Spectrum sharing will be necessary to meet the Obama administration’s goal of finding 500 MHz for commercial broadband service, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling Monday at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The old method of clearing spectrum of federal users and then making it available for the exclusive use of commercial providers is not sustainable,” he told the Silicon Flatirons event. “We have moved the systems that are easy to move, and to continue this method of spectrum reallocation simply costs too much and takes too long. And just as important is the fact that the opportunities to find spectrum to which we can move the federal operations are dwindling rapidly."

State and local officials will grapple with many choices and challenges of coordination in preparing to apply for the $121.5 million in grants that NTIA will give as part of its State and Local Implementation Grant Program Federal Funding Opportunity for FirstNet, speakers said during a Monday NATOA discussion. The grants were announced Wednesday (CD Feb 7 p11). The application deadline is March 19.

The FTC should realize its own limitations on regulating new and changing technologies, Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen said Sunday at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “I realize that I'm not very good at predicting where technology is going.” Ohlhausen remembered a time when she thought she'd have no use for the Internet. “I try to approach things with those limitations in mind,” she said at a Silicon Flatirons event on digital broadband migration.

The cable industry needs to do a better job claiming responsibility for the birth of broadband services in the U.S., said Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And cable operators need to get through to emergency management personnel that they provide critical communications infrastructure during disasters, he said at a Silicon Flatirons event Monday. Britt joins other executives over the years including then-NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow, now at Comcast, in saying the industry must do more to fight misconceptions it’s anti-consumer (CD Sept 8/08 p8).

Policymakers need to ensure the U.S. maintains its “preeminent position” as the driver of telecom technology innovation by maintaining it as a friendly environment for capital investment, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said Sunday during an event at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “What keeps me awake at night is, five years from now, is that still the case?” he said at the Silicon Flatirons event. “Five years from now, are Chinese companies going to be driving the standards, are top Chinese companies going to be driving the technological innovation in this industry? … I think we as a country do not want that."

Mass digitization projects should not be exempted from the need to search diligently for the owners of so-called orphan works, groups representing copyright holders said in response to a notice of inquiry from the U.S. Copyright Office (http://xrl.us/bofo9o). Microsoft, on the other hand, said mass digitization projects should not be required to search for copyright holders of all the works they seek to digitize, while Google suggested that the Copyright Office specifically define the requirements of a diligent search and limit liability for those users that have met those requirements. Comments responded to the office’s questions about orphan works and mass digitization.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the FTC support the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO) efforts to “provide more complete information regarding patent ownership to the public,” the agencies said in a joint filing that PTO released last week (http://xrl.us/bofojr). The filing was one of several submitted in response to PTO’s request for input on its proposal to change its rules on collecting and publishing real-party-in-interest (RPI) patent ownership information. PTO held a roundtable discussion on the proposal last month, at which Google, Hewlett-Packard and IBM expressed support for improved RPI collection (CD Jan 14 p8). PTO had proposed two versions of the rules -- “Broad” and “Limited” -- that would define RPI in different ways. Justice and the FTC said they support “an RPI definition that, at a minimum, includes the [ultimate parent entities] either by including all UPE in the ‘Broad’ definition, or by adopting the ‘Limited’ definition."

The New Jersey office trying to stop Comcast from being let out of local basic rate regulation told the FCC the cable operator’s petitions for special relief violate the commission’s order approving AWS license transfers from SpectrumCo to Verizon Wireless. The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel asked the FCC to dismiss Comcast petitions for a finding that the cable operator is subject to effective competition in 10 New Jersey franchise areas because it relied on competitively sensitive data provided by Verizon to make its case. The FCC’s order approving the Verizon Wireless-SpectrumCo deal “precludes the sharing and use of competitively sensitive data between Verizon and Comcast,” the state said (http://bit.ly/VJtX37). A spokeswoman for Comcast declined to comment.

Allowing subscriber testing of whether an emergency text message to 911 results in the required bounce-back message saying the service isn’t available could cause big problems for 911 call centers, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials told the FCC. The National Emergency Number Association made similar arguments. In December, the FCC approved a further notice of proposed rulemaking posing questions on how the commission can best ensure all wireless subscribers will one day be able to send emergency text messages to public safety answering points (CD Dec 13 p12). Replies were due Friday.

Sprint Nextel lost a net 337,000 subscribers across its networks during Q4, with growth on its CDMA and LTE networks only partially outweighing a heavy subscriber exodus from the soon-to-be-shuttered iDEN network used by its Nextel service subscribers. The carrier’s Sprint networks added 401,000 postpaid and 525,000 prepaid subscribers, while its Nextel network lost a net 1.02 million subscribers. Sprint said it also lost a net 243,000 wholesale subscribers. Sprint added a net 605,000 subscribers for the entire year, down from a net 5.1 million added in 2011. Exits by Nextel subscribers will continue to accelerate as the service nears its targeted shutdown in the middle of the year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said Thursday during a conference call with investors. Sprint said it expects it will see a diminishing percentage of exiting Nextel subscribers choose to join the remaining networks; about 51 percent of Nextel subscribers who terminated their service during Q4 chose to join other Sprint services (http://xrl.us/boff9q).