LAS VEGAS -- LTE build out is expensive and requires carriers to look very seriously at signing roaming agreements to reach areas they can’t otherwise cover, carrier officials said Monday at the opening session of the Competitive Carrier Association’s annual meeting. “We're not going to cover the entire country, we have excellent partners set up with the rural community and CCA members, so embrace that,” has been the mindset of Sprint, said Todd Rowley, vice president-business development. Sprint recognized that to make LTE roaming work, it had to worry about the entire “ecosystem,” not just what is best or easiest for Sprint, Rowley said at the FierceWireless breakfast.
The FCC Enforcement Bureau under Chairman Tom Wheeler and acting Chief Travis LeBlanc has shown a willingness to go after companies that violate agency rules with more aggressiveness than in the past, said agency and industry officials in recent interviews. They said LeBlanc has taken a particularly hard line, refusing to consider reductions in penalties if a company won’t acknowledge wrongdoing and declining to allow language in consent decrees that a company was making a “voluntary” contribution to the government as part of the agreement. The latter change is significant since “voluntary” contributions can often be deducted as business expenses on tax returns, but the Internal Revenue Code explicitly forbids deduction of penalties.
To execute the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) by NTIA’s deadline next September, Internet governance stakeholders need to act quickly and limit the scope of the transition, said IANA technical experts and ICANN accountability stakeholders at the Internet Governance Forum session Friday (http://bit.ly/1nh17YM). The Istanbul event was webcast. Stakeholders from developing countries cautioned that the transition shouldn’t be carried out in haste and should bear in mind the needs of those with limited Internet access.
Senate Commerce Committee leaders plan to include the controversial Local Choice proposal directly in their five-year Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization bill, their staffers told other members’ committee staff and industry officials Friday in two briefings. The legislation sets the stage for a full-throttle lobbying war between broadcasters and pay-TV companies leading up to STELA’s Dec. 31 expiration. Local Choice, which would overhaul retransmission consent rules to end TV blackouts, would take effect July 1, 2017, said a three-page section-by-section committee breakdown of the STELA reauthorization bill, called the Satellite Television Access and Viewer Rights Act (STAVRA).
Ex-FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Robert McDowell clashed over media consolidation, and had differing views on how news and information accessibility has evolved. Comcast’s planned buy of Time Warner Cable should have been “dead upon arrival” when it arrived at the FCC, Copps said during an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators to be shown over the weekend. It’s “highly inimical to the interests of consumers and competition,” said Copps, special adviser to Common Cause. He bemoaned consolidation, saying it creates “huge companies that control distribution and content,” and that they're getting a hammerlock on the news and information infrastructure “that we as a democracy rely upon to govern ourselves. McDowell said Comcast/TWC and AT&T’s deal to buy DirecTV probably will be OK'd.
Industry groups and telcos argued against raising the bar for judging whether the availability of broadband is adequate nationwide. AT&T called the higher speed threshold the FCC is considering “a casual, back-of-the-envelope calculation” based on the “bandwidth requirements of the highest-volume households.”
BERLIN -- The smart home of the future can be turned rather quickly from “vision into reality, but only if we as an industry work together,” Samsung Electronics CEO Boo-Keun Yoon told IFA in an opening keynote Friday. “We will work with everybody who shares this vision because we want to make sure that standards are open, robust and secure,” Yoon told an audience of thousands at the cavernous new CityCube Berlin exhibition hall near the south entrance of IFA’s Messe Berlin fairgrounds.
CTIA laid down a marker strongly opposing the imposition of the same net neutrality rules on wireless as those that are eventually imposed on wireline, in a Thursday FCC filing. The group submitted a paper, “Net Neutrality and Technical Challenges of Mobile Broadband Networks,” which made the case that wireless is inherently different.
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) should be a catalyst for involving the broader global community in the Internet governance debate, said stakeholders at an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) session Thursday (http://bit.ly/1nh17YM). The Istanbul event was webcast. The spread of IoT is bringing the Internet into every conceivable platform, and Internet users need to be aware of potential issues beforehand, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said. U.S. government and European Commission (EC) officials affirmed their support of IGF and the multistakeholder model. A separate Thursday session (http://bit.ly/1nh17YM) on the European Court of Justice’s right to be forgotten ruling raised some concerns from NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco.
The FCC will likely issue a blanket extension of construction permit deadlines for LPTV stations, several attorneys who represent such stations said in interviews Thursday. The reply comment period for a petition from Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance requesting such an extension ended Friday (CD Sept 4 p13). All commenters in docket 03-185 supported such an extension, except the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which didn’t respond to our request for comment.