Life Wireless now offers service in Nevada and Ohio, the company said in a Wednesday news release (http://yhoo.it/12uCIla). The company offers subsidized cellphone service through the Lifeline program. “In Nevada, residents are eligible if they earn up to 175 percent of the federal poverty level,” said the company. “In Ohio, residents are eligible if they earn up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level.”
Los Angeles County reached an 800 MHz rebanding agreement with Harris Corp. and Sprint Nextel. The agreement is dated May 14 (http://1.usa.gov/10PzdHF) and the county’s law firm Shulman Rogers touted the settlement, negotiated ahead of the FCC’s deadline, on Tuesday (http://bit.ly/11bD4k1). “This $20 million settlement agreement, fully funded through Sprint, will allow the Internal Services Department (ISD) to comply with the FCC mandates as well as to upgrade CWIRS to meet the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) national Project 25 (P25) land mobile radio standard, at no cost to the county,” said the pact.
Comments on Verizon’s Voice Link Fire Island proposal and broader ambitions are due June 18, the New York State Public Service Commission said in a notice Tuesday (http://bit.ly/12uscuc). The telco is replacing its landline service on the western part of that island with the fixed-wireless alternative and has proposed expanding Voice Link to other locations (CD May 17 p8). The PSC defined the relevant issues as “use of Voice Link in western Fire Island, its use in other geographic areas with destroyed wireline facilities, and its use in areas based upon geographic location, availability of alternative telecommunications providers, or other Commission designated criteria,” said the notice.
AT&T’s Digital Life went to “great lengths” and “great expense” to protect its cloud-based service, said Senior Vice President Kevin Petersen at the Parks Associates Connections conference being held in Las Vegas in conjunction with CTIA. He cited an environment rife with hacking scenarios and said when it comes to consumer security, “You can’t have them.” Digital Life won’t “jeopardize the AT&T brand because of a rogue incident,” Petersen said in response to a question about what the company has done to secure the service. He cited a security group within the telco that “plays war games on the system” and has been “attacking it for the last year” prior to the start of Digital Life’s home monitoring and automation system late last month. Digital Life makes adjustments where necessary, “but we would not have rolled it [out] if our war games guys wouldn’t have said, ‘You're good to go,'” Petersen said. AT&T has an “aggressive roadmap” for Digital Life, but it will be careful in how it moves forward to expand the service, Petersen said. Letting devices come in from outside the Digital Life ecosystem jeopardizes the “predictable, reliable, consistent experience” the company is promising, he said. “It’s an open platform. It’s just open on our terms today,” he said. “This isn’t a free-for-all. I take the security aspect of this very seriously.” Once security is ensured, he said, “we can certify and move through devices and solutions very quickly.” AT&T also said Monday it’s expanding Digital Life to seven more markets. Digital Life started in April in 15 markets (CD April 29 p9), with plans for a 50-market footprint by year-end. It didn’t take long for AT&T to plan its first cross-promotion for Digital Life, which will be announced Friday, Petersen said. Consumers who sign up for a Digital Life package will get $100 off a smartphone or tablet bought at an AT&T Wireless store, he said. “That will have a big effect out of the gate” on driving sales for other AT&T business, he said. “It’s step one of integration” across AT&T products, he said. The biggest challenge to the Digital Life launch so far, Petersen said, is logistics. The company is “bringing a lot of pieces together,” he said, citing the physical aspect of rolling out to new markets.
Globecomm will provide its LTE solutions under contracts with Chariton Valley, Evolve Broadband and Indigo Wireless. Globecomm will deliver a cost-effective, efficient path to 4G LTE, it said in a press release (http://bit.ly/12sbefS). Its LTE hosting service provides a reliable LTE core, which increases both capital savings and operations savings “while not requiring the carrier to hire trained core network operators,” it said. The converged packet gateway solution reduces expensive backhaul costs over point-to-point fiber, while providing efficient data access in a carrier’s network, Globecomm said.
The Utilities Telecom Council (UTC) is concerned that Progeny’s proposed commercial deployment of its E-911 locator service on the 902-928 MHz band “could cause unacceptable interference to millions of smart grid and smart meter devices that utilities and other critical infrastructure industries use to provide essential energy and water services to the public at large,” the group said Monday in an FCC filing. UTC said it discussed its concerns with Louis Peraertz, then-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s aide on wireless international and public safety issues, in a phone call Thursday. UTC urged the commission not to authorize Progeny’s service for deployment “until further testing can be conducted and it is shown that no unacceptable interference will be caused to unlicensed operations in the 902-928 MHz band, including those by utilities and other critical infrastructure industries.” There’s no need for the commission to “rush to judgment” to authorize Progeny’s service given that tests by the FCC’s Communications, Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) showed the service needed further development to consistently meet current public safety needs, UTC said (http://bit.ly/12TbiWz). Now-former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski reportedly voted for and circulated an order approving deployment of Progeny’s service prior to his departure as chairman Friday (CD May 17 p1).
Top cable operators added fewer broadband subscribers last quarter than in Q1 2012, while major telcos’ growth rate was little changed, an industry research firm said Tuesday. Cable’s growth of 800,000 subscribers to 47.5 million was 82 percent as many as added in the year-ago quarter, said Leichtman Research Group. “AT&T and Verizon added 919,000 fiber subscribers (via U-verse and FiOS) in 1Q 2013, while having a net loss of 696,000 DSL subscribers. U-verse and FiOS now account for 40 percent of the top telephone companies’ broadband subscribers -- compared to 32 percent a year ago.” The researcher said Monday that cable operators lost subscribers in Q1 while telcos added them (CD May 21 p13), and it said Tuesday telcos have 34.9 million total broadband customers.
Motorola Mobility’s countersuit against TiVo that seeks to have TiVo’s so-called “time warp” patent found invalid goes to trial June 10 in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, TiVo CEO Thomas Rogers said on an earnings call. While TiVo has sued Motorola Mobility for allegedly infringing three patents, including one that describes a method for recording one program while watching another, the trial will be based on Motorola’s lawsuit seeking to negate the claims by having them declared invalid. TiVo hasn’t said how much it’s seeking in damages for patent infringement. But analysts have pegged it at more than $1 billion, and TiVo General Counsel Matthew Zinn has maintained that Motorola’s alleged infringement “took away an awful lot of business” from the DVR developer. TiVo forecast a $13 million-16 million net loss for Q2, largely due to the $9 million-$11 million it expects to spend on the Motorola trial and other litigation, including a separate case pending against Cisco, said TiVo Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra. “I think we have a very clear case” against Motorola and Time Warner Cable, which also is party to the case, Rogers said. The case has “significant damages attached to it,” he said. A potential injunction that would bar infringing products is “a very important part of the case,” Rogers said. TiVo gained a ruling recently from U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall blocking Cisco from filing further counterclaims against TiVo and eliminating the possibility that the case would be tried in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., said David Miller, an analyst with Caris & Co. TiVo has reached settlements of patent infringement suits with AT&T, Dish Network and Verizon, which owe $125 million, $170 million and $150 million under the separate agreements, TiVo officials said. Dish’s payments are made annually, while Verizon’s are quarterly, TiVo officials said. Meanwhile, TiVo signed on Atlantic Broadband to start offering its DVR to 250,000 subscribers across seven states, while Mediacom is expected to begin deployments in June and will be followed by Cable One, Rogers said. Scandinavian cable operator Com Hem has begun taking pre-orders for its IPTV system that will offer TiVo both as a DVR and as a cloud-based product, Rogers said. TiVo added 255,000 cable system subscribers in Q1, led by Virgin Media with 177,000, followed by Ono in Spain and Suddenlink. Virgin has 1.5 million customers with the TiVo service, while Ono has 166,000 and Suddenlink, 80,000, Rogers said. Nearly half of TiVo’s new hardware sales in Q1 were for its four-tuner DVR, which typically has a positive profit margin, Rogers said. TiVo typically doesn’t seek to drive “significant margin” off hardware sales at retail or through cable operators, but sales of higher-end products are “profitable to us,” Rogers said. During the past four years, TiVo’s cable and satellite system operator profit margins have been 5-25 percent, said Rob Sanderson, an analyst at MKM Partners. TiVo also reached agreement with Nielsen to provide its data as part of the DVR company’s research and analytics business. TiVo also has combined its Power Watch rating service with the buying behavior data it gained in buying TRA Inc. last year for $20 million, Rogers said. TiVo’s Q1 net loss narrowed to $10.3 million from $20.7 million a year earlier as revenue rose to $82.5 million from $67.7 million. Services revenue jumped to $34 million from $30.6 million, while that from technology increased to $27.7 million from $23.8 million. Hardware sales improved to $20.7 million from $13.2 million. Revenue from TiVo-owned subscribers slipped to $25.9 million from $26.5 million despite an increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) to $8.51 from $8.08. Cable and satellite system operator sales grew to $8 million from $4 million as ARPU rose to $1.19 from $1.06. TiVo added 255,000 cable and satellite customers in Q1, while its standalone service lost 22,000, the company said. It ended Q1 with a million standalone TiVo subscribers and 2.3 million with cable and satellite operators. Monthly churn declined in Q1 to 1.5 percent from 1.6 percent a year earlier.
Time Warner Cable is carrying the Lifestyle Network in Hawaii, said the Filipino programmer’s owner, ABS-CBN International, in a news release Tuesday. It said the network is available for no extra cost to Oceanic Time Warner Cable digital-video subscribers getting the Filipino Channel.
TiVo asked the FCC Media Bureau to reconsider the two-year waiver of CableCARD rules granted to Charter Communications. The petition for reconsideration filed Monday (http://bit.ly/191YQIO) follows a similar request from CEA (CD May 20 p8). The company attacked the bureau for exceeding its authority with some of the language in the waiver, which TiVo said will allow operators to “eviscerate the Commission’s CableCARD rules.” TiVo -- which had originally supported Charter’s petition -- said the waiver’s language improperly releases the cable operator from FCC-mandated obligations to provide customers with CableCARDs. TiVo also said that because Charter has provided no details on how its downloadable security system will work or if it will satisfy the integration ban after the waiver expires, the bureau’s support of the system in its waiver order went too far. “The Bureau erred in granting Charter relief that denies consumers the ability to use new CableCARD devices without notice or an opportunity to be heard -- relief that goes beyond Charter’s waiver request,” said TiVo. TiVo asked the bureau to alter the waiver to require Charter to continue to “supply and support CableCARDs to subscribers wishing to use new retail devices,” explicitly say no decision has been made on whether Charter’s system complies with the integration ban and clarify that no security system can comply with commission rules until its details have been presented to the FCC and exposed to public comment. Charter did not respond to a request for comment.