Some states are looking to consolidate their emergency dispatch centers for cost savings as they migrate to the next generation 911 systems. But some local officials urged states to back off the plan. Concerns regarding additional cost, longer response time and quality of service were cited at a Maine Public Utility Commission hearing Wednesday. The state PUC proposed to reduce the current 26 public safety answering points to 15-17.
The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) and Motorola, long the top provider of public safety radios, disagreed on the state of industry competition, in filings on an Aug. 19 FCC Public Safety Bureau public notice. Motorola also took issue with the notice’s characterization of the market as one where “first responders rely on communications systems supplied by a small number of equipment providers to support mission-critical communications.” Questions about competition in the public safety equipment market were raised by leaders of the House Commerce Committee in a June 30 letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
ATLANTA -- Toshiba will limit distribution of its Cinema Series LED edge-lit and 3D LCD TVs to regional chains and independent dealers this year after parting ways with Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater, National Training Manager Michael Danning told us at CEDIA.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has issued its report on its audit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s management and oversight of the Importer Self-Assessment program.
Auctioning the D-block is “right technically, it’s right as public policy, [and] it’s even right politics,” said T-Mobile Vice President Tom Sugrue at a press conference Monday. But most major public safety groups oppose an auction and want Congress to give them the D-block spectrum. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has a bill to give public safety the D-block and scheduled a hearing for Thursday morning. “This is a long process and there’s always ups and downs,” but the 4G Coalition plans to keep fighting and convince policymakers to auction the spectrum, Sugrue said. While the Senate is moving to D-block reallocation, a bipartisan group of House members seemed to agree with the auction approach at a hearing earlier this year, Sugrue said. “This week’s hearing may go a little differently, but we'll see.” House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was working on a draft bill authorizing an auction, still seems interested but appears to be waiting to see “how the process plays out” before introducing the bill, Sugrue told us afterward. There may be some desire in Congress to do a comprehensive spectrum bill next year, and public safety could get wrapped into that, he added. A lack of funding has held back a national public safety network, said T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham. “It has nothing to do with spectrum.” Auctioning the D-block will bring “competition and choice” to public safety and consumers, she said. The FCC should move forward on its rulemaking to determine how the network will operate and what the licensing scheme will be, she said. On most days, public safety would have sufficient capacity for its network using its existing 10 MHz allocation of 700 MHz spectrum, and in emergencies they could share capacity on the LTE networks of major carriers, said Ken Zdunek, chief technology officer of Roberson and Associates, a consulting firm that prepared a recent technical white paper for T-Mobile. The LTE standard would make it easy for consumers and public safety to “peacefully coexist,” said the consulting firm’s president and former Motorola CTO Dennis Roberson. Leveraging commercial networks would offer great network resiliency because commercial towers are built closely together and because public safety could fall back on multiple networks, Zdunek said. T-Mobile, meanwhile, explained how it ran a scan of spectrum use by the government in eight cities whose results it filed with the commission (CD Aug 26 p6). The scan used spectrum analyzers on T-Mobile towers with clear lines of sight to known federal facilities, T-Mobile said in a call with Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julie Knapp, according to an ex parte filing. “A resolution bandwidth of 30 kHz was used for the scan of the spectrum between 1755-1800 MHz, with particular attention paid to the spectrum between 1755-1780 MHz,” the carrier said. “The equipment was calibrated for the noise floor before each scan and utilized both omni-directional and directional antennas pointed towards the federal facilities.”
On September 20, 2010, the following executive communications were received by Congress:
Siemens and Samsung are among the top five “global leaders” in carbon disclosure and performance in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) 2010 Global 500 index released Monday. The report said U.S. companies lag their global peers in the “numbers and types of action they are taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Managing carbon is becoming a “strategic business priority and competitive driver” for the largest global companies, even though there’s a lack of international agreement on climate change, it said.
Siemens and Samsung are among the top five “global leaders” in carbon disclosure and performance in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) 2010 Global 500 index released Monday. The report said U.S. companies lag their global peers in the “numbers and types of action they are taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Managing carbon is becoming a “strategic business priority and competitive driver” for the largest global companies, even though there’s a lack of international agreement on climate change, it said.
The President has issued an administrative order continuing for one year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13224 on September 23, 2001, "Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism."
On September 15, 2010, the Export Promotion Cabinet submitted a report to the President which provides an overview of the progress of the National Export Initiative and lays out a plan for reaching the President’s goal of doubling U.S. exports in five years.