The very small aperture terminal (VSAT) industry remains uncertain of the necessity for carrier ID as a means to mitigate frequency interference, said David Hartshorn, secretary general of the Global VSAT Forum. Hartshorn and others are leading the effort to deal with interference and said the issue represents a growing problem for the satellite industry. Hartshorn spoke about the interference issue in a panel at SATCON in New York and discussed the VSAT concerns with Communications Daily afterwards. Other sections of the satellite industry, including broadcasters and data, have made real progress in dealing with the issue, he said.
The FCC will put an end to Form 355, under a draft order set to be voted on at the Oct. 27 meeting (CD Oct 7 p13), commission officials said. The document is a quarterly programming report the agency approved in 2007 but which TV stations were never required to complete. The Office of Management and Budget under both the administrations of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama didn’t approve the form under the Paperwork Reduction Act, industry officials noted.
The role and interest of the U.S. government in in-orbit servicing of satellites remains a major question as Vivisat and MDA move toward beginning operations, company executives said Wednesday on a SATCON conference panel in New York on extending the life of satellites. While the commercial market is huge, MDA can’t compete with the U.S. government or a government-funded program, said Steve Oldham, president of space infrastructure servicing at MDA. That would put “us out of business,” he said. “We don’t have the size or power” to compete with the government, he said.
Emergency alert system participants are increasingly focusing outreach on consumers before next month’s first nationwide test, industry officials told us. They said the FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency are shifting educational efforts from being just focused on letting radio and TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors know about the Nov. 9 test, to working on public education. The FCC has produced public service announcements about the exercise (http://xrl.us/bmfyvk), and FEMA is working on them, industry participants said. They said both agencies have been holding conference calls and meetings with the broadcasting and MVPD industries and local emergency management agencies.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed universal service order would raise speed standards to 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up, prune the so-called “right of first refusal” for incumbents, cut down the $2.2 billion set-aside for price cap carriers and reduce the transition time for rate-of-return carriers from 10 years to five, telecom and FCC officials told us Wednesday.
LightSquared Executive Vice President Jeff Carlisle found himself in the hot seat once again Wednesday, before a hearing of the House Small Business Committee. Several members conceded that LightSquared poses a dilemma for the committee. Many small businesses in rural America are desperate for broadband, but at the same time many also rely on precision GPS receivers as part of doing business.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is “not optimistic” Democratic senators will support Republicans’ Congressional Review Act effort to kill FCC net neutrality rules, the ranking member of the Communications Subcommittee said Wednesday. Until the election, DeMint hopes to “minimize the damage” of the Democratic-controlled Senate and executive branch, he said. In other speeches also at a Free State Foundation event, Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., also railed against regulation. Stearns supported the FCC effort to revamp the Universal Service Fund, but said Congress should take the next steps of revamping USF contribution rules and updating the 1996 Telecom Act.
The CEOs of Sprint Nextel and AT&T Mobility hardly mentioned AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile in keynotes to the CTIA conference, which started Tuesday in San Diego. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, current CTIA chairman, talked about the industry’s environmental record and the campaign against distracted driving. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega spoke about his company’s Innovation Pipeline and the importance of wireless to IT.
The American Cable Association made a pitch Tuesday to reduce the first refusal rights in the pending universal service reform order. Association officials and members said they were heading into ex parte meetings with FCC staff this week, but were put off by Chairman Julius Genachowski’s remarks announcing the order (CD Oct 7 p1). “Thursday, we heard the speech and in there it’s clear that the chairman anticipates providing some level of right of first refusal,” ACA President Matthew Polka said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “We feel confident about our concerns about where the commission is heading.”
Retransmission consent costs will keep rising in coming years, agreed broadcast and cable industry officials and an analyst who tracks those prices. On opposite sides of whether the FCC should change retrans rules, the industry officials said neither the commission nor legislators seem poised to step in. The number of recent retrans disputes in terms of multichannel video programming distributor subscribers blacked out from getting a TV station on their MVPD has been small and the duration of outages has been short, said the broadcast lawyer and the analyst. The cable executive said the sheer number of disputes has been high, even if they've been in smaller markets.