Major telcos like AT&T and Verizon aren’t seeing a major impact from the nation’s economic trouble, despite the recent stock market swoon and U.S. credit downgrade, executives said. Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo weighed in at the Oppenheimer investor conference in Boston Wednesday on the ongoing union workers strike, emphasizing the need to change the company’s cost structure to remain competitive.

Three Commerce Committee members will be on Congress’s joint select committee on deficit reduction. Late Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he appointed Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass. On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, selected House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chose Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. The lawmakers’ presence on the committee may increase the chances that spectrum is part of final legislation, lobbyists and industry analysts said.

Another program access complaint may make its way to the FCC. Hawaii’s biggest telco has threatened one against that state’s largest cable operator. And the commission may finish work soon on two other program carriage complaints made by AT&T and Verizon against Cablevision and its former programming unit.

PHILADELPHIA -- FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said he remains ‘hopeful and positive’ about the prospects Congress will approve legislation authorizing the FCC to conduct voluntary incentive auctions and dedicating funds to a national wireless broadband network for public safety. Barnett made a special appearance at an Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials general business meeting.

The FCC adopted an order that the commission said will help peel back several previous rules and allow fixed microwave operation in the spectrum bands that had been previously restricted. License holders will also be able to use adaptive modulation, “which will allow them to take advantage of the latest technology to maintain the reliability of links,” the FCC said. The FCC also eliminated the so-called “final link” rule, saying Tuesday’s rules would give broadcasters “flexibility” by letting them use fixed microwave links more frequently. The commission also launched a rulemaking seeking comment on ways to make microwave communications “more flexible and cost-effective."

The FCC’s decision won’t be political on whether LightSquared poses an interference threat to GPS systems, Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a news conference after Tuesday’s open meeting. The agency is looking for an answer that will let both GPS and LightSquared thrive, and isn’t taking sides, agency officials said later at a briefing for reporters. The commission hasn’t decided whether more testing will be needed, and it isn’t setting a deadline to make a decision, the officials said. “There’s no timetable” for making a decision “other than we're trying to work as quickly as we can,” said Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan. At the officials’ briefing, held at FCC headquarters, the staffers spoke on the condition they not be identified by name and only would have agreed-upon comments attributed to them.

The FCC’s coordinated treatment of AT&T’s proposed purchase of Qualcomm spectrum and T-Mobile USA doesn’t necessarily indicate the later deal is in trouble, analysts told us. The commission will review both purchases in a “coordinated manner” and suspended its informal 180-day clock of its review of AT&T’s $1.9 billion offer for Qualcomm’s 700 MHz spectrum. That’s according to an FCC letter to AT&T and Qualcomm late Monday.

Cablevision shares dropped 13 percent Tuesday after the company reported Q2 results. The loss came despite a broader bounce-back among the major stock indices following Monday’s plunge. Analysts had expected better financial and operating results at Cablevision. “For years we have worried that Cablevision would become a victim of its own success,” Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett wrote investors. The company has among the highest penetration rates for its services and is significantly exposed to Verizon’s FiOS overbuild, he said. “And yet each quarter, their results proved surprisingly resilient, a function of best-in-class execution and best-in-class subscriber demographics. Until now.” Investors may have also expected a new plan to return capital to shareholders, which didn’t materialize, Wells Fargo’s Marci Ryvicker wrote.

There’s no reason to expand telecom outage reporting mandates from traditional phone service to VoIP, broadband and backbone service providers, said all corporate filings to the FCC. There are major differences between outages on public switched telephone networks (PSTN) and on broadband and other newer networks, associations and companies said. But states said such outage reporting is needed, given increasing reliance on VoIP to make calls instead of circuit-switched phone networks, and because Internet networks carry calls to 911. The FCC proposed (http://goo.gl/09KYY), amid concerns of Commissioner Robert McDowell, to extend Part 4 rules to ISPs, backbone services and VoIP for outages of at least a half-hour (CD May 13 p9). Comments were posted Monday and Tuesday in docket 11-82 (http://goo.gl/boqUK).

The availability of technology and fewer economic resources is behind the effort to form partnerships between news organizations and to share and streamline content across multiple platforms, media executives said. Finding resources and cutting costs while expanding quality content affects both public and commercial broadcasting, they said Tuesday during a Bisnow event in Washington.