Dish Network is encouraging its customers in 36 markets to call their local Raycom station to influence the broadcaster to sign a new retransmission consent agreement. Customers in Cleveland, Panama City, Fla., Tucson and other markets lost access to ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC-affiliated stations Thursday morning. Dish is ready to sign a deal “if Raycom will match the words in the contract with its message to viewers,” it said in a press release (http://bit.ly/13DeRTX). “Raycom has publicly told its viewers that they are willing to give Dish the same deal as other providers.” The blackout also affects CW and MyNetworkTV channels in Baton Rouge, La., Cleveland, Honolulu, Paducah, Ky., and Richmond-Petersburg, Va., it said. Raycom said Dish refused its offer for a temporary extension (CD Aug 2 p6).

The National Broadband Map, updated for the sixth time on Monday, shows more work needs to be done to build advanced, high-capacity telecommunications networks, said Anne Neville, NTIA State Broadband Initiative director, in a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/15B2o5d). As of the end of 2012, nearly 99 percent of Americans had access to broadband speeds of 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream through wireline or wireless service, said Neville. Ninety-six percent of Americans had access to broadband speeds that will soon be considered a “basic requirement for accessing many online services” of 6 Mbps downstream and 1.5 Mbps upstream, said Neville. Nearly 90 percent of Americans had access to 4G wireless broadband, defined as a service with download speeds of at least 6 Mbps, which is up from 81 percent in June 2012 and just under 26 percent in June 2010, said Neville. Of the 2,083 providers in the updated data set, 1,618 offer broadband speeds of 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream and 1,018 offer broadband speeds of 6 Mbps downstream and 1.5 Mbps upstream, said Neville. Two hundred providers offer 100-megabit connections, said Neville. The number of Americans with access to fiber grew from just above 20 percent in June 2012 to just above 23 percent at the end of 2012, and 6.7 percent of Americans have gigabit connections in their neighborhoods, said Neville. The National Broadband Map saw a significant broadband gap between urban and rural communities, with nearly all urban communities (99.6 percent) with access to download speeds of at least 10 Mbps compared to nearly 84 percent of rural communities, said Neville.

Mobile phone users in Europe face huge price differences for the same services, the European Commission said Tuesday. The largest discrepancy is in domestic mobile calls, where there’s a 774 percent price difference between Lithuania, the cheapest country, and the Netherlands, the most expensive, it said. The disparity can’t be explained by differences in quality, costs to provide the services, or consumer buying power, it said. The numbers show that Europe’s 28 national telecom markets aren’t benefiting consumers the way a single market would, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. She'll unveil legislation in September to remedy the situation, the EC said.

Members of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Media and Telecommunications Task Force met in the offices of FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai last week to emphasize the group’s concerns, particularly on prison calling, according to an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/185XXx6). “We explained that the Lifeline program and the e-rate program should not compete for the same funds,” the filing said of the group’s meeting with Rosenworcel. “We urged the Commissioner to support the inmate calling draft order circulated by the Chairwoman. We urged the Commission to address the full range of fees that impact inmate telephone calls, as well as the rates and per-call charges.” The group also pushed for quick work on the FCC’s proposed Critical Information Needs/Section 257 studies, it said. The group reiterated the importance of the inmate calling proceeding with meeting with Pai’s office: “Even if the time spent in jail is short, that time is a critical one for inmates requiring telephone calls,” it said. “Access to counsel and contact with family members is critical when someone has just been detained.” It advocated that rates be brought down as low as possible.

T-Mobile US submitted to the FCC a report written by American University Washington College of Law professor Jonathan Baker that found reasonable aggregation limits in auctions would foster mobile competition. Baker’s paper also said two papers recently submitted by AT&T that argued against aggregation limits were flawed (http://bit.ly/13UKK5Y). The AT&T submission “inappropriately focuses on the possibility that spectrum aggregation limits could hinder large incumbents’ abilities to realize production efficiencies rather than on the dangers that spectrum aggregation limits address: that the largest two incumbent firms could foreclose rivals from access to spectrum, and thereby relax the existing competitive constraint those rivals impose on the largest two firms, resulting potentially in higher prices, decreased investment and innovation, and lower service quality,” T-Mobile counsel Howard Symons said. The AT&T papers’ claim that the use of spectrum aggregation limits for auctions and the use of case-by-case reviews of secondary transactions could create arbitrage “are wrong and in any case will not likely occur,” Symons said (http://bit.ly/1cDQPM1).

Thirteen members of Congress joined as co-sponsors of the Local Radio Freedom Act, said NAB in a Monday news release (http://bit.ly/1b7lz6p). The bill would oppose any new performance fee, tax, royalty or other charge on terrestrial broadcast radio stations. The bill has 152 co-sponsors in the House and 11 in the Senate. New co-sponsors include Reps. Robert Andrews, D-N.J.; Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.; Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.; Frank Lucas, R-Okla; and Dan Maffei, D-N.Y.

The FCC violated the Administrative Procedure Act in its order authorizing Progeny to begin commercial operations of its E-911 locator service on the 902-928 MHz band, Google said in an FCC filing posted Monday. Google’s comments were in support of separate efforts by the Part 15 Coalition, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and four other opponents of Progeny’s service who have filed petitions for reconsideration of the order. The FCC order “changed the rights and responsibilities of licensed and unlicensed users” on the band “without public notice and opportunity for comment, and without admitting the change,” Google said. If the FCC does not reverse the order, it “will discourage future deployment of equipment and services in the 902-928 MHz band and elsewhere,” the company said. Recent efforts to develop new versions of Wi-Fi like the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE-developed 802.11ah standard “can be sustained only within a predictable and stable regulatory framework, which the Order undermines,” Google said (http://bit.ly/194YfJ9). WISPA said in a separate filing that it believes the order should be overturned because of the FCC’s “failure” to provide a clear standard for what it believes are unacceptable levels of interference to unlicensed users, which “is a material legal error that Progeny cannot sidestep with twisted logic and post hoc rationalizations” in its opposition to the petitions for reconsideration (http://bit.ly/14uskQA). The FCC also “committed legal error by not just accepting but relying almost exclusively on the unilateral testing conducted by Progeny,” the Part 15 Coalition said Friday. Progeny, meanwhile, has offered “no valid reason why the Commission should not reconsider and overturn the Order,” the Part 15 Coalition said (http://bit.ly/1b7hZsV).

U.S. cloud computing companies could lose between $21.5 billion and $35 billion by 2016 due to global concerns about government access to data after the revelations about U.S. surveillance programs, said the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in a report Monday (http://bit.ly/151a22J). U.S. cloud companies could lose 10-20 percent of the foreign market to European and Asian competitors as foreign governments and their citizens express concerns about the U.S. government having access to user data through the Internet surveillance program Prism, the report said. “After PRISM, the case for national clouds or other protectionist measures is even easier to make.” To protect American companies in the global cloud market, the report suggested the U.S. government “proactively set the record straight about what information it does and does not have access to and how this level of access compares to other countries,” and “work to establish international transparency requirements” through international agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., inserted a provision into the defense spending bill last week that would create new obligations for the National Security Agency. The provision would compel the NSA to disclose the number of phone records of U.S. residents that have been acquired under the agency’s bulk collection program and how many records NSA staff has reviewed, his spokesman told us. The NSA would also have to report on all its bulk collection activities, “including when such activities began, the cost of such activities, what types of records have been collected in the past, what types of records are currently being collected, and any plans for future bulk collection,” he said. The agency would also have to disclose the terrorist activities that the data collection program helped prevent and whether other means could have yielded this information, he said. The provision would require NSA to give the reports to Congress by 90 days after the bill is signed and ensure they're “unclassified to the greatest extent possible,” the spokesman said. The spending bill cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee last week.

Copyright holders should focus on improving their search engine optimization (SEO) to promote legitimate content over pirated content online, said a report from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (http://bit.ly/16YtqQE). The content industry’s “fixation on demoting responsive but undesirable search results overlooks a more viable strategy: promoting desirable results,” the report said. Rightsholders can optimize their websites to improve the page rankings of legitimate content and include in licensing agreements requirements for licensees to do the same, it said: Including words such as “mp3,” “download” and “torrent” in websites -- including those belonging to legitimate content delivery services, content creators and content industry groups -- is one way to increase the chances that search users see legitimate content when looking for pirated content online.