The Senate approved the nominations of Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel by unanimous consent Monday to become FCC commissioners. Pai, a Republican from Kansas, was an aide to former Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., has worked as a lawyer at the FCC and replaces former commissioner Meredith Baker, for a term ending July 1, 2016. Rosenworcel, a Democrat from Connecticut, was an aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and replaces former commissioner Michael Copps, in a term that ends July 1, 2015.
An FCC rulemaking on Dish Network’s effort to build a wireless network and the proceeding on Verizon Wireless’s purchase of AWS spectrum from cable operators will impact Dish’s entrance into the wireless business, Chairman Charlie Ergen said Monday during an earnings call. With comments in the proceeding on flexible use of the 2 GHz satellite band due May 17, Ergen said filings may be similar to those submitted during the proceeding related to Dish’s purchase of DBSD and Terrestar last year (CD Nov 8 p4). Some comments may touch on interference, he predicted. The GPS industry said previously “that we don’t interfere,” Ergen said. “I don’t think there’s surprises there and we've done a lot of homework in the interference issues."
States like Virginia said they are going beyond traditional methods to ensure cybersecurity, as a federal report found that despite progress at the federal level, “cyber capabilities are lagging at the state level.” The latest National Preparedness Report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (http://xrl.us/bm6jmy) found that cybersecurity was the “single core capability where states had made the least amount of overall progress,” with an “average capability level of 42 percent.”
CAMBRIDGE, Md. -- NTIA never probed the administration or industry on the $18 billion cost estimate for clearing the 1755-1850 MHz band contained in a recent agency report on the future of the band, Deputy Administrator Anna Gomez said Saturday. One recurring industry criticism is that the numbers contained in the report were unrealistically high. Gomez reiterated, in a presentation at the FCBA’s annual meeting, that a key finding of the report that spectrum sharing will be a key part of meeting growing industry needs for more access to spectrum.
CAMBRIDGE, Md. -- The FCC “transformed” the USF in a series of recent orders rather than just reforming it, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told the FCBA’s annual retreat on Saturday. “It’s a perpetual transformation of a regime we all knew needed to be modernized,” she said. “I think we all knew it was going to be difficult and will continue to be difficult. … It’s a balancing act, but it’s one worth embarking on."
CAMBRIDGE, Md. -- FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick and Chief of Staff Zac Katz denied that uncertainty created by the Comcast v. FCC decision, and pending appellate reviews of the FCC’s net neutrality and data roaming orders, have slowed agency work in other areas. Their comments came, during a discussion at the FCBA annual meeting late Friday. Schlick noted pointedly that one company, Verizon, could remove future uncertainty since it is a lead appellant challenging both orders.
The data-gathering phase for the FCC’s 2012 Measuring Broadband America report was delayed by about a month to this April, because of server issues, said an ex parte filing posted in docket 09-158 last week (http://xrl.us/bm55z3). An FCC engineer working on the ISP speed tests told us the issues were relatively minor. And the technical issues occurred over a period of several months, the recent filing said.
The Obama administration is hopeful that “cooler heads” will prevail to pass a White House-backed Senate cybersecurity bill as lawmakers see “the national security implications” of some provisions of the measure. The “small regulatory regime” for core critical infrastructure that’s contained in the Cybersecurity Act (S-2105) is “very narrowly crafted” and built on “best practices” for corporations, many of which are already implementing them for “their own business purposes,” said Howard Schmidt, White House cybersecurity coordinator. “We don’t see that being asking too much of anybody,” he said in an interview on the C-SPAN program The Communicators scheduled to air Saturday.
Congressional investigators are looking into allegations of loan fraud raised by cable operators against a county government in Minnesota that accepted about $66 million in funds from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to build a fiber broadband network there. Mediacom Communications, which serves some of the less sparsely populated parts of Lake County, Minn., complained last year to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s office of the inspector general that Lake County’s Broadband Initiatives Project (BIP) loan application appeared to be fraudulent, designed to set the county up for financial failure and allow outside consultants hand-picked by local officials to buy the fiber-to-the-home systems at a discount (CD March 17/11 p6). More recently it has been taking its case to nearly anyone else who might listen, including federal prosecutors in D.C. and investigators with the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, and apparently gaining some traction.
Comcast is getting the most scrutiny for the way it delivers Internet Protocol video to connected devices, but is far from the only U.S. multichannel video programming distributor streaming video content to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and other Web-connected devices. A growing number of other MVPDs stream IP video to the videogame console, connected TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics. Some MVPDs say they are looking to do much more IP streaming. But net neutrality advocates criticize Comcast for not counting the cable channels it delivers to subscribers’ Xboxes by IP, instead of the traditional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) distribution that sends shows to TVs connected to set-top boxes, under its broadband data caps.