NCTA was among the 50 industry trade associations and public interest groups that urged House and Senate leaders in a letter Wednesday to pass legislation meant to address the problem of “patent trolls.” The number of defendants facing patent infringement lawsuits brought by patent trolls has quadrupled since 2005 and patent trolls’ activity cost the U.S. economy $80 billion in 2011, the groups said in the letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have been seeking “comprehensive legislative solutions” through their committees, while individual members of Congress have introduced their own bills aimed at addressing the effects of patent trolls; the White House’s executive actions, mainly directed at addressing the problem through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and related legislative recommendations are also an encouraging step, the groups said. Other industry groups that signed onto the letter: the Application Developers Alliance, Association of National Advertisers, Competitive Carriers Association, CompTel, Computer and Communications Industry Association, the CEA, Direct Marketing Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Engine Advocacy, Information Technology Industry Council, Internet Association, Internet Infrastructure Association, MPAA, NAB, NCTA, NTCA, Online Publishers Association, Public Knowledge, the Software & Information Industry Association, TechAmerica, TechNet and USTelecom (http://bit.ly/12TfZ1M).

The number of certified HomePNA products grew to 96 after the addition of 12 products, the HomeGrid Forum said Wednesday. The new products that passed certification testing for HomePNA interoperability and compliance are from seven vendors, and include set-top boxes from Arris and Kaon Media, residential gateways from ZyXEL and Pace, an Ethernet to HomePNA bridge from Cameo, optical network terminals from Calix and a new reference board from Sigma Designs, said the HomeGrid Forum. The announcement was the first since the HomePNA Alliance merged with the HomeGrid Forum in May to create what it called a larger, stronger industry association dedicated to the development and promotion of home networking technologies over any wire in the home. It now has more than 70 members. There’s an installed base of more than 40 million HomePNA products, HomeGrid Forum President John Egan said in a news release. The ongoing introduction of new certified HomePNA products to the market is a “good indication of continuing demand” from service providers for high quality interoperable HomePNA products as they “expand their service areas and rely on HomePNA for robust home networks that support” HD IPTV, the HomeGrid Forum said.

Boeing said the FCC should rethink changes to its experimental licensing rule that effectively prohibits holders of conventional experimental licenses from using any frequency exclusively allocated to passive services. “In doing so, the Commission has, without explanation and perhaps inadvertently, departed from its longstanding policy of investing the Office of Engineering and Technology ... with the discretion to review applications on a case-by-case basis and grant, condition, or dismiss them as appropriate based on the nature of the experimental program, the public interest considerations, and the potential for interference to co-channel users,” Boeing said (http://bit.ly/17lEZSJ). “Such a change could prevent or significantly increase the cost of important military, scientific, and commercial experimentation programs without a corresponding benefit to passive services.” Marcus Spectrum Solutions raised the issue in a May reconsideration petition (http://bit.ly/1dFbUTY).

The FCC appears set to take up a rulemaking notice on reporting requirements for carriers on the reliability of their networks during and after natural disasters, but should instead ask for more comment through a notice of inquiry, said CTIA and member companies in a series of meetings at the FCC, with Public Safety Bureau officials and commissioner aides. “CTIA and wireless providers understand that the proposed rules under consideration are similar to recommendations submitted to the Commission by Consumers Union ... earlier this year, whereby carriers would report -- and the Commission would publicly disclose -- the percentage of cell sites out of service in a particular county during a Commission-defined [Disaster Information Reporting System] period,” CTIA said (http://bit.ly/13P3Q4f). “Before imposing new paperwork burdens and requiring the public disclosure of proprietary information, however, the Commission should ensure that any proposed rules will, in fact, be useful to consumers. In service providers’ experience, consumers need information concerning wireless coverage in areas affected by natural disasters -- i.e., they want to know where wireless service is available to them. CU’s proposed metric (the percentage of out-of-service cell sites in a given county) does not provide that information."

NARUC Telecom Committee Chairman John Burke, a member of the Vermont Public Service Board, will take over chairmanship of association’s task force on telecom and federalism, an association spokesman told us. The task force was formed in November and has worked to outline relevant principles to guide state commissioners and other stakeholders. Commissioner Orjiakor Isiogu of the Michigan Public Service Commission has chaired the task force since its creation, but his PSC term expired in early July. Isiogu will still moderate discussions of the task force at NARUC’s Denver meeting next week, the spokesman said.

In a DisplaySearch survey of 15,000 connected TV owners in 15 countries, 88 percent of tablet users and 82 percent of smartphone owners said they use their mobile device at least “some of the time” while watching TV, the research firm said. Primary second-screen activities include checking email, browsing the Web, texting, and checking Facebook and weather, it said. “For many people around the world, multi-tasking with apps on smartphones and tablets while watching TV has forever changed the traditional TV-focused viewing experience,” said DisplaySearch analyst Riddhi Patel. While 85 percent of tablet owners use their devices to watch online content, just 65 percent of smartphone owners use their device to watch online content, primarily due to screen size, DisplaySearch said. Other reasons cited for not watching video on a smartphone include inferior sound quality, the discomfort of holding the device for a long time and difficulty in finding content to watch, it said. The 15 percent of tablet owners that never view online content on a tablet don’t because of screen size and poor sound quality, it said. There’s little evidence to support a “commonly held belief” that tablets and smartphones will cannibalize or adversely affect sales of TVs larger than 30 inches, Patel said. While tablet ownership has impacted sales of smaller-size TVs, “owning smartphones has little or no effect on TV purchases,” she said. Results varied according to region, Patel said. Some 60 percent of connected TV owners in the U.S. and other mature markets said they sometimes watch content on a tablet, as said 72 percent in emerging markets including Brazil, China and India. The survey was done between January and June across key global markets including Brazil, urban China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, the U.K., U.S. and Vietnam, DisplaySearch said.

DTS’s recent efforts to work with tools and infrastructure providers to make the surround-sound codec deliverable via the cloud have paid off with April’s deal for CinemaNow to deliver content encoded with DTS, and with Tuesday’s pact for Paramount Studios to encode its library of UltraViolet movies available in Common File Format (CFF) with DTS-HD surround sound, said CEO Jon Kirchner. He called DTS-HD an “efficient and scalable solution” that crosses multiple listening environments from multi-channel home theater surround sound to two-channel TV sound and the headphone space. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for improvement in the marketplace to enhance entertainment” from smartphones, tablets and PCs, he said. CFF-encoded content, which consumers download once and then can play on multiple devices “anytime, anywhere,” is due out later this year along with hardware to support it -- including Blu-ray players and set-top boxes, Kirchner said. It’s possible that existing hardware could be upgraded with software to play CFF content, he said. There aren’t any products on the market supporting UltraViolet CFF, since the specification was only recently finalized, Kirchner said. Over the next six to nine months, a range of new devices will come out that support CFF, he said. Those devices will come from the iOS, Android, Mac and PC domains, and include Blu-ray players and TVs, he said. “There are lots of people involved in the UV organization and lots of industry support” from the content and device sides, he said. Kirchner said the DTS platform is “largely agnostic” to the file containers, whether they're for streaming or downloads. On UltraViolet, Kirchner referred to the “soft launch mode” of the ecosystem due to studios dealing with “the complexity of completing all the standards” for CFF delivery and infrastructure challenges of launching “what they hope to be the next big interoperable format.” DTS believes there will be a big push behind UltraViolet, he said, with the number of UltraViolet-formatted titles approaching 10,000. Dolby said in January that Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will encode thousands of movies and TV shows in the UltraViolet CFF using its codec, Dolby Digital Plus. Kirchner said initially Paramount is releasing its catalog in UltraViolet only with DTS surround audio as the 5.1 track for the content, but the relationship isn’t exclusive long term. Initially the libraries are going to be released in DTS, he said. “The studios have an interest in monetizing content and will “do what they need to do,” long term, he said, citing the costs involved in converting libraries to the cloud environment.

CTIA took issue with arguments the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance made last week (http://bit.ly/11UtL9x) that wireless and wireline voice services should be lumped into a single interstate telecommunications service provider (ITSP) category for assessing regulatory fees, in a letter to the FCC. “First, it is undisputed that the wireless industry supports a greater portion of the Commission’s budget than any other industry segment, including wireline carriers,” CTIA said in an ex parte filing posted by the FCC Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1aqA44J). “Second, ITTA’s reliance on the Commission’s decision to include interconnected VoIP providers in the ITSP regulatory fee is also misguided and uninformed. Prior to that decision, interconnected VoIP providers were not subject to any regulatory fees -- unlike wireless regulatees who have been paying regulatory fees since their inception. In fact, wireless regulatees that provide interconnected VoIP service also separately pay ITSP regulatory fees based upon their VoIP end user revenues."

The framework specifications of NENA i3 contain many gaps that may disrupt the transition to accessible next-generation 911, said a report from the FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee Monday (http://bit.ly/12uJvuR). NENA 08-003 version 2, yet to be released, may fix some of these gaps, it said, calling the NENA i3 work a “tremendous accomplishment” despite the work to be done. The report pointed to test requirement inconsistencies and lack of testing specification, how 911 call centers will be able to accept text messages as TTY during the transition, TTY limitations generally, the risk of not using terminal procedures for NG-911 handling and other aspects. The report does not claim to be comprehensive but wants its points taken into consideration in any future revision of the standards. Accessibility should be implemented from the start in NG-911, it said.

A growing number of customers worldwide are using smartphones in their purchasing processes, but the U.S. is far behind emerging markets like China and India in this trend, said a Havas Worldwide study Tuesday (http://prn.to/16GmoP2). With research partner Market Probe International, the study surveyed 10,219 adults in 31 countries. The study said 16 percent of U.S. consumers have used a mobile device to shop, compared with 50 percent in China, 48 percent in Singapore and 42 percent in India. Globally, 43 percent of those surveyed used a smartphone to check for a better price or product reviews online while shopping in a store, said the study. Americans are less worried than consumers elsewhere about sharing sensitive information online or being the victim of fraud, with one in 10 worrying every time they place an order online, and one in 4 never or only rarely concerned about the security of their information when making purchases online. “Consumers are moving on from the last decade’s relatively simple and static model of digital commerce to the more complex and dynamic systems of m-shopping, using a mix of fixed and mobile devices,” said Matt Weiss, Havas Worldwide global chief marketing officer, in a statement: “This shift is most pronounced in Asia, where wider adoption of m-shopping is giving brands and developers great incentive to push through new mobile-centric services.”