AT&T’s proposed buy of 700 MHz spectrum licenses from Qualcomm faces hurdles, and possibly got more complicated Friday with the announcement that Verizon Wireless agreed to buy 122 AWS licenses from SpectrumCo, the cable consortium. The AT&T/Qualcomm order is still in the commission’s electronic voting system. Chairman Julius Genachowski has voted for the item and Commissioner Robert McDowell is likely to as well. But Genachowski would still need another vote from Commissioners Michael Copps or Mignon Clyburn. It isn’t clear either is prepared to vote yes, FCC officials said.
Media consolidation has taken a toll on the quality of journalism, FCC officials and media professionals said. Technological advances have given people better access to information, but much of that information isn’t as in-depth and unique to various communities as it used to be, said FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps and other media professionals Thursday at a forum in Atlanta.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, may add spectrum auction authority to a larger spending package that’s to be voted on this week on the House floor, a Boehner spokesman told us Friday. Boehner is discussing using spectrum as a “pay-for” for a payroll tax extension, the yearly pay correction for doctors serving Medicare patients and other items in the package, the spokesman said. If the spectrum proposal goes straight to the floor, it would skip a vote by the full Commerce Committee that had also been expected for this week. The House Communications Subcommittee approved draft spectrum legislation on Thursday (CD Dec 2 p1) amid objections by Democrats.
The FCC will soon open a proceeding taking off from BART’s adoption of a policy for cutoffs of wireless service, a commission official said Friday. The Wireless and Public Safety bureaus and the general counsel have been involved in the issue and will continue to be, the official said in an interview. He wouldn’t specify the nature of the proceeding or when the notice might be issued. And he wouldn’t say whether it would wrap in the handling of petitions that have challenged a shutdown by BART in August, before it had a policy.
Spectrum legislation survived a lengthy House Communications Subcommittee markup in which the political parties squabbled over many details of the complicated bill. The subcommittee voted 17-6 to approve the GOP draft bill with amendments. Every Democrat voted no except Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga. The approved version would authorize voluntary incentive auctions and give public safety the 700 MHz D-block and $6.5 billion for a national wireless broadband network. The draft would not let the FCC provide for unlicensed use spectrum freed up by incentive auctions. States and a private company would play a large role in governance of the public safety network. And the bill would limit FCC authority to make rules in auctions.
Panelists differed on regulatory models for the future federal/state relationship over broadband and, during a conference call by the National Regulatory Research Institute Thursday, saw difficulties for federal regulators in classifying VoIP as a telecom service.
A top AT&T official accused FCC staff in comments released by the company Thursday of not giving the company’s proposed buy of T-Mobile a fair review. The statement by Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi came two days after the FCC released a staff memo on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, while also allowing AT&T and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom to withdraw their merger application.
The public television system in New York is collaborating on a project that will allow all broadcast signals for 34 channels to come from one facility. This centralcasting initiative is expected to save the nine public TV stations in the state a total of about $25 million over the next 10 years, some station executives said. Other centralcasting projects at public broadcasting stations are pending and reflect efforts in the industry to cut costs.
The rapid and continued growth of Ka-band satellite services has several satellite companies and organizations working to develop rules both at the national level around the world and within the ITU, said industry executives. With numerous satellites already including Ka-band capabilities and many more to come, the companies and groups are working to come up with rules to facilitate Ka-band development, executives say. A Global VSAT Forum (GVF) white paper released Thursday describes some hoped-for rules and a “best practices guide” for national Ka-band regulation.
Don’t let multichannel video programming distributors use the FCC’s review of media ownership rules to “import retransmission consent issues” about MVPDs’ deals to carry TV stations, the NAB said. The association defended shared services agreements, which let separately owned TV stations in the same market share news and other services, against continued MVPD criticism of SSAs as letting broadcasters abuse retrans rules. “Recent filings by representatives of the MVPD industry were blatant attempts to use ownership rules to skew retransmission consent negotiations in their favor,” the NAB said. Cable, DBS and telco-TV companies had visited the eighth floor several times in recent weeks (CD Nov 22 p8) to try to get the quadrennial ownership review to further tackle the issue of SSAs.