ZGS Communications Chairman Ronald Gordon urged FCC officials to do “everything possible” to make sure Class A and low-power TV operators can continue serving their audiences following the incentive spectrum auction, an ex parte notice shows (http://bit.ly/ZNMI7L).
Globalstar CEO Jay Monroe said he expects progress this year on its FCC petition for a rulemaking on obtaining authority for a terrestrial low-power service (TLPS). “We expect to hear from the FCC shortly regarding how it plans to proceed with our petition, and we continue to believe that they will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking in the near future and complete the proceeding by the year’s end,” he said last week during the company’s fourth quarter 2012 earnings teleconference. Globalstar filed the petition last year (CD Nov 14 p26). The TLPS will expand the nation’s spectrum capacity and will relieve existing Wi-Fi congestion, he said. “We expect it to be managed over a carrier-grade network of access points in a controlled fashion to maximize the throughput capacity of the service and so as not to interfere with our satellite operations or any other wireless services in adjacent bands.” The mobile satellite service company is working with potential partners to hold field trials in various areas of the country, he said. Globalstar filed for experimental licenses with the FCC to test the service, he added. This year, the company is focusing on new products for voice and its duplex data modem market, he said. There are plans to introduce new products, like a consumer tracking device “that will broaden the market for inexpensive tracking of anything, anywhere, anytime,” he said. Last month, it completed its fourth launch campaign and “all previously launched satellites are in commercial service,” Monroe said. Revenue for Q4 2012 reached $19.1 million compared to $17.4 million in 2011, said Rebecca Clary, chief accounting officer. For the full year 2012, excluding revenue received from the termination of its Open Range agreement in 2011, total revenue increased 8 percent to $76.3 million from $70.8 million in 2011, she said.
Allowing Amazon to register .mobile as a closed generic top-level domain (gTLD) would create customer confusion and allow “anti-competitive misuse of the gTLD, including deceptive marketing practices,” CTIA said in an objection (http://bit.ly/ZVX33Q) filed with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). “The Mobile Wireless Community lives and breathes by virtue of its presence online,” and Amazon’s application for the gTLD makes clear that “it will be acting solely in its own interests and not in the interests of the Mobile Wireless Community” by retaining all .mobile domains for its own use if ICANN delegates .mobile to Amazon, CTIA said. Allowing that to happen would “impact hundreds (if not thousands) of companies who are currently engaged in providing mobile products and services by limiting their ability to engage with consumers,” the objection continued. Delegating the closed .mobile to Amazon would be an “unwarranted expansion of exclusionary rights” and would create a situation where Amazon “will automatically put competitors at a disadvantage by capturing direct navigation and online search requests,” CTIA said.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission’s telecom deregulation order is now final, given all appeals are dealt with one way or another, according to the latest filing in that docket from the Colorado State Department (http://bit.ly/13XQ6Cu). The PUC adopted the order, which calls for rulings of effective competition throughout the state and for cuts to high-cost support, initially in December, and dealt with two rounds of appeals this year. The order’s e-filed with the secretary of state for publication March 25 to be effective April 14.
NAB sought more time for TV stations to comply with coming FCC rules for putting information on crawls during emergency programming onto the secondary audio stream. The rules for the secondary audio program (SAP) channel are being put in place so that that textual information could be read aloud in video descriptions designed for those with vision problems. Broadcasters with SAP should have three years to comply after the order appears in the Federal Register, NAB executives told an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. All other stations should have three and a half years, said a filing Wednesday in docket 12-107 (http://bit.ly/ZbXw0j). A draft Media Bureau order awaiting a commissioner vote would give all stations two years (CD March 12 p3). The agency should update its rules so school closings, changes in school-bus schedules and other “non-imminent weather conditions and alerts” don’t need to go on the SAP channel, NAB said. The draft gives stations some leeway so they don’t need to repeat as secondary audio every time such information is broadcast in a crawl, agency officials told us.
The FCC cited two providers of automatically dialed calls for making millions of “robocalls” to wireless phones without authorization. Dialing Services and Richard Gilmore, doing business as Democratic Dialing, face “significant monetary penalties” if violations continue, Enforcement Bureau Chief Michele Ellison said in a news release. Robocalls to wireless phones and pagers are permitted under the Communications Act and FCC rules only if made in an emergency or when customers give prior consent, the FCC noted (http://bit.ly/YegEvm). “The citations require each company to certify within fifteen calendar days that it has ceased making robocalls to wireless phones without prior authorization, and that the calls it makes include the required identifications,” the FCC said. “Issuance of citations is the required first step before the FCC could impose fines of up to $4.8 million for the particular violations at issue in the citations.” Both companies have been under investigation since last year, according to FCC documents.
Assurance Wireless started service in Missouri Friday, it said (http://yhoo.it/Wli87T). The Lifeline program provider pointed to the 195,000 Missourians lacking employment and more than 23 percent who live below the federal poverty line, when describing the virtues of the program. Assurance Wireless is a division of Virgin Mobile, part of Sprint Nextel.
CEA should “bring an end to its misguided campaign to avoid implementing closed captioning functionality on removable media players,” said five groups representing the hearing-impaired and a program at a university that teaches such people. The plea came in a letter to the FCC on the association’s Feb. 26 filing (http://bit.ly/WtbCuD) on CEA’s request for the agency to redo Internet Protocol captioning rules so some consumer electronics like stand-alone DVD players don’t fall under them. Instead of pursuing that attempt to change last year’s IP captioning order, the association should “turn to the task of ensuring that all consumers who purchase removable media players and discs can experience the benefits of video programming on equal terms,” the groups said in docket 11-154 (http://bit.ly/Z3Ywk5). “The history of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act supports the Commission’s decision to cover removable media players under Section 203(a) and undermines CEA’s arguments about the cost of adding closed captioning functionality to such players.” The 1990 law also was opposed by CEA’s predecessor, the Electronic Industries Alliance, said the Association of Late-Deafened Adults, National Association of the Deaf, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Gallaudet University’s Technology Access Program and others. “EIA’s fears that closed captioning functionality would send the price of television sets spiraling out of control never materialized.” A few years after passage of the act, EIA “abandoned its public opposition” to captioning functionality on TV sets, said the groups, which also include the Cerebral Palsy and Deaf Organization and Deaf Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network. CEA, in a filing also posted Friday in the docket, asked the commission to approve the association’s petition for reconsideration of the IP captioning rules. That’s “because some of the issues raised in the proceeding on emergency information and video description are related” to the petition, executives at Samsung and the association told aides to all FCC members (http://bit.ly/WlkiEk).
The FCC International Bureau dismissed applications from ViaSat for its ViaSat-2 and ViaSat-3 satellites. ViaSat wanted the planned satellites, which operate under the authority of the U.K., to access the U.S. at different orbital locations, the bureau said in separate orders. ViaSat should indicate whether it has obtained launch and space operations licenses for the ViaSat-3 satellite under the U.K. Outer Space Act, the bureau said (http://bit.ly/ZupXpC). ViaSat “did not include the numerical data and power flux density levels for each of the space station’s beams” as required, it said. ViaSat seeks to operate ViaSat-2 at 69.9 degrees west, an orbital location that isn’t available for Ka-band commercial operations in the U.S., the bureau said (http://bit.ly/ZuqMP6). The bureau also denied Hispamar’s request to add the Amazonas-3 satellite to the Ka-band permitted list. Hispamar intended to operate the satellite at 61 degrees west, it said (http://bit.ly/Z3JYkt). A 2004 public notice lists 60 degrees west as “unavailable” and further states that “orbital locations that are less than two degrees away from a location listed as ‘unavailable’ are also unavailable for U.S. operations."
CEA President Gary Shapiro urged lawmakers in a statement last week to pass the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act as a means to promote innovation and deter abusive patent litigation. The bill, which was introduced by Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., late last month, would force any plaintiff who the court designates a “patent troll” to pay all costs and attorney’s fees associated with a patent infringement lawsuit if the plaintiff loses the case. “Many small businesses and startups, including some of our members, cannot afford to fight or continue to get funding for their business when faced with abusive patent litigation from so-called ‘patent trolls,'” Shapiro said. The bill will “help keep the patent trolls beneath the proverbial bridge and prevent them from serving as roadblocks to economic growth and continued innovation.” Members of the House Judiciary IP Subcommittee debated the ability of the SHIELD Act to address patent litigation abuse during a hearing held Thursday.