AT&T will have a “steep climb” if it wants to take over T-Mobile, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said. “You will remember in the Comcast merger that I said at the outset that it would have been a very steep climb for me. I ended up voting against it,” he said in a videotaped interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators. “This is maybe even a steeper climb from the standpoint of a lot of power, a lot of influence given to one company in a world where two companies are going to control, like, 80 percent of the spectrum.” Copps worries about “what residue of competition will be left if the merger is approved,” what impact it will have on U.S. jobs and whether the bulk of the proceeds will flow into Europe’s telecom market, he said. T-Mobile’s parent is based in Germany.

A legal challenge is likely if the FCC mandates data roaming for wireless, as it appears poised to do at next week’s meeting, Verizon Executive Vice President Tom Tauke told reporters Thursday. Tauke also said the FCC should not take a “time out” on getting more spectrum into the market while it examines AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile. The FCC shouldn’t use the merger as an excuse for imposing new regulation on the wireless industry, he said.

An auction of TV spectrum may not raise as much money for the U.S. government and the incumbent broadcast licensees as some incentive auction proponents estimate, said an economist’s paper released Thursday by the NAB. The title of the paper by Managing Director Jeffrey Eisenach of Navigant Economics is: “Revenues From a Possible Incentive Auction: Why the CTIA/CEA Estimate is Not Reliable.” Those two groups’ estimate of winning bids of at least $33 billion to $34 billion (CD Feb 16 p7) is “based on historic spectrum prices, which are subject to wide variation,” it said.

With the first quarter of 2011 in the books, some media investors are awaiting new details about NBCUniversal’s operations and finances from Comcast, which took control over the GE unit in January. GE provided less information about operations at NBCU than CBS, Disney or News Corp have disclosed to their investors. NBCU made up less than 10 percent of total GE sales in 2010, and was dwarfed by GE’s other business units in size. Accounting for Comcast’s 51 percent stake in NBCU, NBCU revenue will represent more than 20 percent of Comcast’s total sales, Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a note to investors.

AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi went on the attack against broadcasters, accusing them of sitting on spectrum and questioning why any would oppose a voluntary auction. Former FCC officials Blair Levin, who also spoke at a Brookings spectrum conference Wednesday, said broadcasters should be required to decide whether they will adopt the MPEG-4 standard, with an eye on spectrum efficiency.

Republicans want to cut FCC spending below the agency’s FY 2012 request of $354.2 million, they said at a hearing Wednesday of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. It’s still important to find cost savings at the FCC, even if the agency offsets its costs by releasing new spectrum, said Subcommittee Chairman Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo. Committee members also needled FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on many specific issues, including data roaming, potential interference to GPS by LightSquared, and alleged privacy violations by Google.

Congress “guaranteed” that CLECs could lease entrance facilities at cost-based rates even when the same outlet is used for interconnection, lawyer John Bursch told the Supreme Court on behalf of Talk America and the Michigan Public Service Commission Wednesday. “Interconnection is the lifeblood of telecom,” Bursch said in oral argument on Talk America v. Michigan Bell and Isiogu et al. v. Michigan Bell. Michigan Bell parent AT&T has argued that it was no longer required to offer entrance facilities under Section 251(c)(3) of the Telecom Act because the commission phased out the mandate in its 2005 Triennial Review Remand Order. AT&T lawyer Scott Angstreich got the most sympathetic responses from Justice Antonin Scalia, who said Bursch wanted “the incumbents to build the cords out” to CLECs.

Google picked Kansas City, Kan., to build its ultra high-speed fiber network, after a year-long search for a location to test broadband at speeds 100 times faster than existing technologies in wide use. The company plans to offer service starting in 2012, pending approval from the city’s Board of Commissioners, Vice President Milo Medin wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Support for a bipartisan bill to reallocate the 700 MHz D-block to public safety (CD Feb 11 p3) appeared strong at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday. Public safety officials testified in support of the assignment for the full 20 MHz of public-safety broadband to a single licensee, in an effort to get legislation passed and a network put in place by the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The FCC International Bureau waiver that allows LightSquared to offer terrestrial-only service should have received a full public notice with a 30-day comment period because the requested modification, by the FCC’s own account, isn’t a “minor” one, said the U.S. GPS Industry Council and the Air Transport Association. The trade groups filed joint reply comments to oppositions to applications for review of the waiver (CD March 17 p17). The waiver order itself makes clear that “the modification is not minor” because it would raise interference issues and finds that LightSquared’s mobile satellite service modification request requires a waiver of FCC rules, they said.