Imposing cybersecurity regulations alone won’t be effective in encouraging cybersecurity-related investments, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) said Monday in comments it filed with the Commerce Department. As part of President Barack Obama’s executive order on cybersecurity, Commerce was collecting input on possible incentives that would encourage adoption of cybersecurity practices. As Commerce formulates its recommendations on incentives, it should respect the need for specific sectors to address specific threats, TIA said in a news release. Commerce should also recognize that enhanced information sharing is needed, as are international approaches and standards, TIA said. Current incentives revolve around successfully administering public-private partnerships, as well as international, industry-led standards and best practices, TIA said (http://bit.ly/YhCfpw).
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an earlier court decision favoring CenturyLink over Sprint in Central Telephone Company of Virginia v. Sprint (http://1.usa.gov/13GURxq). Sprint had appealed the earlier decision. The dispute concerned an interconnection agreement (ICA) involving VoIP traffic in which Sprint had stopped paying, which initially prompted CenturyLink to go to court. Sprint had paid access charges for such traffic from the outset of the agreements, in 2004 and 2005, through 2009. Sprint judged that the agreement rules “did not apply to long distance VoIP traffic that traveled over FGD [Feature Group D] trunks” and “that CenturyLink had billed Sprint at an improperly high rate for VoIP traffic since May 1, 2007,” according to the court document. The court said Sprint could have included a provision to exempt long-distance VoIP traffic traveling over FGD trunks when the agreements were drafted. It criticized the ambiguity and said the agreement must be read to apply to this type of traffic traveling over this type of trunk. In Sprint’s appeal, it argued that state commissions must first consider interconnection agreements before the initial court could have ruled. It also argued that the district judge should have recused himself because his individual retirement account owned shares in CenturyLink, a fact he had noted and judged not reason for recusal. The court decision Monday said state commissions don’t have to provide the first instance of reviewing such agreements before a district court does, and said the judge “did not violate the recusal statute, and therefore did not abuse his discretion in deciding that neither recusal nor vacatur was appropriate. ... Sprint must do more than identify an ambiguity in a contract it drafted. ... In the face of ambiguity, we construe the relevant provisions of the NC [North Carolina] ICA against Sprint and in favor of CenturyLink.” “Sprint is disappointed in the decision and is studying it to determine whether further review is warranted,” said a spokesman by email.
Sports is the “most premium form of content with the highest monetization potential,” given its scarcity, high barriers to entry, big audiences and “resiliency to DVR technology,” said an analyst who gave an “outperform” rating to Madison Square Garden. “New distribution options and devices have spurred growth in content consumption, and in turn the rising demand for content is increasing the value of content ownership,” Michael Senno of Credit Suisse wrote investors Monday. “We expect sports rights owners and networks with sports content to continue to grow profits at the expense of distributors in the medium-term. MSG benefits as it owns both the teams and network.” The stock closed up 2.8 percent at $57.97 Monday.
The FCC granted LightSquared experimental authority to use the bands 1670-1680 MHz and 400.15-406 MHz for mobile broadband services. The authorization, granted Monday, will expire July 20, the FCC said in the special temporary authority. The STA follows LightSquared’s request to modify its ancillary terrestrial component authorization associated with its mobile satellite service L-band licenses. LightSquared proposed relocating its terrestrial downlink operations at 1545-1555 MHz to 1670-1680 MHz, which includes 1675-1680 MHz used by the government (CD Nov 6 p14). The STA directs LightSquared to stop operating in the bands immediately “in the event any authorized user or NTIA notifies the licensee of harmful interference and shall not recommence such use until all impacted users agree with recommencement,” it said. The wholesale satellite capacity company’s plans for a terrestrial network have been stalled since the FCC proposed to rescind its ATC authority last year. The company said the relocation proposal promotes compatibility with GPS receivers (CD Oct 1 p20).
Over-the-top (OTT) messaging traffic volume will be double that of peer-to-peer (P2P) SMS messaging by the end of the year, Informa Telecom & Media said Monday. Daily OTT traffic averaged 19.1 billion messages sent per day in 2012, while daily P2P SMS traffic averaged 17.6 billion messages sent per day, Informa said. An average of 41 billion OTT messages will be sent per day by the end of 2013, while the average daily P2P SMS traffic will be 19.5 billion messages per day, Informa said. There are more P2P SMS users than OTT messaging users -- 3.5 billion P2P SMS users compared with 586.3 million OTT users -- but OTT users send more than six times as many messages as P2P SMS users do, Informa said. The increase in OTT messaging has resulted in dropping in revenue for SMS traffic in many countries; mobile operators’ SMS revenues in Spain dropped from 1.1 billion euros in 2007 to 758.5 million euros in 2011, Informa said. Still, SMS is unlikely to die, with Informa forecasting global SMS revenues and traffic will continue to grow through 2016 (http://bit.ly/15TW3l7).
The Iowa Utilities Board decided to investigate whether to apply civil penalties in light of complaints of long-distance charges wrongly applied to a phone customer’s bill. In a Friday order (http://bit.ly/12KtdzG), the regulator declined to weigh in with substantive judgment of whether the companies in question violated any codes but said the record creates “reasonable ground” for looking into the questions. In December, the Consumer Advocate Division of Iowa’s Department of Justice urged the board to investigate levying such civil penalties after the board first examined the charges earlier that fall. During that proceeding, companies acknowledged errors and provided certain credits to a business customer.
The FCC Media Bureau granted two Comcast petitions to exempt it from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices in 24 communities in Ohio (http://bit.ly/11SulzP) and seven in Illinois (http://bit.ly/Yhs04m), said filings posted in FCC docket 12-1 this week. Comcast’s petitions cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The deregulation in Ohio will affect just under 60,000 households, including the communities of Fairfield, Pease, East Liverpool, and St. Clair. The deregulation in Illinois will affect just under 16,000, including the towns of Danville, Chrisman, and Philo. The FCC also granted two effective competition petitions from Time Warner Cable, for 11 communities in Ohio (http://bit.ly/12dmADl) and for the town of Bradbury, Calif. (http://bit.ly/188ieTX). TWC cited competition from DirecTV and Dish Network in both petitions. The TWC deregulation will affect around 15,000 households in Ohio, including the city of Bellefontaine, and towns of Stokes and Washington. The deregulation will affect 354 households in Bradbury. TWC has also filed an effective competition petition with the FCC asking for deregulation in Orchard Park, NY (http://bit.ly/ZZpZ7b ) and another for around 17,000 households in 24 other New York communities (http://bit.ly/14JaMzm), including Jamestown, Tupper Lake, and Falconer.
Original professional online video (OPOV) is viewed by 45 million U.S. Internet users per month, said a new study of more than 2,400 people by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and market research firm GfK (http://bit.ly/15V4ahq). OPOV viewing compares favorably to traditional television viewing, IAB said in a release (http://bit.ly/Zgv8J9). “Receptivity to marketing messages during OPOV was directly in line with consumer ad receptiveness while watching primetime television programming on a regular TV set,” the release said. “Plus, those surveyed who view both primetime TV and OPOV cited viewing new, unique content and flexible screening times as preferable aspects of OPOV over primetime television viewing."
Dish Network said it received a nondisclosure agreement from Sprint Nextel about Dish’s proposal to buy the wireless company. Dish provided information to a special committee of Sprint’s board that will examine Dish’s $25.5 billion bid for the company, Dish said Monday in a press release (http://bit.ly/ZZmbTF). The DBS company said it’s confident it has exceeded the standards required in the proposed agreement between Sprint and SoftBank “in terms of providing a bona fide written proposal that is reasonably likely to lead to a superior offer,” it said. Sprint said it received a waiver from SoftBank of various provisions of the merger agreement between Sprint and SoftBank. The waiver doesn’t allow Sprint to provide non-public information to Dish “nor does it enable Sprint to enter into negotiations with Dish,” Sprint said Monday in a press release (http://bit.ly/10P7E49). The wireless company said it doesn’t plan to comment further on the work of the special committee “until it completes an assessment with respect to whether the Dish proposal is, or is reasonably likely to lead to a superior offer,” it said.
Numbering databases are the “key” to the IP transition, AT&T Vice President-Policy Hank Hultquist said in a blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/12dfPBf). The FCC “took matters into its own hands,” he said, when it began the process to give interconnected VoIP providers direct access to numbers (CD April 19 p1). Also important was the commission’s seeking comment on database and routing issues that need to be resolved to enable the transition to all-IP interconnection, he said. “It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of these database and routing issues. Numbering databases may seem like the driest of telecom issues, but they are the key to enabling this transition,” Hultquist wrote. With a database in place that associates IP routing information with telephone numbers, “service providers will be free to figure out all of the details needed to move to a world of all-IP interconnection,” he said.