The Colorado Public Utilities Commission issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to get rid of its rules for its Low-Income Telephone Assistance Fund. Senate Bill 13-194 directed the changes, said the notice, posted Monday (http://bit.ly/15HVaKV). The proposed rule, written by PUC staff, will be published July 25. Any comments must be submitted by Aug. 5, it said, and a hearing is scheduled for Aug. 20.

Cisco and Google will pay $490 million into escrow by early August to fund a settlement with TiVo that includes patent cross-licensing agreements among the companies, TiVo said in an SEC filing (http://bit.ly/1bDhhES). Cisco will pay TiVo $296 million, Google the remaining $196 million, the companies have said. TiVo will recognize a portion of the payment in the quarter ending July 31, TiVo said. Google’s ties to the patent infringement case stem from its acquisition of Motorola’s set-top box business, which has since been sold to Arris. Four of the TiVo licenses granted Cisco and Google under the settlement agreement are perpetual, TiVo said. Others expire July 31, 2018, for Google and July 2, 2023, for Cisco, TiVo said. The companies have agreed to provide each other with releases from patent infringement claims and not allege any infringement against each other’s products until July 18, 2018, TiVo said. TiVo also is granting Arris a license and releasing it from any claims, it said. The licenses also extend to Time Warner Cable, which was a defendant in the suit since Motorola is one of its set-top box suppliers.

Communications Workers of America is still concerned with Verizon’s shift to Voice Link in New York regions beyond the regulator-sanctioned deployment on Fire Island. District 1 Vice President Christopher Shelton emphasized these concerns in a Friday letter to the New York State Public Service Commission. “In recent days, CWA members have observed that repair call centers in New York City are now assigning employees to Voice Link jobs,” he said (http://bit.ly/145l2BF). “In addition, CWA members report that technicians are receiving specialized Voice Link installation training and are being assigned to carry out installations in the Buffalo and Watertown areas.” Verizon has defended its deployments, criticized by CWA as well as the New York State attorney general’s office, as an optional offering and not restricted by a May PSC order. Shelton called that claim “highly suspect, since customers are led to understand that Verizon will not provide timely repair of their wireline service.”

SES and Indonesia-based MNC Sky Vision signed an agreement to provide capacity on the SES-7 satellite to enhance a direct-to-home platform. The multi-year deal provides MNC Sky’s Indovision “with access to the Ku-band capacity aboard SES-7 at the prime orbital location of 108.2 degrees east,” SES said in a press release (http://bit.ly/1aIsHJB). Indovision will offer more than a dozen Chinese language channels using the capacity, “which would allow Indovision to reach a niche audience segment in Indonesia’s fast-growing pay-DTH market, beyond its current base of more than two million subscribers,” it said.

Motorola has a new agreement with St. Johns County, Fla., to provide communications for first responders, it said Monday (http://yhoo.it/12AOihP). The cost of the P25 radio system to be used amounts to $24.5 million and doubles the number of previous antenna sites, it added, promising “enhanced coverage and interoperability with surrounding northeast Florida agencies, including Duval County/City of Jacksonville, Nassau County, Alachua and Marion.” The system includes four dispatch centers, it said.

Lockheed Martin completed the navigation, communication and hosted payload antenna assemblies for the first satellite of the next-generation global positioning system, GPS 3. The antennas will be installed on the first GPS 3 space vehicle, “which Lockheed Martin will deliver to the U.S. Air Force on schedule, flight ready, in 2014,” Lockheed Martin said in a press release (http://bit.ly/1dzWOiA). The antenna designs allow three to eight times greater anti-jamming signal power “to be broadcast to military users across the globe when compared to previous GPS generations,” it said. The GPS 3 satellites will replace aging satellites in orbit (CD June 6 p16).

Talks on an updated broadcasting treaty have been pushed back, the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights said. The discussion, which was slated to start at month’s end, has now been moved to December 16-20, WIPO said. It didn’t give a reason for the delay, but its press office said member counties agreed to the postponement. WIPO last month concluded a treaty that boosts access to books for the blind and visually impaired.

AT&T unveiled late Friday a deal to buy Leap Wireless. Leap had long been rumored as a merger partner with MetroPCS, before that company was gobbled up by T-Mobile. AT&T said in a press release it will pay $15 per share for Leap and would pick up 5 million customers and a network covering some 96 million people in 35 states, as well as Leap’s PCS and AWS spectrum. Leap shares closed Friday at $7.98, but quickly doubled in after-hours trading after the announcement was made. “AT&T will retain the Cricket brand name, provide Cricket customers with access to AT&T’s award-winning 4G LTE mobile network, utilize Cricket’s distribution channels, and expand Cricket’s presence to additional U.S. cities,” AT&T said. “The result will be increased competition, better device choices, improved customer care and a significantly enhanced mobile Internet experience for consumers seeking low-cost prepaid wireless plans."

The Tennis Channel asked for a rehearing of its carriage case against Comcast before a full panel of the Washington D.C., Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, the channel said Friday. The court decided the case May 28, in Comcast’s favor and against the FCC, which had ordered Comcast to carry the Tennis Channel alongside other sports networks. The court ruled in Comcast’s favor in part because the FCC didn’t show how Comcast would have benefitted from distributing the Tennis Channel more broadly (CD May 29 p1). This ruling “departed from well-settled anti-discrimination law, ignored congressional intent and erroneously rejected extensive findings made by the FCC,” said the Tennis Channel in a written statement. “Comcast’s programming business benefits from weakening the independent Tennis Channel’s ability to compete for programming and advertisers.” Although the original carriage case involved the Tennis Channel, it was not actually a party in the original court battle -- the FCC was the defendant -- so its en banc appeal was filed as an intervenor. The FCC is not listed as part of the en banc appeal, and did not comment on the matter. In their filing, the Tennis Channel said the court’s ruling departed from many previous decisions that permitted a wide range of evidence in discrimination cases. “Rather than demanding the sort of evidence that the panel required here, this Court has made clear that a finding of intentional discrimination may be based on ’the total circumstances of the case,'” said the en banc appeal, which also attacked the court’s decision for its policy consequences. “The decision requires the Commission to focus solely on the economic consequences of expanding Tennis Channel’s carriage for Comcast’s cable distribution business, and to ignore the evidence that Comcast’s programming businesses (i.e., Golf Channel and Versus) benefit substantially from Comcast’s decision to restrict its carriage of Tennis Channel,” said the appeal. The ruling ignores “the very problem that prompted Congress to enact Section 616 -- that vertically-integrated MVPDs will take advantage of their role as distributors to stifle competition in programming,” the Tennis Channel said. “A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals emphatically rejected the Tennis Channel’s complaint in a well-considered opinion,” a Comcast spokesperson said. “We continue to treat Tennis Channel fairly, making it available to those customers who want it in full accordance with our contract.”

The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association urged the FCC to preserve rules permitting the use of high-gain antennas in the 5725-5850 MHz band, in a meeting with officials from the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (http://bit.ly/1azCPEr). WISPA representatives noted the case of Vistabeam, a WISP in Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, which “is able to maintain a point-to-point link of about 65 miles in that band."