The Rural Telecom Group’s LTE Roaming Initiative will give rural subscribers “seamless connectivity over 4G LTE as they travel between rural networks throughout the U.S.,” the group said Friday. The program, which Union Wireless and six other strategic service and platform providers are co-sponsoring, will provide rural subscribers with the “same freedom and level of service” wireless subscribers have experienced on 4G LTE networks using diameter signaling, Trilogy LTE Services CEO George Woodward said in a news release. Trilogy LTE Services, Performance Technologies, Inteliquent, Aicent, PSA and Planet Cellular are the program’s other co-sponsors. The program will “enable cost savings and provide a level of efficiency and quality the rural wireless industry has not been able to deliver before,” said RTG Executive Director Tanya Sullivan in a news release (http://bit.ly/18ZM1eN).

The New York Public Service Commission is asking for comments on Verizon’s tariff amendment filing to withdraw a provision to use Voice Link for its sole service offering on Fire Island (http://bit.ly/14SwfRO). The tariff amendment makes the provision effective until Verizon completes the construction of a wireline network and the service is available to all customers on Fire Island. The PSC invites comments on the construction of a fiber network to provide phone and broadband service in western Fire Island, withdrawal of Verizon’s authority to use Voice Link as the sole offering in other geographic areas with destroyed wireline facilities, and the availability of alternative telecommunications providers. The PSC will quickly review Verizon’s request to suspend efforts to offer Voice Link as an alternative to basic landline service to certain customers (http://bit.ly/17wIK93). The PSC is asking for comments by Sept. 30 in Case 13-C-0197.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released an order Friday (http://1.usa.gov/17wEG8M) favoring the American Civil Liberties Union’s push to make the court release more documents. The ACLU has “standing to seek this relief,” which in particular seeks disclosed opinions on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a provision that the National Security Agency has said authorizes bulk collection of telephone data, said the document, signed by FISC Judge Dennis Saylor. The ACLU and the Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic pushed the court to disclose the documents in June. The court specifies that its judgment does not cover any items at issue in a separate ACLU lawsuit from October 2011. But “the Court will order the government to conduct a declassification review of any opinions responsive to the present motion that are not subject to that [Freedom of Information Act] litigation and to report the results of that review to the Court.” The executive branch had denied that the parties had any standing or First Amendment justification for making the FISC documents public, but the ACLU argued the FISC can make classification decisions independent of the executive branch. The FISC cited the ACLU’s “active” engagement with Section 215 legislative and public debates and noted that access to Section 215 opinions would help the ACLU during these debates. To withhold them “constitutes a concrete and particularized injury,” it said. The FISC said it could not make the same arguments for the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic because the public record has not shown it to have engaged in the same level of debate as the ACLU nor had the group shown how the records would benefit its activities. But publication of such opinions would lead to an informed debate, the court said. The government must identify the relevant opinions and establish a timetable for declassification review and any proposed redactions by Oct. 4, it ordered, after which the authors of the opinions can decide whether to make them public. “For too long, the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of Americans has been shrouded in unjustified secrecy,” ACLU staff attorney Alex Ado said in a statement (http://bit.ly/15qt73k). “Today’s ruling is an overdue rebuke of that practice.”

The NTIA awarded more than $12 million in grants to six states last week for FirstNet planning, bringing the total number of awards to 45 grants so far (http://1.usa.gov/1gbhizB). Under the State and Local Implementation Grant Program, the following states were awarded funds: Florida ($4.9 million), Hawaii ($872,075), Indiana ($2.3 million), Mississippi ($1.5 million), New Mexico ($1.8 million) and West Virginia ($1.1 million). All recipients are required to provide a matching contribution of at least 20 percent; additional grants will be awarded on a rolling basis.

AT&T and Dish Network likely avoided a negative outcome in reaching agreements to address some of the FCC’s concerns in the lower 700 MHz band and 1.9 GHz H-band block auction objectives, Stifel Nicolaus analysts said. The companies “maybe even turned things to their advantage by creating opportunities for spectrum gains and new deals,” they said in a research note. AT&T and small carriers reached a settlement on interoperability in the lower 700 MHz band last week (CD Sept 11 p1). Dish offered to consent to a reduction of effective radiated power of base stations for its lower 700 MHz E-block licenses and an H-block bid of about $1.6 billion if the FCC grants it AWS-4 flexibility (CD Sept 13 p13). Sprint seems to be the one major player that could be hurt by Dish’s bid offer in the H-block auction, “though even Sprint could benefit if it wins that spectrum and Dish is allowed to convert its adjacent AWS-4 spectrum to a downlink, reducing interference issues,” the analysts said. AT&T also gained Dish’s agreement for stricter E-block power limits, they said. That could facilitate AT&T’s ability to buy into the A block, “where Verizon could be an interested seller, and it also could facilitate an AT&T purchase of Dish’s E-block spectrum,” they said.

High expectations for cable mergers are making it harder for those mergers to happen, said MoffetNathanson Research analyst Craig Moffett in an email to investors Friday. “These inflated expectations have boosted the stock prices not only of potential acquirees (Time Warner Cable) but also of potential acquirers (Charter) paradoxically making deals harder to strike,” said Moffett. Liberty Media CEO John Malone’s buy of 27 percent of Charter and his endorsement of cable consolidation triggered a “run-up” in cable shares that has since leveled off, said Moffett. “But none have returned to anything close to their unadjusted levels, suggesting that expectations remain high for deals to materialize.” The increased stock prices from merger and acquisition speculation have “obscured” other cable trends -- such as weakening growth in broadband -- that might otherwise have led the stocks to fall, said Moffett. Since the stock prices of both TWC and Charter have risen because of merger talk, the increase hasn’t made it any easier for Charter to acquire TWC. Overly optimistic expectations similarly make deals involving Cablevision or Cox unlikely to happen soon, said Moffett. “A more sober assessment of potential merger synergies is likely a prerequisite for getting deals across the finish line."

The Writers Guild of America, West, supported spectrum aggregation limits and stressed, in a paper the group filed at the FCC, the importance of unlicensed spectrum and build-out requirements for spectrum licenses. “While consolidation and deregulation have allowed a small number of vertically integrated companies to control television production, exhibition and distribution, the Internet enables the reintroduction of competition and independent programming,” the guild said (http://bit.ly/1esqZhu). “However, concentration in the distribution of both wired and wireless Internet threatens to stifle these pro-competitive developments. Many wired broadband providers have instituted data caps that limit consumer adoption of online video viewing. The high entry barriers for wired broadband limit the potential for new entrants, making competitive wireless broadband offerings necessary for the development of a robust online video market."

Akamai Technologies is deploying its FastTCP technology across the Akamai Intelligent Platform to optimize the throughput of video and other digital content across Internet protocol networks, said the company in a news release Friday (http://bit.ly/18ZQC0F). The network upgrade of FastTCP technology “indicated significant improvements in select customer and end user instances,” said the company, referring to its data measurements taken a week before and after the upgrade. Japan had an 8 percent increase in throughput, the U.S. 15 percent, Europe 22 percent and China 105 percent, which improved download speeds and the quality of streaming video content, said Akamai.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense will release 190 MHz of its spectrum to the Office of Communications, it said Sept. 13. The spectrum being released is all below 15 GHz, which is deemed the most useful and valuable part of the radio spectrum because of its wide range of applications, MoD said. The military spectrum can help meet the demand for data-hungry applications by supporting 4G service to more people across Britain, it said. The release won’t have any impact on national security or the operational effectiveness of the armed forces, said Minister for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology Philip Dunne. With 40 MHz in the 2.3 GHz band and another 150 MHz above 3.4 GHz, “this spectrum is suitable for mobile broadband uses,” Ofcom said. The regulator will shortly seek expressions of interest from potential users of the spectrum, it said.

Edgeware announced its new solution for over-the-top and pay-TV service providers to scale their costs in their multiscreen headends, said the company in a news release Friday (http://yhoo.it/14RV3JT). The D-VDB Origin Accelerator will reduce complexity and performance requirements and the costs of origin services by accelerating both ingest and playout capacity, said Edgeware. Many vendors have developed origin servers to record, store and serve programs in different formats to reduce pressure on video headends, said Edgeware. Its accelerator fully offloads and load-balances all origin ingest and playout functions, said Edgeware.