The Rural Utilities Service is anticipating that investment for round two of the Broadband Initiatives Program “is going to be more than double what we invested in the first round,” Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said at the Broadband Breakfast. The agency planned to have three rounds, but “folded the second and third rounds into the second one.” Adjusting the “remote” definition, increasing the grant component and other changes in the eligibility process encouraged more applications, he said. Most of the awards will be announced in July and August, he said.
An FCC white paper released Tuesday builds a case against giving public safety direct access to the 10 MHz D-block, which the National Broadband Plan proposes be sold in an upcoming auction. Public safety groups have waged a ferocious battle against the NBP’s recommendations.
News Corp. is in talks with British Sky Broadcasting to acquire the 60.9 percent of BSkyB stock it doesn’t already own, the companies said Tuesday. News Corp. has already made two informal offers for the public shares, both of which were declined by BSkyB, they said. While the companies haven’t agreed on a price, they agreed to proceed with the regulatory process to “facilitate a proposed transaction,” said News Corp. BSkyB’s independent directors said it would back a higher offer. “It is the unanimous view from the independent directors that there is a significant gap between the proposal from News Corp. and the value of the company,” said BSkyB. The purchase likely will require regulatory approval from the European Union and other regulators, said News Corp.
A TV spectrum paper by FCC broadband staffers released Monday to little fanfare drew mixed reviews from broadcast lawyers who closely read it and engineers just beginning to parse it. Consumer electronics and wireless groups, seeking spectrum repurposed from broadcasting to wireless broadband, praised the paper, which is at http://xrl.us/bhor2p. The 60-page paper was posted Monday on the website of the National Broadband Plan but no news release accompanied it, so lawyers and engineers still were studying it Tuesday.
Recent Supreme Court cases haven’t displaced antitrust law in telecom and other highly regulated industries, Verizon Senior Vice President John Thorne said at a hearing Tuesday of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy. But an FTC official and others urged Congress to use legislation to clarify the meaning of the high court’s 2003 Trinko and 2007 Credit Suisse decisions. Democratic and Republican subcommittee members said they were troubled by the rulings, but Republicans seemed hesitant to back legislative action. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., told us a legislative fix is unlikely.
The CEA differed with some consumer electronics makers and cable operators on whether the FCC should exempt more subscription-video providers from CableCARD rules so they can use cheap HD set-top boxes that combine navigation and security features. Filings Monday on fixes to CableCARDs before the commission moves to a gateway device standard showed NCTA and members including Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable support use of digital terminal adapters (DTA), as the regulator proposed in a rulemaking (CD April 22 p6). The CEA and Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC) said DTAs undermine CableCARDs.
Anti-porn advocates urged more vigorous enforcement of federal obscenity laws, saying Congress and the Department of Justice should ensure that aggressive prosecution of laws already on the books is a priority, they said at a briefing hosted by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography on the Hill Tuesday.
Before Cablevision’s acquisition of Bresnan Communications can proceed, approval from various local video franchising authorities in Montana, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado will be needed, industry attorneys said Monday. Cablevision agreed to buy the western cable operator for $1.4 billion and is putting less than $400 million in equity into the deal. The rest will be financed with debt, Cablevision said. The deal is structured in a way that its shareholders and bondholders won’t be on the hook for the debt should Bresnan’s operations falter, the buyer said.
Though little is known about key LTE patent holders and their asset values, companies like Ericsson and Nokia are already projecting how much essential intellectual property rights they will have for LTE. Meanwhile, the fate of Canadian vendor Nortel’s estimated large LTE patent assets is still pending, making the 4G patent ownership landscape even more unclear, experts said.
CTIA said the FCC should “reject outright” Mobile Internet Content Coalition (MICC) arguments that net neutrality principles should be applied to SMS text messaging services and wireless carriers’ review of content providers’ marketing proposals. CTIA “misses the point” of the MICC arguments, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld told us Monday in response to the CTIA filing.