Iridium asked to modify its space station authorization for its Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit Mobile Satellite Service constellation. Iridium would like the authorization to include the Iridium Next second-generation satellites, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/1ajs049). In a separate application, ViaSat requested FCC consent for the assignment of Intelsat’s authorization “to operate the Ka-band payload on the Galaxy-28 satellite in the 19.7-20.2 GHz and 29.5-30.0 GHz bands” at 89 degrees west, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/19xv7LF).
The White House has been “engaged” with the House Intelligence Committee as its members put together a proposal on surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a White House spokeswoman told us. The status of the rumored bill has been contested within the committee, which has not cleared any legislation or settled on a final bill (CD Dec 30 p4). Privacy advocates have criticized initial indications of what the bill may look like, fearing it will codify phone metadata surveillance practices and resemble the Senate Intelligence Committee’s FISA bill. “The Administration has and will remain engaged with Members and staff of the Committee regarding various proposals for reforming signals intelligence collection authorities, policies, and operations,” the White House spokeswoman said.
The Federal Aviation Administration chose six unmanned aircraft system research and test site operators across the U.S., the agency said Monday (http://1.usa.gov/19xp7CB). The sites will be run by the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, Griffiss International Airport in Rome, N.Y., the North Dakota Department of Commerce, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Virginia Tech.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau extended by an additional six months, until June 30, the “true-up” date for calculating whether Sprint owes the government money as part of the 800 MHz transition. When the FCC approved the 800 MHz rebanding in 2004 it required Nextel, before its merger with Sprint, to pay the total value of the 10 MHz national spectrum license it got as part of deal. At the time, the FCC set the price of the license at $4.8 billion. Subtracting the value of the spectrum Nextel agreed to give up, $2 billion, left $2.8 billion Nextel had to cover by paying for the rebanding. The FCC has been extending the true-up deadline in six-month increments since 2008. While the Broadband Auxiliary Service relocation “is now complete and substantial progress has been made in 800 MHz rebanding, a significant number of 800 MHz licensees have yet to complete the process, and rebanding in the US-Mexico border region has only recently begun,” the bureau said (http://bit.ly/1dPhzaV). While Sprint has contended that enough has been paid out that the government can now conclude no money will be owed, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA) has advised that taking this step would be “premature,” the bureau said. “We conclude that conducting a true-up of Sprint’s rebanding expenditures as of December 31, 2013 would be premature. Accordingly, we provisionally extend the true-up date, as recommended by the TA, until June 30, 2014, and direct the TA to file a report by May 15, 2014, with its recommendation on whether the true-up should be conducted as of June 30, 2014, or be further postponed."
The FCC’s 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee will meet Jan. 27, the FCC said Monday in the Federal Register. The committee is collaborating with NTIA’s Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee Radio Conference Subcommittee on consensus opinions on multiple WRC agenda items, which it will eventually present to the State Department (CD Dec 23 p9). The WRC Advisory Committee’s Jan. 27 meeting will include a presentation of the committee working groups’ preliminary views and draft proposals, the FCC said. The meeting is set to begin at 11 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room. The meeting will also be webcast on the FCC’s website (http://1.usa.gov/1fW5DG2).
Communications Daily won’t be published Wednesday, Jan. 1, in observance of the New Year’s Day holiday. Our next issue will be dated Thursday, Jan. 2.
A New York state senator told the FCC she’s “greatly concerned” with the impact the FCC’s prison calling order will have on county jails in her district (http://bit.ly/K9W6Rl). Elizabeth Little asked that the implementation date be postponed from Feb. 11 to “a later date,” because county governments “have acted on their budgets for the year and have not accounted for the loss of funding that will be incurred due to this rule change.” She said the order is “especially worrisome for smaller county jails that experience high turnover rates of inmate populations.”
CaptionCall -- a subsidiary of Sorenson -- wrote to the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Friday to explain the measures it will take to comply with new IP Captioned Telephone Service rules (http://bit.ly/K9V9Ix). CaptionCall noticed many “conflicts” between the text of the final order and the codified rules, it said, such as when users must be registered. The rules are also “ambiguous” as to the permitted and excluded categories of third-party professional certifications, CaptionCall said, or what is meant by “business relationships,” “family relationships,” or “social relationships.” CaptionCall detailed a meeting with bureau staffers in July to seek clarification, but has not received guidance, it said. “Should the Commission disagree with any of the compliance measures CaptionCall intends to implement, CaptionCall requests immediate guidance and clarification."
Netflix probably won’t boost its support for 3D movies, the company said Friday, but wouldn’t immediately say whether it will abandon 3D content altogether. It launched 3D streaming in January and has a “few dozen” such titles now, said spokesman Joris Evers. But 3D streaming “isn’t something we will look to expand as it is used very little,” he said. The company “experimented” with Blu-ray 3D offerings earlier, but “only shipped very few units” to subscribers, said spokeswoman Karen Barragan. Netflix wouldn’t say if it plans to offer Blu-ray 3D titles again or reconsider its plans for streamed 3D movies, especially in light of the strong theatrical 3D showing of the movies Gravity and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Separately, Netflix had an outage Thursday night that lasted about 40 minutes and “impacted streaming on most devices” in parts of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, said Barrigan. The outage started at 6:45 p.m. PST, and affected about 30 percent of streaming “starts across devices” used by subscribers, said spokesman Jonathan Friedland.
The rebanding of a final group of 800 MHz public safety agencies, those located along the Mexican border, is under way and about 195 licensees there are expected to have to retune their systems, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator said in a report filed Friday at the FCC. The U.S. and Mexico agreed last year to an amended protocol, which takes into account the FCC’s landmark 2004 800 MHz rebanding order (CD June 7/12 p7). “With most non-border licensees and Canadian border licensees having completed physical retuning, the TA’s focus is on those licensees that have not finished,” the TA said (http://bit.ly/1cFRG0S). “Licensees that have not completed physical retuning should expeditiously complete their implementation activities,” the TA said. “A delay in the completion of an implementation task by a licensee that has a downstream impact on other licensees (i.e., by blocking another licensee’s replacement frequencies or because the first touch of its subscriber units needs to be completed before an interoperable licensee can retune its infrastructure) can have a cascading effect and cause delays for other dependent licensees and, in some cases, for an entire region."