AT&T’s wireless data strategy is working and helping the company grow its wireless revenue, AT&T officials said Tuesday during the Q2 financial report. “We have confidence in our mobile Internet strategy,” Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said during a conference call. Competitors questioned whether the new data plans from AT&T and Verizon Wireless benefit subscribers, their representatives told us.

Senate Commerce Committee members of both parties said there’s a battle coming as they consider how to rewrite or possibly purge some of the 1992 Cable Act. There was a general accord Tuesday during a committee hearing that consumers need more choice and control of the video they receive, but members disagreed over how to achieve that. Retransmission consent disputes were of particular concern for members, who said they had received calls from their constituents about the recent retrans blackouts.

The FCC violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution when it approved its 2010 Open Internet Order, and exceeded its authority by applying common carrier regulations on broadband Internet providers, several free market think tanks, states, and the nation’s largest industrial trade association argued in briefs filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Monday in case 11-1355. The net neutrality rules were approved with a three-vote majority in late 2010, and Verizon quickly appealed (CD Jan 21/11 p1).

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Multiple challenges emerged for the FCC at a midyear NARUC meeting. Some regulators and officials questioned USF methodology, called for Federal State Joint Board on USF referral of FCC decisions and questioned the broader direction the commission has moved on telecom in recent years. The strains have manifested in broader misgivings that some panelists discussed about the November USF/intercarrier compensation order (http://xrl.us/bnhyb7) as well as a more focused critique and controversy surrounding a quantile regression analysis for the fund.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- “We need more spectrum, I can’t say it enough times,” said AT&T’s Joel Lubin, vice president-public policy, during a panel about the 2020 vision of telecom at NARUC’s midyear meeting. He said “legacy systems are broken” and an “all-broadband world” is on the horizon. Lubin said that over the last dozen years, switched-access line counts have declined enormously as housing units grew. The infrastructure should transition to all IP, he said. The FCC is on the right track with the Transformation Order and its conclusion that “consumers want advanced mobility,” but more needs to be done, he said.

Virgin Media will develop non-DVR set-tops and other products, seeking to expand use of the TiVo interface as the number of subscribers to the service nears a million, CEO Neil Berkett said on an earnings call. The U.K. cable operator ended Q2 with 939,000 TiVo subscribers, up from 34,000 a year ago, and was expected to hit the million mark this week, he said. Virgin added 261,700 net new TiVo subscribers in Q2, the company said. Virgin expects to release a TiVo iPad app in Q4 and will work to spread the interface across multiple products. Among these products could be a non-DVR set-top built by Cisco or Samsung that could sell for $155. The 500 GB TiVo DVR-equipped set-top was originally priced at $399.

Replies to an FCC rulemaking became another venue for multichannel video programming distributors and programmers to more broadly debate the economics of the MVPD industry. In initial comments, Mediacom and others urged the agency to expand program access rules to cover the volume discount and bundling practices of unaffiliated pay-TV programmers (CD June 26 p7). In replies in docket 12-68, the major media content companies attacked Mediacom’s arguments and argued the commission should limit itself to deciding whether it should allow its ban on exclusive deals between an MVPD and a network it owns to expire Oct. 5.

The Department of Defense Monday proposed a list of sites that might be “amenable” for a test of spectrum sharing between commercial and government users, Tom Power, White House deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications, told a meeting of the Wireless Spectrum Research and Development (WSRD) Committee in Boulder, Colo. Power also said the administration has not given up on making parts of the 1755-1850 MHz band, which he called “this most appealing of spectrum,” available for exclusive commercial use.

After years of debate, bickering and compromise, the Senate appears poised to consider cybersecurity legislation this week, said sponsors of a revised Senate Cybersecurity Act. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and three other sponsors held a news briefing Tuesday at the Capitol to gin up support for what they call a comprehensive approach to securing the nation’s cyber infrastructure. Opponents of S-3414 continued to decry what they called its flawed approach that they said would impose a costly and burdensome regulatory regime on businesses that does little to improve U.S. cybersecurity.

The U.K. Office of Communications revamped plans to auction 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz spectrum for next-generation 4G mobile networks. If all goes to plan -- and earlier proposals prompted litigation threats from Britain’s big mobile operators -- Ofcom said it expects to invite applications before the end of the year, with bidding to start in early 2013. Operators said they're reviewing the lengthy documents before making substantive comments. Although the package makes no substantial changes from the earlier one, the regulator worked hard this time to make it as immune to challenge as possible, said Ovum analyst Matthew Howett.