More work remains to develop a complete picture of the 5 GHz bands being studied by the FCC for Wi-Fi and other unlicensed use, NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia told the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee Thursday. It remains to be seen whether the 5350-5470 MHz and 5850-5925 MHz bands can be safely shared with government incumbents already operating there, Nebbia warned.
Discussions were ongoing on the eighth floor of the FCC late Tuesday on a draft report and order on rules for cellphone signal boosters set for a vote at Wednesday’s meeting. A key question is whether the rules would make it easy for people to install boosters or give carriers wide discretion to keep the devices off their networks, agency officials said Tuesday. One official noted that the major carriers have all filed letters at the FCC clarifying that they plan to allow the use of boosters as long as they meet the technical requirements of the order, addressing some concerns that had arisen at the FCC. Another question getting some discussion was when the FCC should impose a deadline for selling boosters that don’t conform to the rules and the penalties for noncompliance.
State legislators in Kansas are considering a bill on Internet Protocol-enabled services that’s at odds with a January ruling of the Kansas Corporation Commission. The state regulators asserted authority over fixed interconnected VoIP, while sponsors of Kansas’s House Bill 2326 propose, like more than two dozen other states, that state utility commissions should have very limited authority over IP-enabled technology. The Kansas bill attracted initial supporters from the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Voice on the Net Coalition. Other state bills limiting IP regulation are moving forward in Wyoming (CD Feb 1 p7), Arizona and other states.
The state of Iowa is looking to sell or lease its fiber network. The government released a detailed request for proposals this month for the sale or lease of thousands of miles of the Iowa Communications Network (ICN), a request that the Legislature called for two years ago. Bids are due April 30, and it wants to “conduct the sale or lease process in a manner which will lead to execution of definitive agreements with the successful offeror to be submitted to the Governor’s Office for guidance no later than June 11, 2013,” according to the accompanying RFP memo (http://xrl.us/bog75d). The bill creating the Iowa network passed nearly a quarter century ago in 1989.
An FCC waiver for a broadcaster that won the last two TV stations auctioned to change the community of license within Delaware of the one outlet the company hasn’t built out, “would serve the public interest,” said a Media Bureau rulemaking notice Wednesday. Waiving the agency’s freeze on such DTV channel changes wouldn’t require “additional technical changes,” said the notice seeking comment on Western Pacific Broadcast’s request to move WMDE from Seaford to Dover. Western Pacific also owns WACP Atlantic City, N.J., seeking guaranteed pay-TV system carriage in the Philadelphia area and, unlike WMDE, on air. An order (http://fcc.us/12AhUbb) also from the bureau’s Video Division denied the Broadcast Maximization Committee’s request to undo the 2010 allotment of Channel 5 in Delaware to Seaford. BMC wants that channel and channel 6 used for radio, not DTV. The section of the Communications Act the allotment was meant to address, that there be a commercial VHF station in every state, “poses a somewhat unique circumstance compared to other allocations,” said the order signed by Division Chief Barbara Kreisman. “To the extent that a proposed allocation of this sort is unusual, BMC does not identify any impropriety or legal barrier to the adoption of a new approach.” Western Pacific and PMCM, which unsuccessfully sought to move two western U.S. TV stations to Delaware and New Jersey so the commission would comport with that section of the act after the DTV transition, both are represented by the Fletcher Heald law firm. PMCM in December won a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling that reversed the agency’s denial of that cross-country community of license move (CD Dec 17 p4). BMC hasn’t decided whether to sue the FCC in an appeals court over the denial of its petition for reconsideration, said Mark Lipp of Wiley Rein, representing the council. Lawyers for PMCM and Western Pacific had no comment right away. Comments are due in 30 days after the rulemaking appears in the Federal Register, replies 15 days later, the notice said (http://fcc.us/X4rSkj).
President Barack Obama touted his executive order on cybersecurity during his State of the Union speech Tuesday as a step to “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy,” and urged Congress to pass legislation to further the order’s goals. Enemies of the U.S. are “seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems,” he said. “We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."
AT&T, CenturyLink, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA and other industry representatives separately spoke by phone with officials from the FCC’s Wireless and Wireline bureaus late last week and Monday about the commission’s proposed changes to the Form 477 competition and broadband data collection process, the companies said in separate ex parte filings. Potential changes FCC officials outlined Friday with AT&T included: changing the number of speed tiers, “providing the Commission “shape files” for wireless services depicting the relevant technologies, frequency bands and maximum advertised speeds,” providing aggregated wireless device data that reflect the highest device speed capabilities, reporting national machine-to-machine wireless device counts and reporting data on wireless devices sold in a bundle with wireline services (http://bit.ly/WizboB). CenturyLink and FCC officials Thursday discussed “the burdens of more granular reporting requirements, including how to make distinctions between services that are residential and those that are business, and potential submission of information on a confidential basis,” said John Benedict, CenturyLink vice president-federal regulatory affairs (http://bit.ly/XyGlCG). Sprint committed during its call to FCC officials “to produce such data,” but said “the additional data and changes to the existing format of the data would increase the burden on carriers.” FCC officials also discussed continuing to provide the mapping information that carriers submit semi-annually to NTIA for its Broadband Map. Sprint representatives told the FCC “that it is time consuming to produce the maps. We agreed with staff that preparing a single nationwide map would be less time-consuming than the current state-by-state mapping,” said Marybeth Banks, Sprint government affairs director (http://bit.ly/V4nBAu). T-Mobile said Friday during its call “it agrees that a single process for providing broadband adoption and deployment data on a nationwide basis likely would be preferable to the current FCC reporting that requires collecting data at the census tract level and having to file a separate report for each state.” FCC officials outlined its proposed changes and noted “that carrier involvement in collaborating on beta tests is a possibility,” said Indra Sehdev Chalk, T-Mobile principal corporate counsel-federal regulatory affairs (http://bit.ly/VPPQmt). Industry representatives from NTCA, the Western Telecommunications Alliance, Alpine Communications, Blackfoot Communications and Enhanced Telecommunications jointly spoke with FCC officials Monday on the proposed Form 477 changes, NTCA Economist Richard Schadelbauer said Tuesday in a filing. The industry representatives said changing the rules to distinguish between residential and non-residential services “would likely double the overall data reporting burden,” Schadelbauer said. FCC officials told the representatives a proposed new tool that aids in geocoding could ease some of their concerns (http://bit.ly/159r3vr).
Sky Angel has tapped former FCC Media Bureau Chief Monica Desai to help it keep its case in federal court, where it alleged C-SPAN broke antitrust rules. Sky Angel, which has a still-pending program access complaint against Discovery that prompted the FCC’s Media Bureau last year to ask how it should define the terms “multichannel video programming distributor” (MVPD), sued C-SPAN in U.S. District Court, Washington, D.C., alleging Sherman Act violations over C-SPAN’s refusal to distribute its networks with Sky Angel. C-SPAN subsequently asked the court to dismiss the claim (CD Jan 15 p7), saying the matter ought to be heard first by the FCC.
EU lawmakers are “copy-pasting” lobbyists’ amendments to the new data protection regulation into their own legislative proposals, Europe-v-Facebook.org and Privacy International said Monday. Website founder Max Schrems noticed striking similarities between proposed amendments and lobbying papers written by representatives from Amazon, eBay, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the European Banking Federation, they said. After talking to lawmakers, Schrems realized that several, particularly those from the U.K., had “unthinkingly copied entire paragraphs” written by lobbyists, they said. Brussels has been heavily lobbied by industry and government since the European Commission proposed the new measure last year, they said. The information technology industry “is about to kill our fundamental right to data protection and privacy and some Parliamentarians do not even notice when assisting them,” said Schrems. “Revelations like these add fuel to the fire of existing concerns about the democratic deficit in the European Union,” said Privacy International Trustee Anna Fielder. She urged lawmakers to take all sides of the argument into consideration when making law, not just the richest and most powerful corporate interests. Another website, LobbyPlag.eu, says it shows which industry-pushed changes went straight into amendments. Amazon, eBay and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce didn’t comment by our deadline. Meanwhile, the EC and European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association Monday jointly urged the European Parliament and Council to ensure that new data protection rules create a level playing field among all actors in the information and communication technology industry to safeguard competition between EU companies and those based elsewhere. The proposed measure, which subjects all EU and non-EU companies to the same rules when they offer services to European consumers, strikes the right balance between data protection and innovation, they said.
The federal government’s broadband initiatives must continue, said FCC commissioners Thursday at the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Services. But such programs need more accountability and a sharper focus, they said. Panelists emphasized the importance of digital literacy, and telco executives promoted a message of grassroots outreach in encouraging broadband adoption. “We are going to approach adoption with a little more nuance than we have in the past,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the conference’s new federal chair, told the summit. The FCC will be looking at “how to quantify how much can be saved when services migrate online and how citizens and consumers can help by sharing in those savings,” she said, describing an intention to look at the accountability of sustainable broadband programs to find out which are “truly sustainable” and strengthen the successes.