The cable industry has more questions than answers on what Google-Motorola Mobility means for tens of millions of Motorola set-top boxes used by North American TV subscribers. Cable executives said their companies were caught off guard by Monday’s $12.5 billion agreement (CD Aug 16 p1) for Google to buy Motorola Mobility. There’s some hope among operators and their suppliers that the deal could lead to a wider array of new products that subscribers can use at home, interviews this week found. With Google seeming more focused on Motorola Mobility’s thousands of patents and the cellphone business, executives and analysts said set-tops may now be more of an afterthought for the combining companies.
A technology wish list from Huawei shows how the North American operation of the huge Chinese vendor is pressing ahead in sensitive network businesses in the face of persistent resistance from the U.S. administration and Congress in the name of national security (CD Feb 16 p10). A description of needs that the company prepared for a Silicon Valley “speed dating” event with developers from around the country and beyond offers a road map of Huawei’s activity and ambitions in this region, said Rory Moore, the CEO of CommNexus, the matchmaker for the event, which runs Monday to Wednesday. The list includes desired data mining, location-services and security technologies.
Verizon and Google disagreed sharply on whether the FCC should give tw telecom the declaratory ruling it asked for. Tw seeks a ruling that VoIP is a telecom service under Title II, giving the company the right “to establish direct IP-to-IP interconnections.” Google, as well as NCTA and a number of cable operators, supported the company’s arguments. Verizon and USTelecom said any such ruling would be premature.
A second cable operator may get an FCC waiver to encrypt all channels. RCN now wants (CD Aug 16 p13) to follow Cablevision’s lead and be able to turn on and off service remotely, cutting down on signal theft and the expense and pollution of sending out technicians. Commission approval of RCN’s new request seems likely, and there will probably be less opposition to the move expressed than Cablevision faced in 2009, industry lawyers and an analyst said in interviews Tuesday. They said the regulator seems unlikely to start a rulemaking to examine whether it’s worth keeping a ban on operators encrypting channels in the basic tier. RCN wants out of that ban in Chicago and New York, where it’s gone all-digital.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., lambasted FCC transparency after the agency refused to show him the allotment optimization model (AOM) used by the commission to predict various possible outcomes of voluntary incentive auctions (CD June 21 p13). In an Aug. 3 letter, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told Dingell that disclosing the model would harm the agency’s process and the marketplace. The refusal is “deeply troubling from a number of perspectives,” Dingell replied in a letter Tuesday. “One wonders if perhaps Members of Congress would have an easier time getting information from the Commission by filing Freedom of Information Act requests."
Verizon and Verizon Wireless told the FCC a declaratory order remains the appropriate mechanism for addressing their concerns that the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) should be paid by the carriers seeking ports, not the carrier handing off numbers. Competitive carriers and cable operators disagreed. On June 1, the Wireline Bureau sought comment on Verizon’s May 20 petition and replies were due Monday (http://xrl.us/bk9qqm).
The GPS industry challenged LightSquared over the scope of interference to GPS signals if it were to begin service only in the lower part of the L-band. The objections came in reply comments filed at the FCC Monday. The effect to GPS services would be more far-ranging than LightSquared has let on, they said. The reply comments filed in docket 11-109 discuss the results reported by the FCC-required technical working group, meant to investigate interference concerns from LightSquared’s planned service. LightSquared continued to advocate its latest proposal, filed as part of the working group report, to begin service in the spectrum furthest away from the GPS services while also chastising GPS interests over their unwillingness to cooperate.
Capitol Hill is reviewing Google’s proposed $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, aides to lawmakers told us. The FCC will review the deal, but only to a limited extent, an FCC official said. Motorola Mobility has a few spectrum licenses and will have to apply for license transfers. In the near-term, it’s hard to see how the deal might affect small carriers as well as lobbying on the FCC’s proposed AllVid rules, officials told us. Google has much to gain from Motorola’s extensive patent portfolio, executives and analysts said. The companies are “confident” the deal, which would help protect the Android system from patent threats, will get approved by regulators in the U.S., Europe and possibly other jurisdictions, executives said during a conference call Monday announcing the deal.
LightSquared’s revised proposal to open operations in the lower 10 MHz channel of its band, 1525-1535 MHz, is expected to have the biggest effect on a class of high-precision, highly accurate devices that use receivers that make use of LightSquared’s entire band. The number of these devices is relatively small, perhaps 400,000 nationwide, LightSquared officials tell us. Not surprisingly, agricultural and other interests heavily invested in these high-precision devices have been among the most active in protesting LightSquared’s proposed network in recent filings at the FCC.
Government officials and industry executives are seeking technical and coordination improvements to the emergency alert system so that the first-ever nationwide test of EAS is smooth. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FCC and state emergency agencies spoke on a webinar Monday organized by FEMA. “Are You Ready for the Nationwide Emergency Alert System Test” was its title. Government officials and executives from the broadcasting and cable industries said they're making progress on improvements from earlier smaller-scale tests, and that some issues remain. And Chief Jamie Barnett of the FCC Public Safety Bureau said in a separate message to broadcasters that there will be more, “periodic” nationwide EAS tests.