Moving to a broadband fund and phasing down intercarrier comp rates, (including intrastate revenues); “controlling costs and constraining the size of the fund;” “demanding accountability;” and “market-driven and incentive-based policies to maximize the impact of scarce program resources.”

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Staff in the office of FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker was lobbied on more than a dozen occasions by Comcast, the NCTA, cable company rivals, nonprofit groups and others as she considered a job offer at Comcast, agency records show. Since April 18, when Baker privately recused herself from voting on anything at the FCC (CD May 16 p7), the lawyers who advise her also were visited by executives of AT&T, the CTIA, News Corp., Verizon and other companies and public interest groups. Baker’s not the first FCC member to directly leave for a large company regulated by the agency, though it’s been decades since that’s believed to have last occurred, said several who have long watched the commission.

Leaders of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Iowa Telecommunications Association gave a cool reception on NCTA’s proposal to freeze the RUS broadband loan program. The RUS relaunched its troubled broadband loan program earlier this year and published interim rules. The comment period on the proposed rules closed last week. In its filing with RUS, the cable association said the broadband loan program was structured as if high-speed broadband suffered under geographic monopolies like old water and electric systems (CD May 16 p14). Offering broadband subsidies to telcos in areas where cable already offers it puts government in the “totally inappropriate role for a government agency,” by “picking winners and losers in the marketplace.”

MTV Networks Chairman-CEO Judy McGrath to step down; heads of MTV operating units to report directly to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman …Cisco assignments of senior vice presidents as part of streamlining units: Pankaj Patel and Padmasree Warrior will lead engineering, and the Emerging Business Group will be run by Marthin De Beer … USTelecom promotes Karn Dhingra to director-communications … MUSL TV hires Robb Weller, ex-Weller/Grossman Productions, as executive vice president-programming and production … National Religious Broadcasters hires Aaron Mercer, ex-Generation Forum of the National Association of Evangelicals, as vice president of government relations … Univision promotes Carlos Deschapelles to senior vice president, sports sales … Julian Bellamy, ex-Channel 4 U.K., becomes Discovery Networks International creative director-head of production and development.

Pole attachment rules approved by the FCC in April (CD April 8 p3) could take effect as early as the beginning of July, lawyer Robert Primosch of Wilkinson Barker said Wednesday on a webinar sponsored by USTelecom. Under the order, the rules take effect, but only for new agreements, 30 days after it’s published in the Federal Register. “It’s not always easy to predict when something will be in the Federal Register,” Primosch said. “If I had to hazard a guess, I would think it would be in … by the end of this month.” It remains possible the order could be stayed by the FCC or a court, so timing is hard to predict, he said. Some carriers with ongoing agreements may be able to get revised rates, but only if their agreement contains a “change of law” provision that kicks in when rules change, Primosch said. Most others will get new rates only when their current contracts expire, he said. Primosch noted that the order addresses a discrepancy in attachment rates paid by phone companies versus cable operators. The commission said phone companies were paying an average of 11.2 percent of the cost of a pole in urban areas, going up to nearly 17 percent elsewhere, versus 7.4 percent for cable attachers, he said: “When you break those out into bigger numbers it turns out to be quite a lot of money.” Kevin Rupy, director of public policy at USTelecom, said the order will have no “direct effect” in the 20 states and District of Columbia, which regulate pole attachments.

Public safety spending on 700 MHz D-block lobbying more than quadrupled in Q1 2011 compared to the same quarter last year, according to Q1 lobbying reports. The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials spent $80,563, 303 percent more than what the group spent in Q1 2010 and 66 percent more than Q4 2010. Meanwhile, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association spent nearly five times what it did last year, and NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield said she expects the association of small rural telcos to continue spending at that level.

With less than four months to go before an FCC-promised deadline for Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms, industry appears to be divided on how to fix the system. The American Cable Association, for instance, said its “diverse and interested membership” meant the association “has had to navigate and balance strongly competing interests, while ensuring any policy proposals are in the public interest.” The FCC’s proposed rewrites at least “provide a good starting point to bring broadband to unserved areas, and, through refinements and targeted rebalancing, there is the potential to adopt reforms this year to reorient the High-Cost fund to improve efficiency and achieve universal broadband service,” ACA said in its comments. All comments were posted to dockets 10-90, 09-51, 07-135, 05-337, 01-92, 96-45 and 03-109.