PHILADELPHIA -- FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said he remains ‘hopeful and positive’ about the prospects Congress will approve legislation authorizing the FCC to conduct voluntary incentive auctions and dedicating funds to a national wireless broadband network for public safety. Barnett made a special appearance at an Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials general business meeting.
The FCC adopted an order that the commission said will help peel back several previous rules and allow fixed microwave operation in the spectrum bands that had been previously restricted. License holders will also be able to use adaptive modulation, “which will allow them to take advantage of the latest technology to maintain the reliability of links,” the FCC said. The FCC also eliminated the so-called “final link” rule, saying Tuesday’s rules would give broadcasters “flexibility” by letting them use fixed microwave links more frequently. The commission also launched a rulemaking seeking comment on ways to make microwave communications “more flexible and cost-effective."
The FCC’s decision won’t be political on whether LightSquared poses an interference threat to GPS systems, Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a news conference after Tuesday’s open meeting. The agency is looking for an answer that will let both GPS and LightSquared thrive, and isn’t taking sides, agency officials said later at a briefing for reporters. The commission hasn’t decided whether more testing will be needed, and it isn’t setting a deadline to make a decision, the officials said. “There’s no timetable” for making a decision “other than we're trying to work as quickly as we can,” said Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan. At the officials’ briefing, held at FCC headquarters, the staffers spoke on the condition they not be identified by name and only would have agreed-upon comments attributed to them.
The FCC’s coordinated treatment of AT&T’s proposed purchase of Qualcomm spectrum and T-Mobile USA doesn’t necessarily indicate the later deal is in trouble, analysts told us. The commission will review both purchases in a “coordinated manner” and suspended its informal 180-day clock of its review of AT&T’s $1.9 billion offer for Qualcomm’s 700 MHz spectrum. That’s according to an FCC letter to AT&T and Qualcomm late Monday.
Cablevision shares dropped 13 percent Tuesday after the company reported Q2 results. The loss came despite a broader bounce-back among the major stock indices following Monday’s plunge. Analysts had expected better financial and operating results at Cablevision. “For years we have worried that Cablevision would become a victim of its own success,” Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett wrote investors. The company has among the highest penetration rates for its services and is significantly exposed to Verizon’s FiOS overbuild, he said. “And yet each quarter, their results proved surprisingly resilient, a function of best-in-class execution and best-in-class subscriber demographics. Until now.” Investors may have also expected a new plan to return capital to shareholders, which didn’t materialize, Wells Fargo’s Marci Ryvicker wrote.
There’s no reason to expand telecom outage reporting mandates from traditional phone service to VoIP, broadband and backbone service providers, said all corporate filings to the FCC. There are major differences between outages on public switched telephone networks (PSTN) and on broadband and other newer networks, associations and companies said. But states said such outage reporting is needed, given increasing reliance on VoIP to make calls instead of circuit-switched phone networks, and because Internet networks carry calls to 911. The FCC proposed (http://goo.gl/09KYY), amid concerns of Commissioner Robert McDowell, to extend Part 4 rules to ISPs, backbone services and VoIP for outages of at least a half-hour (CD May 13 p9). Comments were posted Monday and Tuesday in docket 11-82 (http://goo.gl/boqUK).
The availability of technology and fewer economic resources is behind the effort to form partnerships between news organizations and to share and streamline content across multiple platforms, media executives said. Finding resources and cutting costs while expanding quality content affects both public and commercial broadcasting, they said Tuesday during a Bisnow event in Washington.
PHILADELPHIA -- LightSquared faced tough questions from public safety officials late Monday after a presentation at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials annual conference. The same question came up repeatedly: Will LightSquared be another Nextel, which caused so much interference to public safety systems in the 800 MHz band that ultimately the FCC had to broker the restructuring of that band. That process still is unfolding seven years after the commission approved its landmark 800 MHz rebanding order.
PHILADELPHIA -- Hope remains that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., will manage to bring his version of public safety legislation to the Senate floor after the body returns to Washington Sept. 6 and before the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. That’s according to public safety officials at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ annual meeting, which got underway over the weekend. Hill officials who spoke Monday held out some hope that legislation could move in the few days Congress meets before Sept. 11.
Gray TV is set for a watershed retransmission consent season, as about 45 percent of multichannel video programming distributor agreements expire at the end of the year, executives said on its Q2 earnings call Monday. “We'll be actively negotiating through the fourth quarter and we've got over 200 cable systems” to reach deals with, said President Bob Prather. In 2012 and the following years, Gray will have to reach new affiliation agreements with its major broadcast network partners, he said.