GENEVA -- World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) decisions will safeguard spectrum needed to observe and understand the Earth, atmosphere and oceans and to reduce the risk of weather, climate and water-related disasters, the World Meteorological Organization said in a press release following the four-week conference. The growing importance of collecting and exchanging Earth observation data was an important issue before the conference, said Hamadoun Toure, ITU secretary-general, at a press conference. Toure was referring to boosting the accuracy of weather forecasting, climate change monitoring, disaster prediction and mitigation, and gains in other areas.
GENEVA -- ITU member governments made gains in clarifying the rules for bringing into use satellite network frequency assignments and set up a process of inquiries about the movement of satellites, sources said on the last day of the four-week World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC). Reducing the orbital arc used for determining the coordination requirements of satellite networks is one way to ease difficulties, but is “not sufficient by itself,” said Francois Rancy, director of the Radiocommunication Bureau, during a press conference.
GENEVA -- The World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) took major steps toward global harmonization for mobile applications, including wrapping up work on issues remaining after the 2007 conference, setting up a work program on future use of the 700 MHz band and agenda items for the 2015 conference that will follow up on decisions this month and consider spectrum allocations to the mobile service to spur broadband applications, officials said during a press conference on the last day of the four-week conference.
Dish Network lacks the legal standing to force the FCC to pull back encoding rules for set-top boxes adopted in 2003 as part of plug-and-play device implementation, the FCC and Justice Department said in a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Dish appeal, filed in 2004, was paused as the agency considered DirecTV’s petition for reconsideration of the plug-and-play order, which the commission denied in 2010. Dish argued in its brief last month that the agency’s application of plug-and-play rules to all multichannel video programming distributors, rather than just cable, goes beyond the congressional intent.
MUNICH -- Industry and regulators are grappling with the slow uptake of fiber-to-the-home networks in major Western European countries. Countries like Germany and the U.K. don’t even figure in the recent statistics of the Fibre to the Home (FTTH) Council Europe, the Council warned at its meeting this week.
FCC work on making all TV stations put political-ad files online, so campaign buys of spots around the time of elections can be more closely tracked, likely will be guided by the industry’s first proposal (CD Feb 15 p20) for how to manage the files, said agency and industry officials. Officials at public interest groups that have long wanted everything in station’s public files to go online said the plan from 11 companies is a start to a dialogue with industry. Industry officials said it’s unclear if other stations and the NAB will back the proposal for broadcasters to aggregate information on ad buys without disclosing how much campaigns spent on each commercial. At first glance the proposal’s an interesting one, and may add corporate backers, industry officials said.
An FTC report Thursday targets mobile applications stores and app developers for their inadequate disclosure of information parents need to determine what data is being collected from their children when they download and use apps, how it’s shared or who will have access to it. The report highlights “the lack of information available to parents prior to downloading mobile apps for their children, and calls on the industry to provide greater transparency about their data practices,” the FTC said. FTC staff also found that there isn’t enough information provided from apps available through stores from Apple and Google’s Android concerning apps that are integrated with social media and targeted advertising, the FTC said.
Congress is poised to approve as early as Friday legislation extending the payroll tax cut, which also gives the FCC authority to hold voluntary incentive auctions of broadcast spectrum. The agreement on the spectrum provisions was a win for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski who had made a push on the bill one of his top priorities, industry and FCC observers said, and a victory for public safety. A wireless industry official said he expects the FCC to move quickly to start developing rules for an auction, but an actual auction could be four to six years away.
GENEVA -- U.S. objectives, including a broadly defined 2015 agenda item to spur mobile broadband, were largely met during the four-week World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC), which ends Friday, officials said. The conference has been “very successful,” said Decker Anstrom, head of the U.S. delegation. The work by more than 150 countries to resolve each of the 33 agenda items was “effective and collaborative,” he said, and U.S. objectives have been “largely realized.” The U.S. is pleased with the agenda provisionally set for the 2015 conference, he said.
SILICON VALLEY -- Strapped state and local governments must move to the cloud for economies, but “with a lot of trepidation and very carefully,” said California Technology Secretary Carlos Ramos Thursday. Constituents “don’t trust government” but it requires them to entrust it “with critical and sensitive information,” and security “really is a big challenge, especially in government,” he said at an event to release a cloud-adoption report by a TechAmerica Foundation work group. The State & Local Government Cloud Commission includes representatives of AT&T, Google, Microsoft and Verizon.