Companies buying special access services are bracing for higher prices in areas where AT&T and Windstream’s pricing flexibility petitions were deemed granted by the FCC this week (CD June 26 p4). To CLECs and businesses that purchase the dedicated high-capacity circuits, the increased prices in price flex markets are an indication that those supposedly competitive areas are not competitive at all. After all, their thinking goes, competition should drive costs down. But ILECs maintain that the dynamic is more complicated than the other side claims.
Industry officials on Thursday urged Senate approval of the Law of the Sea Treaty, saying it is critical to industry, from consumer electronics to telecom. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was among those to testify at a hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation not a party to the treaty, which dates to 1982.
Lawyers for Comcast and Boxee presented a proposal to resolve an impasse that held up work on an FCC order that would let all-digital cable systems encrypt the signal of basic-tier programming. The two-part plan involves an interim and long-term solution that would let devices such as the Boxee Box receive encrypted basic-tier programming, according to an ex parte notice (http://xrl.us/bnc79y).
News Corp.’s decision to pursue a separation of its publishing businesses probably won’t change the way companies and public interest groups are advocating for and against the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership (NBCO) ban, industry and public interest officials we interviewed said. News Corp. announced Thursday that its board had approved a plan to pursue a separation of its publishing businesses from its entertainment assets. Public interest advocates who want the commission to retain the ban said the move represents further evidence that combining broadcast and newspaper assets doesn’t work for businesses.
GENEVA -- Mobile operators and participants in an ITU-T study group on numbering are collecting information on numbering misuse and associated fraud with the aim of better combating the practice, according to a letter by the director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau and a report by the GSM Association (GSMA). The association submitted the report to the study group with the aim of raising awareness of both the problem, and scale, of numbering resource misuse as “a key factor in fraud perpetrated against mobile networks” and their customers, the report said. Numbering misuse and fraud are also being discussed in preparations for the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December. The conference will revise the International Telecommunication Regulations.
The Telecommunications Industry Association got support from the Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) , Motorola Solutions and Land Mobile Communications Council (LMCC) for a petition asking the FCC clarify as OK the continued certification of 25 KHz equipment for use in the T-band. Public safety agencies that use the band, at 470-512 MHz, got a waiver from the FCC so that they didn’t have to overhaul their systems by the Jan. 1 narrowbanding deadline. Unless the commission offers clarity, these agencies won’t be able to replace equipment operating in the T-band, TIA warned. Under February’s spectrum law, the FCC is required to auction the public safety portion of the T-band within nine years, with public-safety licensees having to move to other spectrum within 11 years.
A variety of operational factors cause carriers to buy extra spectrum licenses without deploying the spectrum, Peter Rysavy said in a conference call about his new report on the subject. “It’s a long-term process from identifying spectrum to when it actually becomes deployed,” he said. “Operators, when faced with the opportunity to obtain spectrum whether or not they need it at that time, really have to obtain it simply because there’s no assurance of when it will become available next.” The report (http://xrl.us/bnc7if) was done independently by Rysavy Research.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., cast doubt on Congress’s efforts to pass privacy legislation in 2012. “Do-not-track does not rank very high on the scale of decisions the [Senate majority] leader has to make, and I understand that,” Rockefeller said after his committee had a hearing Thursday. “This is probably a next year thing, but when I say that I am in no way discouraged.” Lawmakers, the FTC and the White House have called for legislation to offer consumers greater choice and control over how their online data are collected and used by ad companies and third-party data brokers.
Comcast agreed to sell unbundled broadband service for a fourth year because it faced allegations it violated conditions of the FCC’s OK of the cable ISP’s purchase of control in NBCUniversal by not telling customers widely enough about the naked cable modem service. The naked broadband condition was extended to Feb. 21, 2015, in an Enforcement Bureau consent decree where Comcast also agreed to voluntarily pay $800,000 to the U.S. Treasury and train employees so they know about the product that costs almost $50 monthly. It’s a “historic settlement,” said Bureau Chief Michele Ellison, who signed the decree (http://xrl.us/bnc4p3) that was released late Wednesday.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Wednesday asked the FCC’s Technology Advisory Committee to start work on a report on the future of band planning, especially in light of a pending auction of broadcast TV spectrum. Genachowski said during a speech at CTIA last month he would ask TAC “to convene a forum on the future of band plans to inform the incentive auctions and other upcoming auctions.” Genachowski spoke to the TAC Wednesday, then stuck around for more than three hours to hear reports from the various working groups (http://xrl.us/bnc4g3).