ORLANDO, Fla. -- Spectrum availability outside the home will be a challenge for cable operators as they try to sell new customer products for mobile access, CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney told a Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing conference. “It’s a concern,” he said Tuesday. Spectrum availability could impact the industry’s growth in offering mobile content, he said: “Connectivity is vital for our future."

ORLANDO -- Pay-TV customers are likely to see more disruption of programming, as increasingly difficult negotiations among programmers, broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors are expected, MVPD executives said at the Cable Television Association for Marketing show. Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and the National Cable and Television Cooperative (NCTC) executives said programming negotiations -- including those involving broadcasters and independent programmers -- will likely produce more disruptions in programming. Executives also said pay-TV companies are continuing to introduce TV Everywhere (TVE), so subscribers to an MVPD service can get programming online and not just on their TVs connected to set-top boxes.

An Alaska Communications Systems petition for waiver of the Connect America Fund Phase I support rules faced opposition from all who commented. ACS sought a waiver of the rule requiring broadband deployment to one unserved location per each $775 received, a waiver of the definition of “unserved” to exclude those locations served by fixed wireless broadband providers; and a waiver of the definition of “broadband” to count upgrades to existing customers with speeds below 1.5 Mbps. ACS originally accepted about $4.1 million of incremental Phase I support -- the full amount allocated to it by the commission -- but later requested a waiver for $2.5 million of that allocation after a “more detailed analysis” revealed a shaky business case for deployment of broadband where it had intended (CD Sept. 28 p19).

The FCC’s regulation of rural broadband is akin to the taxation of the British government two and a half centuries ago, said Harold Furchtgott-Roth, former FCC commissioner and head of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economics of the Internet. “Today the situation is eerily similar,” he said at a Hudson Institute panel on rural telecommunications Monday. His comparison kicked off a series of scathing critiques among panelists of how FCC policy contributed to the U.S.’s rural broadband divide. “Flat out, it’s a terrible set of rules that they came up with,” Furchtgott-Roth said of the FCC’s USF/intercarrier compensation order of November 2011.

After months of delay, the FCC released an order that will let cable operators fully encrypt their services in all-digital systems. The order, published Friday (http://xrl.us/bnuci7), had been expected as far back as February (CD Jan 26 p6). But a presentation by Boxee, which introduced a device designed to use cable operators’ unencrypted basic tier signals, slowed its approval (CD Feb 8 p4). The order is largely consistent with what an earlier draft proposed, but adopts a series of commitments by the six largest cable operators for accommodating devices like Boxee’s. The commission concluded that a limited number of customers will be affected by the rule change. Communications industry attorneys following the rulemaking said they don’t expect the order to be challenged.

Japan’s No. 3 carrier, SoftBank, is making a $20.1 billion investment in Sprint Nextel in exchange for a 70 percent stake in the No. 3 U.S. carrier, both companies said Monday in a news conference from Tokyo. The deal isn’t expected to lead to a big regulatory fight in the U.S., as did AT&T/T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless’s recently completed buy of spectrum licenses from cable operators, since the Sprint transaction is expected to lead to more competition in the U.S. (CD Oct 12 p1).

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will again bring cybersecurity legislation to the Senate floor when Congress returns in November after the election. The move follows a GOP rallying cry to let Congress handle cybersecurity rather than President Barack Obama issuing a cybersecurity executive order, which is in draft form (CD Oct 3 p13). Bringing cybersecurity to a vote also gives Congress another chance to hash out a compromise on the issue, a Senate aide said. But a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official during George W. Bush’s presidency said Reid’s move may not be a sincere attempt to get a new deal. Obama is right to “examine all means at his disposal” for confronting cyberthreats, Reid said in a news release Saturday.

The European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) is likely to withdraw its controversial Internet traffic compensation proposal from consideration at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), but is now considering another proposal the U.S. also finds problematic, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. WCIT delegation, Friday. ETNO’s current proposed revision to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) would, among other things, establish a “sender-party-pays” model for Internet traffic compensation that could require the sender of any Internet content to pay for its transmission.

Transcom Enhanced Services has brought its complaints against the Georgia Public Service Commission and Tennessee Regulatory Authority to courts in both Georgia and Tennessee this fall. The Texas-based company was formerly linked to affiliate Halo Wireless when AT&T and various ILECs alleged unpaid access charges as part of a Halo interconnection agreement. Halo and Transcom became embroiled at several state utility commissions in the course of the consideration of the allegations in cases that sprawled over the last two years. Halo was liquidated in mid-July but Transcom continues to fight back.

A federal judge approved a settlement between Netflix and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) that calls for Netflix to provide closed captions on all its streaming content within two years, court filings show. Judge Michael Posner granted the parties’ motion to approve their consent judgment Thursday in U.S. District Court, Springfield, Mass.