Verizon won round one in the next stage of its fight to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality rules when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was picked in a lottery as the court that would hear a consolidated challenge. The next key question is which panel will hear the case. Verizon hopes for review by the same judges that vacated the FCC’s order in Comcast v. FCC in April 2010, industry officials agree. In January, in a pleading filed with the court, Verizon asked that the same panel that heard the Comcast case hear its appeal.
Rate-of-return carriers would be subject to recovery caps on capital and operating expenses from July 1, 2012, under FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s universal service reform order, a telecom official told us Friday. The commission would use a regression analysis to come up with a formula for the caps initially, but will publish a further rulemaking notice seeking comment on how to structure cap formulas, the official said. A revised draft of the order was expected to circulate among commissioners and their aides late Friday.
Two of the three judges who heard ICO Global Communications v. FCC focused on the issues of definition of band entry and sunset date to seek reimbursement as they considered ICO’s appeal of an earlier FCC declaratory ruling intended to clarify several rules on broadcast auxiliary spectrum relocation expenses. The declaratory ruling (CD Oct 1 p2) helped Sprint Nextel’s lawsuits against DBSD, then owned by ICO Global, and TerreStar seeking reimbursement of the expenses or relocating BAS spectrum. In a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hearing Friday, judges also questioned if reimbursement requirements were clearly explained.
House Democrats will likely offer an amendment to reallocate the 700 MHz D-block when the House Communications Subcommittee marks up spectrum legislation, said Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. Eshoo and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., co-chairs of the Congressional E-911 Caucus, also advocated their next-generation 911 bill (HR-2629) during a visit Friday morning to Washington’s 911 call center. The legislators hope their bill to fund NG911 will be included in the comprehensive spectrum bill, Eshoo said.
ViaSat will reignite a battle for high-speed broadband subscribers with the launch of the ViaSat-1 Ka-band satellite next week, pitting it against Hughes Communications as well as DSL and cable providers, industry executives said Thursday at the Content & Communications World show in New York.
The deployment of stimulus-funded broadband networks and international events like Japan’s earthquake are tightening the fiber cable market, causing some delays in fiber delivery, officials and companies said. But many stimulus projects are moving forward. Some are even ahead of schedule.
Price cap carriers would be given $300 million for broadband deployment in unserved areas in the first year of universal service and intercarrier compensation reform under a proposed order being circulated at the FCC, telecom officials told us Thursday. The money would come on top of the legacy universal service support the price cap companies are already receiving, the officials said. Having received the money, the price cap companies will have to meet minimum standards for broadband deployment within two years, they said.
FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan asked AT&T for more documents on whether AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile would mean a net gain of jobs in the U.S. Kaplan said in a letter dated Thursday, that the bureau asked the question in a May 27 information request. “AT&T to date has produced almost nothing in response,” Kaplan wrote (http://xrl.us/bmf3ot).
Cablevision discriminated against the Game Show Network by moving it off a basic tier of the cable operator in February, GSN said in a program carriage complaint filed with the FCC Wednesday night. It alleged the cable operator gave wider carriage to its own networks, which weren’t moved to the sports programming package like GSN was. The complaint portrayed those networks that were owned at the time by Cablevision -- We TV and Wedding Central -- as similar to GSN. Cablevision rejected that comparison.
Most GPS interference problems can be solved quickly using low-cost fixes for GPS receivers, LightSquared officials said Thursday during a press briefing. Meanwhile, other LightSquared officials said at a financial conference the company’s financial future, as well as its contract with Sprint Nextel, remain viable.