SAN FRANCISCO -- Smartphones will be “the center of the consumer electronics universe” within a couple of years, Sony Ericsson’s chief technology officer said Tuesday. Large-screen TVs will run Netflix-style streaming from handsets, and their computing power will allow notebook computers to be reduced to keyboards, Jan Uddenfeldt predicted at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. “From 3-inch to 100-inch, you have the same capabilities” across devices because of the huge computing power in phones, he said.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Department of Transportation needs to figure out soon whether cellular carriers can meet the privacy needs for a massive communications system that would use vehicle, traffic signal and other data to prevent accidents, a federal official central to the effort said Tuesday. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is scheduled to decide in 2013 whether to start requiring manufacturers to begin building the technology needed into light vehicles, said Director Shelley Row of DOT’s joint program office for Intelligent Transportation Systems.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell Friday called for an investigation of the Wireless Priority Service (WPS) program in the wake of the Aug. 23 earthquake in Virginia and Hurricane Irene, which swept up the East Coast the following weekend, the latter taking out more cell towers than Hurricane Katrina five years earlier. WPS, part of the National Communications System (NCS), is designed to give priority to calls by public officials over other callers during times of network overload. Officials get a card with a number they input into their phone. Questions have arisen about how effectively the system worked, especially following the earthquake, McDowell said in an interview.
Google’s recent accord to buy Motorola Mobility hasn’t changed the stances of fans and foes of the AllVid rules the FCC is seeking. The $12.5 billion purchase plan could represent a type of integration achieved by acquisition that some hope AllVid rules will spur widely in the consumer electronics and multichannel video programming distributor industries, executives on both sides of the debate acknowledged in interviews. They contend the deal doesn’t alter the equation for whether regulation is or isn’t needed -- because of what’s happening in the rest of the CE-MVPD market. That might change much later though if Google keeps Motorola’s set-top business or if the two companies are run by the same managers, executives on both sides of AllVid said.
MobiTV took a cautionary tone in filing an IPO seeking to raise $75 million, saying cellular carriers’ moves to end unlimited data plans could “decrease the attractiveness” of its mobile video service, in an SEC filing. “Because our services are data-intensive” ending unlimited data plans could “increase costs to our end-users and decrease the attractiveness of” MobiTV, the company said in SEC documents.
State regulators in California and Hawaii are putting their review of AT&T/T-Mobile on hold in light of the Department of Justice’s complaint against the deal, state officials told us. The potential collapse of the deal could be bad news even for AT&T’s rivals, some analysts said. Meanwhile, Public Knowledge late Thursday asked the FCC to act now to reject the transaction in light of DOJ’s challenge.
AT&T is vowing a fight, but if the carrier’s $39 billion buy of T-Mobile falls through, one big implication is ramped up pressure on federal policymakers to get more spectrum online quickly for wireless broadband, industry officials and analysts said Thursday. Pressure was already strong for the FCC and NTIA to make good on administration promises to make another 500 MHz available for broadband.
SEATTLE -- Defendants seeking to hold telecom companies accountable for alleged government-directed wiretapping can’t overcome the classified nature of orders by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, the Justice Department argued Wednesday before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), representing plaintiffs in both the Jewel and Hepting cases targeting government and telecom defendants, asked the judges to find they have more than a “general grievance” and to strike down the law passed by Congress to shield telecoms for cooperation. Judges seemed wary of Justice’s suggestion they hold back oversight and defer to the policy judgment of Congress and the executive branch.
State regulators formed a NARUC task force hoping to convince the FCC to create financial incentives to states to lower their intercarrier compensation rates, Vermont regulator and NARUC telecom committee Chairman John Burke told us Thursday. The task force is chaired by New York Commissioner Maureen Harris, Burke said. Members of the task force hope to have recommendations before the October open meeting, when many expect the FCC to move to orders on universal service fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms, Burke said. Some state regulators are hoping to keep the FCC from preempting state authority with the reforms, he said.
The second-largest TV station blackout of 2011 on a multichannel video programming distributor spurred the cable company’s CEO to send a critical letter to the FCC chairman. Mediacom’s Rocco Commisso said Julius Genachowski isn’t living up to promises to protect consumers, in not issuing new retransmission consent and a la carte rules. No retrans order is poised to circulate, FCC officials said, and one may not be ready this year (CD Aug 5 p2). Wednesday evening, Mediacom subscribers could no longer see seven LIN Media stations in small- and mid-sized markets. A commission spokesman declined to comment.