Rural Kansans are demanding high-bandwidth services, said collocation center 1102 Grand (http://yhoo.it/ZeYOcx). Kansas Fiber Network, a customer of the center and consortium of 29 Kansan companies, upped its network capacity to 100 Gbps as a result, it said Wednesday. The network “will utilize the 1102 Grand DealCenter, an online meeting management system for customers of 1102 Grand, to drive core transport and other network service opportunities,” 1102 Grand said.
American Cable Association members are mostly small businesses that will face “inordinately substantial” burdens responding to the FCC’s special access data request, the association told Wireline Bureau officials May 23, according to an ex parte filing posted Wednesday (http://bit.ly/16pWkNU). To ACA, the “three most burdensome” requests are for fiber maps, location information and revenue information. Many member companies don’t have the mapping information and would have to create it, ACA said. Most ACA members do have automated billing records but don’t have access to much of the requested information, such as revenue from Dedicated Service based on bandwidth speeds or by LEC rate element. ACA wants to work with the commission to find “less burdensome alternatives that would still provide the Commission with what it needs to understand the special access market,” it said.
As a participant in the trial of direct access to numbers, VoIP provider Level 3 would seek IP interconnection with other service providers, it told FCC Wireline Bureau officials Tuesday. That experience will help Level 3 “identify best practices and standard terms for such agreements in the future, as they become more common,” it said. The trial will also help resolve issues related to routing and terminating traffic in an “efficient” manner, Level 3 said. Level 3 intends to include both wholesale and enterprise lines in the trial, which is consistent with the commission’s desire to “test direct access to numbers in ‘a variety of factual scenarios,'” Level 3 said, quoting the commission’s order approving the trials (http://bit.ly/16pW15I).
The Mississippi Public Service Commissionconcurs with NARUC and the other state commissions that have filed in the FCC’s rural call completion docket, it said in comments Tuesday (http://bit.ly/16pT4Cn). It also “appreciates” the FCC’s enforcement actions, it said. “The MPSC urges the FCC to expand its rulemaking scope to incorporate NARUC’s suggestions to ensure call failure causes are timely identified and either resolved or enforced in a meaningful way,” the commission said. Call completion problems don’t only plague rural customers, the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable (MDTC) said (http://bit.ly/16pTmsO). “While call completion is characterized as a rural issue, the problem can extend to suburban and urban areas in Massachusetts as these calls may originate or terminate anywhere in the United States,” the state department said. MDTC also agrees with NARUC and the state commissions’ call for the FCC to expand its rulemaking.
Seventy percent of media consumers said they “enhance their entertainment experience by simultaneously using another device,” said an Edelman study, the results of which the PR firm released Wednesday (http://prn.to/ZtIYx7). Two-thirds of respondents said watching and sharing entertainment online has increased their sense of global connection, it said. People were also more open to watching online videos from more distant locales than they were in 2012, it said. On social media, people are five times more likely to share a positive entertainment experience than a negative one, it said. The Global Entertainment Study, by the PR firm’s research affiliate Edelman Berland, was done last month among 6,500 consumers in eight countries.
The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology and the Media Bureau created a website where TV translators, low-power TV stations and Class As can update their input channel data in the Consolidated Database System (CDBS), said a public notice Wednesday (http://bit.ly/17tUNqn). The site is https://apps.fcc.gov/oet/translator. Input channels for low-power stations can be properly protected from interference by TV white space devices only if they are correctly recorded in the CDBS, the notice said. “This facility is especially important for low power stations that are located outside of the service contours of the station(s) that they re-transmit.” Many full-power stations changed channels during the digital transition, and low-power stations re-transmitting them had to change their equipment, said the notice. “A significant number of those low power stations have not updated their input channels in the CDBS.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., urged President Barack Obama to discuss pending U.S. cybersecurity legislation with Chinese President Xi Jinping when the leaders meet in June, said a letter that was made public Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/19mUA6I). Levin urged Obama to refer the Chinese president to the Deter Cyber Theft Act (S-884), which is aimed at deterring countries from hacking U.S. commercial secrets and intellectual property (http://1.usa.gov/141SEgi). The bill, sponsored by Levin, “would require the Director of National Intelligence to produce a report that includes a priority watch list of foreign countries that engage in economic or industrial espionage against the United States in cyberspace,” Levin’s letter said. “The bill also would require the President, if he determines such action is warranted, to block imports of certain categories of goods if they benefitted from the stolen U.S. technology or proprietary information. ... I thought you could refer to this bill in your meeting with President Xi as an example that the U.S. will indeed impose real costs on China should they continue to steal our intellectual property.” Obama plans to discuss cybersecurity issues with Xi when they meet in California next week, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday (CD May 29 p10).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision to overturn the FCC’s “meddling in program carriage negotiations is welcome news,” said two senior Republicans on the House Commerce Committee in a joint news release Wednesday. On Tuesday the court ruled that the FCC can’t force Comcast to carry the Tennis Channel on the same tier as the operator’s own Golf Channel and NBC Sports, in a 3-0 ruling (http://1.usa.gov/12gefp0). “American viewers have unprecedented choice in the content they watch, the services that deliver it, and the devices that display it,” said House Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. “In a dynamic market characterized by increased competition, rapidly developing technologies, and evolving business models, government intervention typically increases costs for consumers and reduces innovation. Our hope is that Acting [FCC] Chairwoman [Mignon] Clyburn and her eventual successor will take note of this decision and begin reducing the agency’s intervention in the television marketplace.”
The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology sought comment on the 45-day public test of Google’s white spaces database, which ended April 17. The database, one of several that has been tested, is part of the FCC’s push to open up unused TV channels for “super Wi-Fi.” The FCC has already certified databases operated by Spectrum Bridge and Telcordia. Comments are due June 13, replies June 30, a public notice said (http://bit.ly/17tJ7E9). OET also released a report Google filed on its field tests (http://bit.ly/1134vH2). Some 16,000 “unique users” visited the trial site, generating more than 36,000 page views, Google said. More than 30 percent of visits were from outside the U.S.
Dish Network launched its Social app for the Hopper. The app allows consumers to join social conversations about their favorite shows on their TV screen, Dish said in a press release (http://bit.ly/ZeRRrX): “Fans can multitask between watching a show on TV and following social posts about it on the same screen.” Consumers can link up to four Twitter accounts and four Facebook accounts to the app, Dish said. The app contains a data bar that displays stats and relevant information related to the program being watched, it said.