STANFORD, Calif. -- U.S. public media have powerful weapons to fend off onslaughts from all directions -- political, financial and technological -- executives said. From 30,000 feet, public media look “diffuse, decentralized, not very powerful,” because stations were the original institutions, said Dan Werner, McNeil/Lehrer Productions’ executive producer, at a Stanford University forum Tuesday. The structure is poorly understood, said Tim Olson, vice president-media and education at KQED TV and radio in San Francisco: The national organizations are “more like buying clubs” than they are like integrated commercial broadcast operators like Disney.
The President has issued a notice and message to Congress continuing for one year, until November 3, 2012, the national emergency in Executive Order 13067 of November 3, 1997 with respect to the Government of Sudan, and the expansion of that emergency in EO 13400 of April 26, 2006, with respect to which additional steps were taken in EO 13412 of October 13, 2006. As the crisis that led to the declaration of a national emergency has not been resolved, the President determines it necessary to continue the national emergency and maintain in force the sanctions against Sudan to respond to this threat.
Delays in broadband stimulus projects continued (WID Oct 3 p3). While NTIA expects a $126.3 million West Virginia project to be completed on time, it terminated the $80.6 million project managed by the Louisiana Board of Regents. The funds will be returned to the U.S. Treasury, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who worked with the Board of Regents to secure the funding, said she plans to work with interested parties to complete the project. West Virginia is playing catch up and is confident that its project, which must be completed by February 2013, will be done on time and on budget, Jimmy Gianato, director and homeland security adviser with the state’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, told us. The project was designed to connect schools and other public facilities. But recent letters by the state’s schools Superintendent Jorea Marple to Gov. Earl Tomblin and state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette cited lack of progress, a concern by education staff across the state. About 20 months into the project, only six miles of fiber had been built, according to the latest progress report. A big issue is a fiber shortage, said Gianato, coordinator of the project. But the project has identified an alternate fiber vendor and additional fiber has arrived and is now being deployed, he said. The state is working with NTIA and Frontier, which is installing the fiber cable, to deploy “a mitigation strategy to get the project timeline caught up,” he said. As part of the mitigation plan, Frontier will assign more personnel and will work overtime and on weekends, a spokesman said. Louisiana, however, was unable to implement the original project plan and fell significantly behind schedule, according to Strickling. It proposed major modifications to its original proposal without adequate technical and financial details and a viable schedule for completing the project, said Strickling. NTIA has worked with the state in the last several months to rescue the project but has now concluded that “we have to move on,” he said. NTIA, during a site visit in March, found that the project that should have been 12 months along in its implementation was already at least nine months behind schedule, according to a letter to the Board of Regents by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which works with NTIA on BTOP oversight. A corrective action plan submitted by the state didn’t address the regulators’ concerns directly and provided no further detail on what timetable the construction would occur, “alluding only to a series of bid packages that would be implemented concurrently to address the significant schedule delays,” NOAA said. Additional responses by the state appeared to be insufficient, according to the agency. The lack of details and specificity effectively doomed the project, designed to connect public schools and libraries, Landrieu said. The Board of Regents will continue to look for outreach opportunities in the state’s rural communities as well as funding to improve connectivity to the existing LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative) network, said James Purcell, Commissioner of Higher Education. He noted that the Board of Regents’ approach, though rejected by NTIA, gained demonstrated support from the group’s public and private partners.
Delays in broadband stimulus projects continued (CD Oct 3 p9). While NTIA expects a $126.3 million West Virginia project to be completed on time, it terminated the $80.6 million project managed by the Louisiana Board of Regents. The funds will be returned to the U.S. Treasury, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who worked with the Board of Regents to secure the funding, said she plans to work with interested parties to complete the project.
The ITU study group on the broadcasting service will begin new studies of “worldwide broadcasting roaming” and make changes to work in three other areas, unless objections arise before Jan. 27, the director of the Radiocommunication Bureau said in a letter to administrations. Worldwide broadcasting roaming may spur regional, national and international harmonization of broadcasting, it said, and offers the possibility of intersystem interoperability for information services in disaster and emergency situations, navigation and safety. Demand for portable broadcast receivers is rising worldwide, it said. Those devices are increasingly connected to the Internet and are based on loaded software or firmware that can be updated, it said. The work aims to define the service requirements and features for worldwide broadcasting roaming, needed characteristics and performance, and the technical characteristics of broadcast receivers including elements of software defined radio (SDR) and its enhancements that may be useful, it said. SDR is also being studied in ITU-R, it said. Revisions to existing work include the inclusion of extremely high resolution or multi-view TV, and 3DTV, in studies on generic bit-rate reduction coding of digital video signals for production, contribution, primary and secondary distribution, emission and related applications, it said. Work on broadcasting of multimedia and data applications, and digital interfaces for production and post-production applications in broadcasting systems, will include 3DTV, it said.
OAKLAND, Calif. -- BART is struggling over a policy on cellular service cutoffs in the absence of guidance it has requested from the FCC, said members of the transit agency’s board and its general counsel. The board couldn’t complete action at a public meeting Thursday because members sought changes in various directions in a draft (CD Oct 20 p8). “I'm not comfortable turning to the FCC” for guidance, said board member Robert Raburn. “They have not shown the leadership. We have shown the leadership.” General Counsel Matt Burrows said he had sent the draft to the FCC and California’s Public Utilities Commission for review but hasn’t received a substantive reply. “No regulatory agency has stepped up to say, ‘This is what we do.'” An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
OAKLAND, Calif. -- BART is struggling over a policy on cellular service cutoffs in the absence of guidance it has requested from the FCC, said members of the transit agency’s board and its general counsel. The board couldn’t complete action at a public meeting Thursday because members sought changes in various directions in a draft (WID Oct 20 p3). “I'm not comfortable turning to the FCC” for guidance, said board member Robert Raburn. “They have not shown the leadership. We have shown the leadership.” General Counsel Matt Burrows said he had sent the draft to the FCC and California’s Public Utilities Commission for review but hasn’t received a substantive reply. “No regulatory agency has stepped up to say, ‘This is what we do.'” An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
The President has posted a notice and message to Congress extending for another year (until October 27, 2012) the national emergency declared on October 27, 2006 by Executive Order 13413 with respect to the situation in or in relation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and related measures adopted on that date blocking the property of certain persons contributing to the conflict in that country. The President is continuing the national emergency for another year as this situation continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the U.S. Notice as posted by the White House is available here.
The Justice Department has announced that Michael Todd, president of The Parts Guys LLC in Florida, has been sentenced to 46 months in prison, a $10,000 fine and was ordered to forfeit $160,362 in connection with his efforts to illegally export military components for fighter jets and attack helicopters from the U.S. to Iran.
The U.N. Broadband Commission set goals “that countries around the world should strive to meet” by 2015 to ensure their populations fully participate in “tomorrow’s emerging knowledge societies,” the ITU said. One goal is that each country should have a national broadband plan or strategy or include broadband in their universal service program, it said. A second goal is for “adequate regulation and market forces” to ensure that entry level broadband is affordable, it said. At least 40 percent of households in developing countries should have Internet access, it said. Internet penetration should reach 60 percent worldwide, 50 percent in developing countries and 15 percent in least-developed countries, it said. ITU will measure each country’s progress and produce an annual broadband report with rankings of nations worldwide for broadband policy, affordability and uptake, it said.