Mobile stakeholders participating in the FCC’s 2013 broadband testing and measurement program are now free to return a signed copy of the Code of Conduct, said an FCC ex parte filing posted Thursday (http://bit.ly/11skVN9). Those who sign the code (http://bit.ly/ZaPSRc) will promise to act in good faith; not publish any data generated by the test -- or make any public statement on the results -- until the FCC does so first; and not publish or use test data in a way that would “significantly reduce the anonymity” of collected data, or compromise privacy. However, test data can still be used to support the writing of the FCC’s official Measuring Broadband America reports, and to support analysis and plan for future measurement efforts, the code says. At the March 28 meeting, stakeholders discussed tweaks to the mobile app that will be used to collect the measurements, the ex parte filing said. Walter Johnston, chief of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Division in the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology, expects the app to be released publicly after the beta test finishes in late May or early June, the filing said.
The federal government has failed in pioneering U.S. broadband deployment and thus prompts states and cities to lead, Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin told Wisconsin broadband stakeholders Thursday. “As there is no reasonable expectation that the FCC will take any substantial action to change the investment equation in the near-term, states and cities must act to do so,” Levin said, according to his prepared remarks (http://bit.ly/Xs9g1D). The Wisconsin Public Service Commission is hosting a symposium on how to advance broadband adoption and deployment Thursday and Friday of this week in Madison, Wis. The PSC includes its own state broadband director, Tithi Chattopadhyay, who started last fall and has helped lead the PSC’s broadband efforts, which include a broadband playbook (1.usa.gov/XqhZvV) directed toward state legislators and policy officials. The playbook was formally released and presented in late March, although it was initially completed and went through a round of comments last fall. It “is a tool that all stakeholders need to study and explore to identify specific broadband actions and initiatives that can be considered for the state,” said the PSC commissioners in their March letter presenting the 15-page book. The symposium included a keynote from Levin, who helped manage the creation of the National Broadband Plan, and panels with industry and state officials. The National Broadband Plan struggled because “D.C. culture doesn’t lend itself to effective experimentation,” Levin said in his speech. “The Broadband Plan analysis demonstrated that the biggest problem for unserved areas stemmed from the lack of incentives to upgrade the networks in areas dominated by the three largest wireline phone companies.” Levin did credit the success of the $4 billion broadband stimulus program. He questioned the FCC’s USF reform and said the major companies “have indicated the reform package will not catalyze significant network deployments” and pointed to smaller companies that have stalled progress due to the uncertainty the reform created. The shortcomings of the reform “put it in a hole,” he said, noting it misses the impact of 4G and wireless and satellite on rural regions that need more bandwidth. “In sum, while the FCC shifted billions of dollars around, the combination of carrots and sticks created by the FCC actions has resulted in minimal deployments in the most problematic unserved areas identified in the Plan, a slowdown of deployment in other areas, consumers paying more, a failure to anticipate future needs and a punt of a central issue.” He praised local experimentation with broadband networks and noted how aware cities are of competing with one another. “Cities, and not the federal government, are leading in experimenting with new forms of mutual agreements that serve today and tomorrow’s needs,” Levin said, expressing confidence in municipal leadership and implicitly criticizing laws that restrict municipally owned networks: “We should also squarely look at the conflict that occurs when a state curtails a city’s ability to take control of its own bandwidth destiny.” The FCC disputed the characterization: “The Commission’s reform of USF to create the Connect America Fund is expanding broadband to rural Americans who lack access while for the first time putting the Fund on a budget, though we're still in the early innings,” an FCC spokesman said in response to Levin’s speech. “Last July, the Connect America Fund began connecting nearly 400,000 Americans unserved by broadband in 37 states. Last October, the Commission launched the Mobility Fund, providing $300 million to extend advanced mobile wireless service on up to 83,000 unserved road miles in 31 states, reaching areas where millions of Americans live, work, or travel. This October, the new Tribal Mobility Fund will provide $50 million to increase availability of advanced mobile services on Tribal Lands.” The spokesman emphasized broadband plans to come. “The Commission is also on track to launch, later this year, both the second phase of the Connect America Fund, which will distribute up to $1.8 billion a year to deploy broadband to millions of Americans across the country, and the second phase of the Mobility Fund, which will distribute $500 million annually to deploy mobile broadband to unserved areas,” he said. “The FCC has accomplished this entirely through savings from reforms, without increasing the size of the Fund or the cost to consumers and small businesses who pay into it. In fact, thanks to the Commission’s reforms of Lifeline, the overall size of USF -- and the USF contribution factor -- are both shrinking since reforms took effect. The contribution factor has decreased in each of the past two quarters, dropping nearly 15% from its high.” Intercarrier compensation reform will “unleash over $1.5 billion in annual benefits to consumers by eliminating hidden calling costs while removing major barriers to deployments of advanced IP-based broadband networks, such as AT&T’s announcement in November that it would substantially expand its U-Verse footprint,” the spokesman added. “Together, these reforms put the country on track to connect the 19 million Americans who lack service by the end of the decade.”
Gilat will unveil an integrated airborne satellite communications solution for unmanned aerial vehicles at the Latin American Aerospace & Defense conference in Brazil. The product is capable of transmitting 1 Mbps of IP-based data, Gilat said in a press release (http://bit.ly/ZarLSK). Its features include a “ruggedized spread spectrum satellite modem” and a two-way, on-the-move, flat panel tracking antenna, it said. It also provides a lightweight, compact, low-power terminal for airborne applications “and can be tailored to meet varied end-user specifications and requirements,” Gilat said. The conference will be April 9-12.
North Dakota officially passed into law its bill calling for a legislative management study of the regulations and funding mechanisms surrounding VoIP and Internet Protocol-enabled services. Jack Dalrymple, the state’s Republican governor, signed Senate Bill 2234 Wednesday. The bill, which originally would have restricted state regulation of these services but was then pared down, passed out of the Legislature earlier this week.
An Illinois Citizens Utility Board workshop in Elgin, Ill., Friday will focus on how consumers can reduce the size of their phone bills. The consumer advocates did a study that “estimated that Illinois callers could be overpaying by more than $1 billion a year -- but most could enjoy big savings by making a few simple changes on their phone bills,” it said (http://bit.ly/Xg1YM9). The board will suggest ways to cut bills, potentially dropping the cost by hundreds of dollars per customer, it said.
The North Carolina Next Generation Networks project received bids this week in its connectivity venture that promises faster Internet and public-private leveraging. The partnership combines several universities and communities in the state’s Research Triangle Region and issued an RFP in February seeking companies to assist in its next-generation efforts. Time Warner Cable bid to “play an integral role,” the cable company said in a press release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/12lKKxs). “We ... believe our highly reliable, advanced network can exceed the future requirements of the NCNGN to deliver speeds of 1 Gigabit per second,” said COO Rob Marcus in a statement: “Our network is capable of, and is already delivering, multiple Gigabit speeds and so much more, meeting customers’ needs today and into the future.” The company has invested upwards of $1.5 billion and installed 28,000 miles of fiber and coaxial cable infrastructure in the region the request covers, it said. It touted its 6,600 employees and 1.6 million customers in the state. The request received eight responses total, including Time Warner Cable’s, Triangle J Council of Governments Regional Planning Director John Hodges-Copple told us. “We were pleased with the response.” He described an initial review process that should happen rather quickly, followed by a more elaborate, intended period of negotiation set to happen likely throughout the summer before any contracts are signed. Time Warner Cable is the only bidder that’s publicly announced itself, he said, declining to disclose the others.
The state of Washington has moved House Bill 1971 forward from the House Finance Committee to Appropriations and received its first reading on Wednesday, substituting in a new version of the bill. The proposed legislation received a lengthy hearing, with a great show of support, in mid-March and would overhaul the way the state taxes telecom and creates a state USF (CD March 20 p8). The substitute (http://bit.ly/12jCul9) makes several clarifications on what certain terms mean and revises language in several instances, such as specifying how retailers must collect 911 excise taxes on prepaid wireless services.
Microsoft benefited from a Washington state unfair competition law, said state Attorney General Bob Ferguson Wednesday. The law was “aimed at protecting both” intellectual property “and fair competition in Washington,” said the attorney general’s office (http://1.usa.gov/ZAkUSc). The law helped in settling a case between Microsoft and Embraer over software licensing, as the office “exchanged several letters with the Brazilian company in an effort to resolve this matter before taking more formal steps,” said the office.
The FCC Wireline Bureau adopted the “form and content” for a survey of urban rates for fixed voice and fixed broadband residential services, it said in an order Wednesday (http://bit.ly/Z8ZCvk). The bureau will annually select a “statistically valid sample” of urban providers to complete the survey, it said. The commission will use the responses to establish a rate floor that eligible telecom carriers must meet if they receive high-cost loop support or frozen high-cost support. “We adopt a fixed-services specific survey because we have decided not to create a national average urban rate that represents a blended rate derived from both fixed and mobile data,” the bureau said. “The differences in rate plans and other attributes of fixed and mobile services would make it inordinately difficult to create a unified benchmark.”
Content owners will constitute 17 percent of the total encoder and transcoder market by 2017, up from 11 percent in 2012, ABI Research said Wednesday. While content owners have always bought some video encoders that fed into existing pay-TV systems, they're now increasingly turning to multi-format video transcoders that support direct-to-consumer distribution, bypassing traditional pay TV distributors, ABI said. Owners’ “role in distribution stems from both authenticated access offered as part of a retransmission agreement with a classical Pay TV operator, but will also increasingly include advertising supported free-to-wire services and some standalone content-owner bundles,” said Sam Rosen, ABI practice director, in a news release. ABI forecasts the total encoder and transcoder markets will do more than $1.5 billion in business a year by 2017. Arris/Motorola, Cisco, Ericsson, Harmonic and Thomson Video Networks will all play a “strong role,” ABI said (http://bit.ly/10rBjfk).