AT&T, which reported Q2 profit of $3.6 billion, is confident its plan to buy T-Mobile will get receive regulatory approval in Q2 next year, executives said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. The looming departure of Justice Department’s antitrust chief Christine Varney and opposition by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., will have no material impact on the timing of the outcome, General Counsel Wayne Watts said.

Sprint Nextel’s fight with AT&T and T-Mobile over the GSM carriers’ proposed combination led to increased spending on lobbying for all three carriers in Q2, according to quarterly lobbying reports released this week. The fight over the extent to which LightSquared’s planned terrestrial system will disrupt GPS signals also continued to be a boon to the lobbying industry. Google, Facebook and other Internet companies continued to expand their Washington presence, while major telecom associations maintained spending consistent with 2010 levels.

The $6.5 billion in deficit reduction estimated by the Congressional Budget Office for Senate spectrum legislation (S-911) failed to win over at least two of four Commerce Committee Republicans who voted against the measure in markup. However, a recent statement by Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., may imply that Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, is reconsidering her opposition. Meanwhile, lobbyists are debating the accuracy of the CBO estimate Wednesday that S-911 would reduce net direct spending by $6.5 billion from 2012 to 2021 (CD July 21 p1).

Toyota urged the FCC to change the limits for radiated emissions in the 76-77 GHz band to allow more use of “stop and go” adaptive cruise control (ACC) and rear pre-collision (RPCS) systems in the cars it manufactures for sale in the U.S. (http://xrl.us/bk2qij). In a May 25 rulemaking notice, the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology sought comment on whether the commission should modify its rules for the band with an eye on improved collision avoidance and driver safety (http://xrl.us/bk2qje).

Transition from Internet Protocol version 4 to IPv6 on mobile networks is lagging because operators don’t see any immediate benefits in the new addressing technology, WirelessE2E LLC founder Murat Bilgic told us. The shift involves major “back-office,” business objective and technological upgrades in the face of customer apathy, he said. Mobile IPv6 could offer services better to consumers if operators made the effort, said WiChorus Technical Fellow Charles Perkins, a co-inventor of the technology.

Four Missouri Republicans joined rural telcos’ campaign to ward off what they see as the worst of the pending Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms. Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Sam Graves, Jo Ann Emerson and Vicky Hartzler said a letter dated Tuesday and released the next day. “We believe that in order to achieve the goals of this [1996 Telecom] Act, changes to the USF and ICC system must be made carefully and in a way that would enable carriers serving rural areas to sustain and improve upon affordable broadband where it already exists, to encourage deployment to unserved customers and not to harm rural customers who already have broadband service,” the letter said.

Verizon President Lowell McAdam expects approval of AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile by the FCC and Department of Justice, he said Wednesday. “If I was betting I would say that the merger will probably go through,” he said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. “It’s a merger that I think AT&T had to do because we have a failed spectrum policy in this country. There’s plenty of spectrum out there. It’s in the wrong peoples’ hands. [AT&T] needed to get spectrum. T-Mobile had spectrum. To me, the only question was why did it take this long to do it.”

LOS ANGELES -- The rising volume of data-rich traffic requires carriers to address capacity issues with technical solutions in the short run and deploying more spectrum in the long run, panelists at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners summer meeting said. Operators need to continue to deploy more advanced wireless technologies and offload data traffic onto alternate networks like Wi-Fi and femtocells, which have greater capacity due to their much higher frequency reuse, said Peter Rysavy, president of Rysavy Research. The measures aren’t sufficient to meet growing market demand, he said late Tuesday. The only viable long-term solution is to allocate more spectrum, he said.

The FCC should exempt Internet-connected TV sets and video players from rules it’s in the process of adopting to ensure accessibility of certain online content to people with disabilities, the CEA said in an ex parte letter to the commission filed this week. It wants Internet-connected TV sets, DVRs and DVD players to be exempt from rules laid out in Section 716 of the Communications Act, as amended by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which covers accessibility of “advanced communications services” (ACS), a term the FCC has yet to precisely define but which may include VoIP, electronic messaging and videoconferencing. Industry groups had sought a narrow definition of the term in initial comments in the FCC’s CVAA rulemaking (CD April 27 p8). The CEA waiver request doesn’t address accessibility of video programming on those devices, it said in a footnote to its letter.

Major groups representing local officials asked the FCC to activate its Intergovernmental Advisory Committee (IAC), a successor to its Local and State Government Advisory Committee, active from 1997-2003, in a filing responding to a notice of inquiry on promoting broadband deployment. Such sector heavyweights as the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the United States Conference of Mayors, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, the Government Finance Officers Association, the American Public Works Association and the International City/County Management Association signed the filing.