An unusual appeal of an FCC Media Bureau order gets a rare hearing Wednesday at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Cablevision and cable programmer Madison Square Garden Holdings appealed last month a pair of bureau orders against the companies and in favor of the two biggest telcos, rather than waiting for the full commission to act. Even rarer, said media lawyers not part of the case, is the New York court’s agreement to hear oral argument on the request for the 2nd Circuit to stay the bureau’s rulings (CD Sept 23 p5). The rulings gave AT&T and Verizon access to HD feeds of two regional sports channels owned by MSG, which used to be part of Cablevision.
Industry is worried that the FCC is apparently trying to put together an order on VoIP outage reporting for the December meeting, telecom lobbyists told us Friday. CTIA, USTelecom, NCTA, the VON Coalition and NTCA, among others, have all exchanged emails in recent days seeking letters and organizing meetings with FCC staff, urging the FCC not to adopt standards for “outage” that industry believes are arbitrary and unnecessary (CD Aug 10 p7).
Dish Network and Sprint Nextel settled a years-long legal battle over the cost of relocating broadcast auxiliary spectrum from the 2 GHz band, the companies said Friday. The confidential settlement should help Dish in its pursuit of FCC approval for the company’s purchase of DBSD and TerreStar, which control a combined 40 MHz of S-band spectrum, said industry executives. Dish is buying the companies out of bankruptcy. Other wireless filers in the proceeding pointed to procedural concerns.
An industry coalition and the Interior Department clashed sharply on what the FCC should do next to curb bird deaths caused by wireless towers. The written comments largely tracked points both sides made during a Sept. 20 FCC workshop (CD Sept 21 p 11). The comments were in response to a draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) released by the commission. The FCC found in that document that communications tower collisions kill millions of birds every year, but the numbers must be weighed against the overall U.S. bird population, estimated at 10 billion birds (CD Aug 30/10 p5).
The U.S. government shortened the length of Wednesday’s emergency alert system nationwide test to 30 seconds from more than three minutes, a public noticed released by the FCC Thursday said. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, shortening the duration of the test will achieve its two goals of testing the system while minimizing the potential disruption and chance for creating concern among the public. That’s something broadcasters and pay-TV providers have been working to remedy, along with the government (CD Oct 28 p12). FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on Friday asked EAS stakeholders for help educating the public about the exercise.
Chances appear very good that a spectrum sale will be part of any legislation recommended by the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, CEA President Gary Shapiro said in an interview on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, scheduled to be broadcast over the weekend. Shapiro was asked repeatedly about recommendations the group made in an Oct. 27 letter to the super committee (http://xrl.us/bmhuym). Shapiro said the likelihood the committee will recommend spectrum auctions is “well over 90 percent.”
Any Networx contractors that can’t start fulfilling client agencies’ requests for IPv6 work risk losing that work to competitors, a Defense Department official told us. “Discussions in various forums are underway to try to resolve this,” Ron Broersma, a member of the Federal IPv6 Task Force, said by email. “However, if I had my way I wouldn’t wait around for every Networx customer to ask for IPv6 service, but would instead use a top-down approach and ask every Carrier to deploy IPv6 service NOW to every Federal customer, since all will need the IPv6 connectivity to achieve the Federal mandates. If the Carriers can’t deliver, then the Agencies have the choice to switch Carriers.” Broersma spoke last week in San Jose, Calif., at the Gogonet Live conference on IPv6 implementation, about agencies’ poor start on meeting a September 2012 adoption deadline (CD Nov 3 p8). He’s the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s network security manager.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Congress will keep holding hearings about privacy about every couple of weeks into December at least, but it won’t pass a scrap of legislation, said Maureen Cooney, the director of Sprint’s privacy office. “Privacy is one of the hot-button issues on the legislative agenda,” but “it’s very unlikely -- very unlikely -- we'll have new privacy legislation,” she said last week at the Sprint Open Solutions Conference for developers.
Members from each side of the political aisle at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing on Friday voiced privacy concerns with a bill (HR-3035) to relax requirements on calls to cellphones now contained in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). But many agreed the 1991 law may need an update. The TCPA is the basis for many consumer complaints submitted to the FCC about unsolicited calls. HR-3035 is supported by the wireless industry, businesses and universities, but opposed by several consumer advocates and state attorneys general (CD Nov 4 p7). Sponsor Reps. Lee Terry, R-Neb., and Ed Towns, D-N.Y., said they're open to revising the bill.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sprint is considering selling WiMAX devices beyond its commitment to do so through 2012, as it forges toward the more broadly accepted LTE technology for 4G wireless broadband, CEO Dan Hesse said. Speaking at the Sprint Open Solutions Conference for developers late last week, he didn’t elaborate on the possibility of sticking longer than promised with handsets or other hardware that can use both 3G and WiMAX.