Comcast and TiVo reached a voluntary agreement under which the operator will abide by CableCARD rules vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and work with TiVo to develop a two-way non-CableCARD security solution to replace CableCARD, the companies told the FCC (http://bit.ly/1wuQG4I). TiVo will use the solution developed by Comcast in its set-top boxes. CEA, which has aligned with TiVo against cable interests in past efforts to protect CableCARD rules, said it was “supportive” of the companies’ efforts to find a successor to CableCARDs. Last year, the D.C. Circuit vacated some encryption rules in EchoStar v. FCC but not the entire CableCARD regime, leading TiVo to petition the FCC to confirm the rules still applied.

NTIA published transition plans for various federal agencies to clear much of the 1695-1710 and 1755-1780 MHz bands as part of the FCC AWS-3 auction, slated to get underway Nov. 13. The total costs to all agencies is $527.1 million for the 1695-1710 MHz band, $4.576 billion for the 1755-1780 MHz band, NTIA said Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1zJpEea). Transition times to clear the spectrum could run as long as 10 years in some cases, documents say.

A House Republican succeeded, as some groups feared (CD July 16 p17), at amending the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, HR-5016, to stop the FCC from pre-empting state municipal broadband laws. Municipal advocates and observers told us they suspect the FCC will move forward with addressing state laws that restrict municipal networks and don’t think such a measure could pass the full Congress.

The FCC is under intense pressure from net neutrality advocates to reverse its 2010 order and not provide different rules for wireless as it tries again to come up with net neutrality rules. Wireless industry officials tell us their big concern is that in an effort to toughen the rules, Chairman Tom Wheeler will urge the commission to impose the same standards on mobile as it imposes on fixed broadband. Comments are due Friday in docket 14-28, following a delay because of a deluge (CD July 16 p1) totaling close to a million. (See separate report in this issue.)

For all the last-minute negotiations, partisan bickering and congressional pressure involved in Friday’s FCC E-rate modernization order (CD July 14 p1) -- not to mention the sweep of bringing Wi-Fi connections to millions of schoolchildren nationally -- several major issues facing the program were left on the table, advocates involved in the debate told us. “This was a tough sell, but the next set of deliberations will be even harder,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former West Virginia Democratic governor, who supported FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal. “There will be an incredible amount of debate."

Sinclair and Allbritton Communications will have to sell their interests in WHTM-TV Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Media General to proceed with their $963 million deal, said the U.S. Department of Justice in a consent decree filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. “Without the required divestiture, prices for broadcast television spot advertising would likely increase in parts of central Pennsylvania,” said DOJ in a news release Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/U87NN5). The divestiture requirement echoes a plan to sell WHTM to Media General announced by Sinclair last month (CD June 24 p16). In a May letter to the Media Bureau, Sinclair said its plan to buy Allbritton’s TV stations must be completed by July 27 to remain viable, because the purchase agreement allows either party to terminate it July 28 (CD May 30 p1).

More than 1,000 comments on net neutrality on what was supposed to be the last day to file comments on the polarizing issue crashed the FCC electronic filing system Tuesday, the agency acknowledged, forcing it to extend the deadline for comments until midnight Friday night. “Not surprisingly, we have seen an overwhelming surge in traffic on our website that is making it difficult for many people to file comments through our Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS),” the FCC said in a statement, after hours of problems. Free Press said in a news release the problems led many in the Washington, D.C., area to deliver comments by hand.

DALLAS -- NARUC’s Telecom Committee unanimously passed Tuesday an amended version of a resolution encouraging the FCC to craft its new net neutrality rules using Communications Act Section 706 as its main legal justification. NARUC’s board is set to vote on the resolution Wednesday. Public Service Board member John Burke, the resolution’s original sponsor, introduced an amended version of the resolution at the committee meeting that would encourage the FCC to use Section 706 as its main jurisdictional base for drafting the new net neutrality rules, while encouraging the use of Title II authority as a backup. A draft resolution had equally encouraged Title II and Section 706 as jurisdictional bases for the rules (CD July 14 p6).

A group of semiconductor and product companies representing a disparate connected devices alliance -- from Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Silicon Labs on the semiconductor side to Big Ass Fans and Nest Labs in the product camp -- announced the formation of the Thread Group Tuesday. The Thread Group’s charter is to steer adoption of Thread, an IP-based wireless networking protocol that promises to improve security, reliability and ease of set-up of connected devices in the home. Other founding members of the Thread Group are ARM and lock company Yale Security.

With final rules for the 3.5 GHz band reportedly on a fast track at the FCC, industry groups are making a number of recommendations to the agency they say will lead to more successful use of the band for spectrum sharing and small cells. CTIA and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) raised the same issues about protections for Priority Access License (PAL) versus General Authorized Access (GAA) users. Commenters also urged the FCC to restrict the size of exclusion zones, where access to the spectrum won’t be allowed to protect government incumbents.