To calculate the Transit Relay Service Fund size, the FCC should use the industry projection of 181 million minutes for Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Services (IP CTS) for 2013-14, Hamilton Relay told agency officials, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/19lUDlR). Hamilton also urged the commission to adopt the proposed IP CTS rate for the entire 2013-14 funding period rather than on an interim basis.

Comments are due July 19, replies Aug. 19, on the FCC’s proposal to allow interconnected VoIP providers to get direct access to telephone numbers, the Wireline Bureau said in a public notice Monday (http://bit.ly/19lNCkZ).

Iowa got offers from one vendor to buy or lease the Iowa Communications Network, the Iowa Telecommunications and Technology Commission told us it planned to say in a news release Monday that wasn’t posted online by our deadline. The state first issued a request for proposals for the municipal fiber network in February, with bids due at the end of May (CD Feb 19 p7). The interested vendor is Iowa Network Services and it made two offers. Iowa Network Services described itself as providing 330 Iowa communities “with a self-healing statewide fiber optic voice and data network, engineered and continuously upgraded to minimize service interruptions,” said its website (http://bit.ly/18bEKgz). The Iowa Telecommunications and Technology Commission will discuss the offers in a call Wednesday morning and then issue a recommendation to Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) Friday, the commission said. Iowa Communications Network Executive Director Dave Lingren declined comment on the nature of the two offers and said there would be no more information disclosed until after the Wednesday call.

NAB asked the FCC to sanction “collusive price setting” in retransmission consent negotiations, the American Cable Association said in docket 09-182 Monday (http://bit.ly/12lp6qx). NAB and cable providers have been trading filings over non-commonly owned stations jointly negotiating retrans prices, which groups like the ACA want the FCC to limit as part of the agency’s consideration of changes to ownership rules (CD May 31 p15). The commission “must draw a bright line which prohibits this activity, and the only natural and reasonable place to draw such a bright line is for there to be a complete prohibition on all collusion,” said ACA in an ex parte filing. It dismissed NAB’s arguments that retrans fees don’t affect prices for consumers, and that joint negotiations don’t drive those fees up. “Economists expect that downstream markets will pass through a significant share of upstream price changes and there is no sense in which economists generally subscribe to any sort of theory suggesting that collusion in upstream markets is in general less harmful than collusion in downstream markets,” the cable association said. An FCC “sanction” of joint retrans negotiations could lead to “much more extensive collusion” among broadcasters, the ACA said. “It might well become the norm that all four of the Big 4 stations in many DMAs begin to threaten simultaneous withdrawal of all of their signals as a coercive bargaining strategy to increase retransmission consent fees,” said ACA of designated market areas. “A bedrock principle of competition policy is that providers of competing products should not be allowed to collusively set prices.” An NAB spokesman said it was “laughable” to suggest broadcasters have undue market power over pay-TV providers. “In virtually every American city, separately owned TV stations provide viewers with local news, the most popular network programming, foreign language and religious programming,” said the NAB spokesman. “Contrast that with cable’s business model, where ‘clustering’ and single monopoly cable providers are the norm. The FCC should reject ACA’s rhetoric and not inject government into the free market retransmission consent negotiation process."

The Texas Public Utility Commission granted a motion for dismissal that several telcos requested in May. These various companies requested to be dismissed from a PUC rate proceeding due to what was then a pending potential law that would remove the PUC’s rate oversight relevant to their categorization. They argued it would be a waste to force them to continue with the proceeding if Texas Senate Bill 583 became law (CD June 7 p11). These companies alerted the PUC that Gov. Rick Perry (R) signed that bill into law June 14, and a PUC administrative law judge “agrees that the issue raised by the USF Coalition need not be addressed at this time and is not part of this Order,” according to the Friday PUC order (http://bit.ly/12en3bZ). “Therefore, the motion to dismiss is granted and Big Bend Telephone Company, Eastex Telephone Cooperative, Inc., Valley Telephone Cooperative, Inc., and the Parties in the Alenco Group, the Hill Country Group, and the Ganado Group are dismissed from this proceeding.”

Mary Dillon stepped down as CEO of U.S. Cellular, to be replaced by Kenneth Meyers, former chief financial officer of Telephone and Data Systems, the majority owner of the carrier, the carrier said Monday. Dillon was one of the highest-profile women in the wireless industry and was chairman of the board at CTIA, a position that rotates among members. Dillon also resigned that position and has been replaced by Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead, an association spokeswoman said. Dillon joined U.S. Cellular as CEO three years ago. She’s also leaving the company’s board. Dillon is moving on to take over as CEO of Ulta Beauty in July, U.S. Cellular said.

Amazon’s LOVEFiLM European video subscription service inked a multi-year licensing deal to stream TV content from CBS and Showtime in the U.K. and Germany, said LOVEFiLM in a news release Monday (http://bit.ly/144yDq9). The streaming service has more than 2 million members in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The shows now available in the U.K. and Germany as a result of the CBS deal include The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, Californication and the original Star Trek series.

Sprint will offer secure text messaging to help healthcare professionals ensure their texts are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, said the carrier in a Monday news release (http://bit.ly/14t9kx4). It will offer secure messages through TigerText, a cross-carrier mobile messaging platform in use in more than 1,000 healthcare facilities, and through Sprint Enterprise Messenger - Secure, which will enable professionals to communicate with one another.

Some investors expect Dish Network to re-engage T-Mobile in transaction discussions, but the FCC could put a new piece of spectrum into play that the DBS company could buy instead of T-Mobile, said Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant. Counting Clearwire spectrum is key, he said in a research note. The two main blocks of spectrum the commission will add to the denominator are Dish’s 40 MHz of AWS-4 spectrum, “and up to 135 MHz of the currently-uncounted BRS/EBS [Broadband Radio Service/Educational Broadband Service] spectrum at 2.5 GHz,” he said. If Sprint/Clearwire ends up above the new spectrum ownership limits, “the agency will face calls to require the company to divest spectrum to come into compliance with the new cap,” he said. The FCC might prefer to see Dish acquire any divested 2.5 GHz spectrum “if the agency believes Dish will use that spectrum to compete against cable/DSL with a fixed wireless broadband product,” he said. However, a higher industry-wide cap also might help AT&T acquire Dish, “which might be less desirable from the FCC/DOJ’s perspective,” wrote Gallant. With the Senate Commerce Committee having pressed FCC Chairman nominee Tom Wheeler to focus on rural broadband, “Dish’s acquisition of 2.5 GHz spectrum for fixed wireless could appeal to the agency,” he added.

Time Warner Cable on Monday petitioned to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic video and some other prices for Louisville and non-incorporated portions of Jefferson County, Ky., said filings posted in FCC docket 12-1. The petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The proposed deregulation would affect just under 2 million households (http://bit.ly/18bspJu).