Transition to a Next Generation 911 system, technical solutions like call prioritization and rerouting, procedure and policy changes are answers to 911 overloading issues, speakers said during the 911 Industry Alliance’s 911 workshop Wednesday. But many solutions have issues like funding that need to be addressed, they said.

The FCC is poised to rescind several hundred waivers given in 2006 to mostly small TV programmers in a process that officials inside and outside the commission believed wasn’t done in a transparent way (CD Sept 21/06 p2). Agency officials said the draft Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau order would undo about 300 waivers that the bureau gave to mostly religious programmers, many of which are nonprofits, exempting them from having to caption video they produced. The order circulated Aug. 30 and should be voted on and released soon, perhaps late this week, commission officials said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Verizon’s deal with Microsoft to stream some live TV programming from its FiOS service to the Xbox Live service is the first step toward what the partnership could ultimately yield, Eric Bruno, Verizon Telecom vice president of product management, told us. Features such as PVR functionality and eventually allowing the device to function as a full-fledged set-top box could come in the future, he said. “That’s certainly part of the plan,” Bruno said. “You've got to get critical mass from a channel capacity standpoint and you've got to get to a point where you've got different content providers signed up,” he said. But the device itself has “plenty of capacity” to handle the functions associated with a traditional set-top box, he said. “If you look long term, eventually the set-top box fades away."

CTIA will ask a federal judge Oct. 20 to block enforcement of a San Francisco law requiring cellphone retailers to make disclosures provided by the city about health questions concerning radiation (CD Oct 4 p18). A hearing is scheduled then before U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco on a motion for preliminary injunction that the association filed late Tuesday. It accompanied a complaint amending one that had been lodged against a previous version of the ordinance and then put on hold.

The Department of Energy should “defer” pursuit of “conventional regulation” of set-top boxes and instead “participate in and support” the Energy Star program for the devices, the CEA said in comments. Besides being difficult to “properly define,” the boxes are “evolving in numerous ways that affect total power consumption of the household configuration … making single-product regulation possibly improperly focused and even counterproductive to overall energy efficiency,” the group said.

The FCC confirmed that Chairman Julius Genachowski will circulate a proposed order that he hopes will lead to reform the universal service and intercarrier compensation regimes. The FCC called a briefing with reporters where agency officials spoke on the condition they not be named and said Genachowski will deliver a speech Thursday laying out some of his proposals. FCC officials declined to discuss specifics in Tuesday’s briefing, set for Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at FCC headquarters, instead reiterating their talking points about why reform was necessary.

Public Knowledge asked the FCC to clarify how it and other organizations can challenge whether redacted information in the AT&T/T-Mobile and other proceedings should be made part of the public record. Too much of the time, AT&T and T-Mobile have stamped as confidential information they want to keep out of the public view, which is not the kind of “competitively-sensitive information” the FCC ought to protect in protective orders, Public Knowledge said in a letter signed by Legal Director Harold Feld (http://xrl.us/bmfba3).

All VoIP calls look and feel like traditional phone calls and as a result, the FCC needs to protect the public by imposing 911 location-accuracy requirements on outgoing only VoIP calls, the Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials told the agency in comments on a July further notice of proposed rulemaking. But the VON Coalition said imposing the mandate on outgoing only services is a step too far. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions said requirements should be based on the way a device is physically attached to the access network, not on the nature of the voice technology. ATIS said industry will need some time to develop technology needed for any mandate.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Comcast’s vision of delivering high-quality video services to multiple devices in the home, among them its new hybrid IP-QAM device in field trials, includes HTML5 as an application platform, said Senior Vice President Steve Reynolds. At the TVNext conference Tuesday, he said the emergence of idiosyncratic application platforms has been a step in the wrong direction.

To make networks safer from botnets and other malware, public-private partnerships and a minimal role for government are the best approaches, said officials from the FCC, Commerce Department and other agencies. Any framework for protecting and notifying end-users of an attack should be voluntary and comprised of input from multiple stakeholders, they said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.