The White House renewed an emphasis on wireless broadband in President Barack Obama’s FY 2013 budget, released Monday (www.budget.gov). “High-speed, wireless broadband is fast becoming a critical component of business operations and economic growth,” the budget said. “The United States needs to lead the world in providing broad access to the fastest networks possible.” The budget also proposes significant funding for cybersecurity research. In total, the 2013 budget proposes $140.8 billion for federal R&D, 1.4 percent more than the 2012-enacted level. The overall increase is the same as the rate of inflation.

The intersection of antitrust law and intellectual property is likely to be “the single most important” antitrust issue of the next decade, said former Department of Justice antitrust chief Christine Varney during a Monday panel at a Silicon Flatirons conference on digital broadband migration. Varney also warned that federal regulators have much more trouble sorting through vertical market power issues than they do traditional horizontal issues. She said she has continuing concerns about the Comcast-NBCU deal, approved while she was chief of DOJ’s Antitrust Division.

GENEVA -- African, Arab and European officials have preliminarily agreed to mobile allocations, with the entry into force immediately following the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC), an official told us at the 2012 conference. The resolution, given initial approval at our deadline, calls for an allocation to the mobile service in the band 694 to 790 MHz in ITU region 1 on a co-primary basis with other primary allocated services, and to identify it for International Mobile Telecommunications, the international standard for advanced wireless communications. Broadcasters continued to raise concerns. More approvals will be needed.

In the long transition toward bill-and-keep, a skirmish is building over how to handle intrastate originating access rates for calls that start over the public switched telephone network and terminate on the Internet. LECs like Windstream and Frontier are charging intrastate rates, while interexchange carriers like Verizon and AT&T argue that they should pay the lower interstate rate. In a series of meetings over the past several weeks, the industry has been appealing to the FCC for clarification.

Cable industry efforts to provide bargain-basement-priced broadband service to low-income consumers (CD Feb 2 p8) played to rave reviews from federal regulators. But the programs aren’t expected to make major contributions to company bottom lines, industry officials said. That’s because the aim of the program isn’t to make money for now but instead is to spur further consumer uptake of broadband, said companies participating in “Connect to Compete.”

The launch of ViaSat-1 gives Viasat a new chance to convince regulators of satellites of their usefulness in bringing broadband to hard-to-reach areas, said Tom Moore, ViaSat senior vice president, in an interview Friday. Satellite companies have increased the push in recent years for increased government recognition of them as broadband providers. The new satellite marks a shift for ViaSat, which has its origins as a satellite system components manufacturer, though the purchase of WildBlue in 2009 has helped with the transition, said Moore. Moore co-founded WildBlue.

Mobile communications technological innovation is not as world-changing as the industry would have us believe, panelists said at a New America Foundation event Thursday. Mobile solutions may benefit society in the long run but don’t offer any immediate solutions to longstanding human problems, said U.S. Agency for International Development Chief Innovation Officer Maura O'Neill. She said she’s hopeful about the future effects of mobile innovation, but current effects are being over-hyped. Solution providers should focus first on adoption rates, especially among minority groups, connectivity and affordability, she said.

The FCC has put off action on more than 30 waiver requests from local governments that have proposed public safety networks using 700 MHz spectrum (CD Sept 15 p1). Some officials at the FCC and industry say the reluctance to grant the waivers appears tied to the desire of Chairman Julius Genachowski not to muddy the waters as Congress pushes forward on broader spectrum legislation, which addresses a national wireless network for public safety.

As the FCC prepares to vote on an order on VoIP outage reporting at Wednesday’s meeting, carriers continued to characterize the proposed rules as unrealistic, unnecessary and burdensome. That’s even though they've been greatly curtailed from what was originally proposed.

The FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee met Friday for the first time since issuing a contested report last year on the future of emergency communications for people with disabilities. Industry representatives on the EAAC filed an addendum to the report questioning many of the findings (CD Dec 27 p4). Members of the EAAC representing the disabled said in an FCC filing they found it “very contradictory” that industry members “organized and jointly questioned nearly all the key recommendations.”