Top wireless carrier and trade association officials Wednesday urged NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling to push forward on a proposal to clear the 1755-1780 MHz band for wireless broadband so it can be paired with the 2155-2180 MHz band for a spectrum auction. The leading technology around the world for commercial mobile broadband is Long Term Evolution (LTE), using standards defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project. “Carriers around the world have plans to deploy LTE consistent with 3GPP band plans,” said the letter, signed by CTIA, 4G Americas, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. “The 1755-1780 MHz band, when paired with the 2155-2180 MHz band, aligns closely with 3GPP Band Class 10. Pairing the 1755-1780 MHz band with the 2155-2180 MHz band would allow this spectrum to be auctioned and licensed by February 2015, as the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission recently noted.” Rather than focusing on the entire 1755-1850 MHz band, “at some point in the distant future we strongly urge that NTIA focus the effort on reallocation of the 1755-1780 MHz sub-band as soon as possible,” the letter said. The letter came as the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces held a hearing on spectrum issues. Wireless carriers remain focused on getting exclusive-use spectrum, where possible, instead of shared spectrum, CTIA Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe said at the hearing. He pressed in particular for the reallocation of the 1755-1780 MHz band for wireless broadband after it’s cleared of the Department of Defense and other incumbents. “What’s in there?” he asked. “What needs to be moved or what can be retuned? What can we help to upgrade?” Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, deputy chief information officer at DOD, countered key DOD operations are in the spectrum. Wheeler noted that the broader 1755-1850 MHz band contains many of the operations formerly in the 1710-1755 MHz band, which was previously auctioned by the FCC in the AWS-1 auction. To just make the 1755-1780 MHz band available, DOD would have to “redo all of the systems” in the broader band, he said. “We're looking at airborne platforms that go across the whole United States that actually span that whole band,” he said. “We actually have satellite control functions that are in the 1755-1780 area. Of those 100 systems most come across that whole area. That’s really the problem.” But Wheeler acknowledged that DOD has yet to do a specific study of the costs of clearing just the 1755-1780 MHz band. “That … is definitely something that we can do,” he said. Wheeler also stressed the importance of spectrum sharing. “We agree that sharing is a methodology for the future,” he said. Guttman-McCabe said carriers in the U.S. are falling behind their peers internationally in terms of the amount of spectrum they have available for broadband. “The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, Canada, all of these countries have brought hundreds of megahertz of cleared spectrum to market in the last year,” he said. “They're all a fraction of our size, have a fraction of our usage.”
Arguing that the commission overstepped its bounds when it required eligible telecom carriers to use USF support to provide broadband service, the carriers claimed Congress didn’t delegate Title II authority to the FCC to regulate broadband. Section 254(b), which the FCC relied on for jurisdiction, is “clearly” not a jurisdiction-conferring provision, the carriers wrote. “Congress conferred no jurisdiction by its references to ‘advanced telecommunications and information services.’ It merely stated principles to guide the FCC in exercising its authority.” In its response, the FCC argued that argument was “not properly before the court because it was not first presented to the FCC.” The commission also attacked petitioners’ “unsound” argument.
Mediacom CEO Rocco Commisso asked Congress to pick a new FCC chairman who will change retransmission consent rules and fix “the broken video programming marketplace.” His letter to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and ranking member John Thune, R-S.C., was posted online by the FCC Friday (http://bit.ly/17M32fe). Commisso criticized the commission’s “outdated” video rules for driving up the costs of video programming to distributors. “The owners of ‘must-have’ programming are immune from competition while cable, satellite and phone companies vigorously compete with each other,” said Commisso. “This allows programmers to play distributors against each other, driving up programming costs and, ultimately, consumer prices.” Commisso said the FCC had permitted the current retrans rules to continue despite his request that the agency back a price freeze. “The failure of the Commission to act on these matters of importance to consumers is unconscionable,” he said. Commisso urged the senators to appoint a new FCC chairman who will take action against programmers who interrupt service because of disputes with distributors. “The American public needs and deserves a Federal Communications Commission that is dedicated to protecting video service subscribers against the programmers’ anti-consumer practices.” said Commisso.
Competitive providers are uneasy -- about the future of interconnection in a world where copper is gone; about the monopoly power they believe is still enjoyed by many incumbents; and about AT&T’s proposed wire center trials, which they fear could bring the industry a step closer to massive deregulation. No matter what AT&T and its supporters say to assuage CLECs, to many industry officials the trials are inextricable from their history -- such as an August ex parte FCC filing in which AT&T detailed its ideal path toward deregulation. In interviews with several CLEC officials, a common theme emerged: Confusion about the scope of the trials, and fear of what it could mean for the future of competition.
There were failures among many types of emergency alert system participants and at many levels in the so-called daisy chain distributing EAS warnings, the FCC said sixteen months after the first nationwide simulation. There’s a “Need for Additional Rulemakings” and other steps by the commission and Federal Emergency Management Agency before another test is held, said one subsection heading of the Public Safety Bureau report. The study sought a “re-examination” of FCC state EAS plan rules, with some plans not providing enough details about alert propagation, said the report. EAS stakeholders we spoke with said they generally backed its recommendations and found it a useful document even so long after the Nov. 9, 2011, test. Members of Congress were among those who had scrutinized the results and sought such an autopsy (CD Nov 18/11 p1).
The proposed pilot program under which Vonage would have access to numbering resources in a few trial markets could be in trouble after NARUC and consumer and public interest groups announced their opposition in a letter to the commission. The pilot program and an NPRM on number resources is set for a vote Thursday at the commission. It’s unclear whether the letter will cause commissioners to rethink the draft order, industry officials said Friday. Vonage is rebutting arguments made by the NARUC-led coalition.
Multiple civil rights groups urged FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to release the commission’s plans for Telecom Act Section 257 minority media ownership studies and commit the agency to considering them by 2015, said an ex parte filing by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights on Thursday. “We write to urge you to release, before you step down from your post as Chairman, the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed methodology on the long-planned studies.” The letter was signed by the NAACP, ACLU and Asian American Justice Center, along with many other organizations (http://bit.ly/10RF2mZ). The organizations criticized the commission for dragging its feet on the ownership studies, saying that while they “support the Commission’s apparent desire not to rush to an imperfect decision in the Quadrennial Review docket, we are concerned that the decision to await input from a single, narrowly focused, study before the Commission makes a decision” could further delay action. “From public statements and meetings with your staff, it appears that the Section 257 studies are ready to move ahead to [the public comment stage] and that there is therefore no reason for further delay,” said the letter.
President Barack Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget for fiscal year 2014 proposes an auction of the 1675-1680 MHz band spectrum that LightSquared hoped to get from the government for its wholesale wireless broadband network. The budget alternately suggests assigning the spectrum and charging a fee. The budget mentions spectrum repeatedly. Another theme is increased spending on cybersecurity.
Bridging the rural communications gap has been complicated by uncertainty created by some FCC policies, said stakeholders at a Senate Communications Subcommittee hearing Tuesday. The hearing was the first of the subcommittee’s investigation into the state of the nation’s communications policy, and the first held by it’s new Chairman Mark Pryor, D-Ark. Subcommittee staffers said the panel will also seek to investigate the state of wireless communications and the state of video in future hearings.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision Friday against an arrangement between a Virginia land developer and telecommunications provider OpenBand that made the company the exclusive video provider for a residential subdivision. “This is the first case to determine whether courts can strike down exclusive easements under the Federal Communications Commission’s 2007 Order banning exclusive video access arrangements,” said a release from Wiltshire and Grannis, the law firm that represented Loudoun County’s Lansdowne on the Potomac Homeowners Association against OpenBand and several subsidiary companies. OpenBand’s parent company, M.C. Dean, did not comment on the decision. According to the release, OpenBand has used the exclusivity arrangement with Lansdowne on the Potomac’s developer “to prevent any competitive provider of wired video services from accessing or offering communication services to residents in the development’s approximately 2,000 homes.” According to the 4th Circuit decision, OpenBand created a web of multiple agreements among numerous subsidiary companies, such as OpenBand at Lansdowne LLC., as part of a complicated network of contracts that Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson called in his decision “an artifice to evade the FCC order” and “an elaborate game of regulatory subterfuge.” “The district court correctly pierced these arguments to recognize that OpenBand had set up just the kind of non-competitive video service monopoly -- with all the attendant dangers of high prices and poor service -- that the FCC banned.” Friday’s ruling permanently enjoins OpenBand from enforcing the terms of its exclusivity agreements in the subdivisions, the release said (http://fcc.us/Z3S5ln).