Interoperability of traditional radio systems must remain a top priority even as public safety pushes forward on a national broadband network, two Department of Homeland Security officials said Monday at the National Public Safety Telecom Council’s Cross Border Interoperability Forum. Philip Verveer, deputy assistant secretary of State, said that, despite years of trying, public safety communications still isn’t interoperable enough.

The Senate is moving faster than the House to finish legislation to build a nationwide interoperable public safety network. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, late Friday circulated a bipartisan draft bill. Committee aides told the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officers Summit Monday that they're pushing hard to pass a bill before the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But a GOP aide for the House Commerce Committee said it will be difficult to pass a bill in that timeframe.

The FCC advocated better cybersecurity measures among small American businesses, half of which lack a defined cyberplan, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Monday during an industry panel at the FCC’s headquarters. “It’s vital that small businesses be part of the cybersecurity equation,” the chairman said after issuing a 10-step cybersecurity tip sheet for small companies. The panel occurred on the same day that the White House launched its international strategy for cyberspace (see separate article).

Sirius XM will keep its subscription rate at $12.95 per month through the end of the year as part of a class action suit settlement, the company said in an SEC filing on Monday. The lawsuit had said Sirius XM had violated antitrust law and the settlement is dependent on court approval. The settlement coincides with the FCC’s ongoing review of the rate freeze, which was an FCC condition of approving the combining Sirius and XM. The FCC is in the process of deciding if it should let the cap expire as planned on July 28. The settlement agreement was reached on Thursday, according to the filing.

FCC staffers and administrative law judges would face deadlines to act on program carriage complaints made by independent cable programmers against multichannel video programming distributors, under a draft order, agency and industry officials said. They said the order that began circulating earlier this month (CD May 3 p8) would give the Media Bureau 60 days to decide whether a complaint made a prima facie showing, or case at first sight. The clock would start ticking after the end of the pleading cycle on the complaint, which lets only the parties to the case comment, agency and industry officials said. Other deadlines would be triggered once the bureau determined an initial case was made.

Approving the AT&T/T-Mobile deal would be a “historic mistake,” Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., told FCC commissioners at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Friday on commission process reform. Other subcommittee members touched only lightly on AT&T’s plan to buy T-Mobile. Many debated more generally whether FCC conditions on transactions should be specific to the given deal.

Meredith Baker’s surprise June exit from the FCC has left Republicans scrambling to find a replacement on short notice. Under the process set up by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., interested Republican senators will forward recommendations to his staff, and a series of interviews will follow. It’s then up to McConnell to recommend a nominee to the White House.

Broadband reclassification is once again haunting the FCC’s proceedings, this time as rural telcos seize on broadband’s Title I status to lobby on Universal Service Fund reforms. The commission elected to take a Title I approach in its net neutrality order (CD Dec 2 p1), but in recent weeks, executives of rural telcos have begun to argue that proposals to roll universal service cash into a Connect America Fund for broadband will raise “a host of legal and practical complications” under Title II (CD May 9 p13).

Meredith Baker said she sat out the past month’s worth of votes as an FCC commissioner, starting around the time she was approached by Comcast about a job. Her written statement Friday was the first time she addressed concerns on conflicts of interest (CD May 13 p1) between regulating Comcast and going to work for the cable operator, whose deal to buy control of NBCUniversal she voted to approve in January. Several opponents of government regulation who supported the Comcast-NBCUniversal deal said in interviews Friday that they saw no problems with Baker’s decision to become NBCUniversal’s top lobbyist.

With some of the larger pay-TV operators having made TV Everywhere deployments, vendors are looking to the second tier of the market to try to win business. Cable operators and telco TV providers with less than a million subscribers are both seeking and being courted by video technology vendors that offer a range of technological approaches to delivering multi-screen video services both in and out of the home, industry executives said. “They look at what Cablevision and Time Warner Cable have done, but they don’t have the resources to build it themselves,” said Marc Sokol, executive vice president of marketing and business development for NeuLion. He said NeuLion expects to announce new customers in the U.S. and U.K. soon. Vendors are presenting pay-TV providers with a variety of ways to begin offering multi-screen services.