With the advent of IPv6 and the growing number of devices and smart objects in the house, ordinary home networks will become data centers, with subnets for communication, TV, smart grid management, healthcare applications and more. How to make such networks easy for anyone to handle and secure was a major topic of the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Quebec last week. Nearly 300 engineers indicated interest in a soon-to-be-formed working group of the standardization body that will talk about the requirements.

The FCC opened the door to looking at AT&T and T-Mobile’s tower holdings as part of its review of their proposed merger. The Wireless Bureau sent letters to three leading tower companies asking for data about their towers. The FCC has not considered tower consolidation in evaluating recent wireless transactions. But AT&T and T-Mobile collectively have some 17,500 cell towers, almost as many as American Tower’s 20,900 and Crown Castle’s 22,300.

A low-power TV (LPTV) operator is again seeking FCC authority to test an alternate broadcast transmission system that would let stations offer broadband service alongside traditional broadcast content. Portland, Ore.-based WatchTV filed an amended application “to evaluate new digital television technology” with the FCC this week, five months after the FCC Media Bureau denied the station’s last request to test the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based system (CD Feb 11 p12). WatchTV’s March application for review of that denial remains pending, it said.

Comcast and the Justice Department may revisit terms of a consent decree clearing the cable operator’s multi-billion-dollar purchase of NBCUniversal (CD Jan 19 p1) after a judge who must approve the settlement expressed concerns, antitrust lawyers predicted. Judge Richard Leon of U.S. District Court in Washington, in a fairness hearing Wednesday afternoon, criticized an arbitration clause in the antitrust pact for online video distributors (OVD), The Wall Street Journal reported. Such rebukes are extremely rare, and all antitrust lawyers we interviewed said they couldn’t recall a single instance where that happened in such a hearing. Comcast and Bloomberg, meanwhile, continued to trade filings at the FCC on the first company’s adherence to one of the agency’s deal conditions.

A breakaway group of rural telcos organized a last-ditch effort to keep their trade associations from signing on to a USTelecom-brokered agreement on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms. “It is simply a bad deal for rural America!” said a draft letter circulated by the Rural Broadband Alliance’s Diane Smith and Stephen Kraskin.

Billions of dollars are at stake in WRC-12 negotiations aimed at creating new jobs, driving economic growth and pushing forward emerging U.S. industries as global leaders, officials said in a briefing. Spectrum for mobile broadband, unmanned aircraft systems, wireless avionics intra-communications and a framework for post-shuttle era communications are some of the top U.S. objectives for the 2012 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) and beyond, officials said. The U.S. is heavily engaged in bilateral and regional talks to solidify support, they said.

Eric Mokole, head of the Surveillance Technology branch of the Radar Division at the Naval Research Lab, warned Thursday about a growing threat to military radars as the government looks for more spectrum for wireless broadband. The wireless industry often doesn’t fully understand the threat to military radars, Mokole said at the International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies in Boulder, Colo.

The availability of free pornography on the Internet has hurt Time Warner Cable’s VOD sales, a drop that contributed to the company’s largely flat Q2 video revenue compared to a year earlier, company executives said during an earnings teleconference Thursday. About a third of the year-over-year drop in VOD sales was due to lower adult title revenue, said Rob Marcus, chief financial officer. The phenomenon isn’t new, said CEO Glenn Britt. “There has been a fairly steady trend on VOD for some time now for adult to go down, largely because there is that kind of material available on the Internet for free,” he said. Adult VOD is a “pretty high margin” business, Britt said, and the decline hasn’t been isolated to the second quarter.

Sprint Nextel, whose Q2 loss was $847 million, entered into a 15-year spectrum hosting and networking service deal with LightSquared. The deal, which contains protection contingency, is subject to LightSquared’s obtaining resolution and FCC approval of certain interference issues involving terrestrial use of the L-Band spectrum. Though Sprint said the deal won’t change its relationship with Clearwire, the WiMAX operator didn’t seem pleased with the agreement. Sprint’s loss widened from $760 million in the year-ago quarter.

The three largest rural telecom associations defended their decision to engage in the USTelecom-led talks on universal service and intercarrier compensation revisions, but told their members to brace themselves for “give-and-take” on rate-of-return cuts and “deeper” cuts in intercarrier compensation. “We understand that many of you may see it as hard to work with carriers and other companies who often look to undermine the support networks that are essential to operation in rural areas,” said NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield, OPASTCO President John Rose and Western Telecom Alliance Vice President Kelly Worthington in a mass email to their members.