BART’s board president said a draft cellphone-cutoff policy from the regional rail agency’s general counsel is overbroad. In an interview Friday, President Bob Franklin of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District Board also said that getting responses from the FCC, the California Public Utilities Commission and the ACLU to a proposed policy probably will delay final action beyond the board’s next meeting, Sept. 22. He had planned to take a vote by then on what are expected to be the first rules on the subject in the U.S. (CD Aug 25 p6). “It’s my intention to wrap this up quickly,” Franklin said, but “because it’s the first policy, I think it’s an opportunity to get it right and serve as a model for other agencies.”
Commercial-free education advocacy groups began a campaign to take Channel One News out of schools. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Obligation Inc. -- organizations that try to lessen the impact of ads on kids -- told us they're trying to convince companies to stop running ads on Channel One. Channel One came under fire from CCFC and similar advocates in 2006, when then Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., introduced a proposal calling for the FCC to study programs designed to transmit radio or TV shows on buses (CD June 26/06 p6). Channel One delivers its newscasts to almost 6 million teens in about 8,000 middle schools and high schools, it said on its website.
More LightSquared network testing “should be required” before the FCC allows the company to begin service, House Science Committee Chairman Ralph Hall, R-Texas, said at a hearing Thursday. Protecting GPS is “a vital national interest” and of “utmost concern” to the committee, Hall said. Ranking Member Eddie Johnson, D-Texas, highlighted the public benefits of a new national wireless network, but agreed that more tests may be needed to determine whether LightSquared and GPS systems can coexist. Witnesses from several government agencies also urged more tests.
Many hard questions remain about whether the FCC should impose rules to require more network resiliency and outage reporting for broadband networks, Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said Thursday at the start of an agency workshop. He and other officials said the importance of communications during a disaster were driven home by the recent earthquake in Virginia, Hurricane Irene and this week’s torrential rains that have caused flooding on the East Coast.
An upcoming rulemaking notice asks about an FCC advisory group’s recommendations (CD July 15 p5) on putting online captioned programming from traditional sources, agency and industry officials said. They said the draft notice seeks to implement definitions of and rules for such captions once they go into Internet Protocol format. Many commissioners haven’t voted on the item, but are expected to do so soon, agency officials said.
Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, and Tom Ridge, the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said Thursday they're extremely frustrated that, 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, first responders still lack effective, interoperable communications. Both testified at a hearing by the House Homeland Security Committee.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Cisco is pressing the FCC for a broad swath of “contiguous spectrum” in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed sharing for broadband, the chief technology officer of the company’s wireless networking unit said Thursday. But the executive, Bob Friday, said the effort is complicated by a need to accommodate weather radars on the band. Cisco wants to add 195 MHz total in the 5.350-5.470 and 5.850-5.925 GHz bands to the 455 MHz of spectrum now available to mobile communications in the 5 GHz, a spokeswoman said.
Industry was cool to FCC proposals to include performance metrics for its expanded network outage reporting requirements. Speaking on a pair of panels at the commission Thursday, executives from CenturyLink, Vonage, Cox and the Telecommunications Industry Association raised concerns that the proposals might unfairly burden companies without adding any clarity to communications network failures.
TiVo got an FCC waiver to sell all-digital DVR devices that can’t get analog cable channels or analog broadcasts. The conditional waiver was issued by the Media Bureau Wednesday afternoon, citing cost reduction and power consumption as benefits. The company was required to include post-sale materials on some of the new products’ limitations, including that traditional set-tops still may be needed to get all the pay-TV companies’ services. TiVo had sought speedy approval of the waiver, which it got, to begin selling the device in time for the holiday shopping season for consumer electronics (CD June 9 p12).
The FCC has one more rulemaking to issue on putting into place new low-power FM rules from legislation last year that paved the way for the licensing of many more LPFMs, agency and industry officials said. They said the Media Bureau will circulate for a vote a rulemaking notice to implement the rest of the Local Community Radio Act. The forthcoming notice, which may not be finished yet and ready to circulate, is expected to deal with the technical details of licensing new LPFM stations that are closer to frequencies used by existing full-power FM broadcasters than the commission had permitted. Comments, meanwhile, came in to dockets 99-25 and 07-712 on another rulemaking implementing other parts of the act, including from members of the House and Senate who are proponents of LPFM.