AT&T on Tuesday will launch pre-sales of BlackBerry’s new Z10 smartphone at $199 with a two-year contract in advance of the device’s North American launch March 22. The Z10, which was introduced in late January, has shipped in the U.K. and other markets. Based on the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which borrows from software gained in BlackBerry’s acquisition of QNX from Harman, the Z10 has a 4.2-inch display and an eight-megapixel camera that can record 1080p video. The Z10 will be BlackBerry’s first smartphone to run on AT&T’s LTE network.
SEACOM said Monday it’s upgrading its submarine cable network along Africa’s southern and eastern coasts using Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and OneControl Unified Management System. Ciena said its technology will help SEACOM meet growing capacity demands in countries like Egypt, India, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania. “Connectivity services in Africa are booming due to the growing needs of business IT users, the rise of ‘cloud’ based services, and growing requirements for the processing and storing of personal data,” said SEACOM Chief Technology Officer Claes Segelberg in a news release. “Ciena’s technology will enable us to cost-effectively scale our capacity to address this growing demand for connectivity throughout the continent.” The technology can help SEACOM deliver capacity in “very short timeframes” and allow for future increases in demand, Ciena said. SEACOM will initially use Ciena’s 40G coherent transport technology, and plans to use 100G for future upgrades (http://bit.ly/10EhrJd).
The Colorado Legislature is considering a law to limit state regulation of Internet Protocol-enabled services, titled “Internet Protocol Emerging Tech Telecom Incentives.” Similar laws have been passed in more than two dozen states, and many state lawmakers have proposed bills of this sort in 2013. “This bill clarifies that certain internet protocol-enabled services, including voice-over-internet protocol services, are exempt from regulation,” said House Bill 13-255’s latest text (http://bit.ly/ZBhfYs), introduced last week. The bill emphasizes it wouldn’t affect obligations of emergency service providers and makes clear the authority of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission that the bill doesn’t change.
There’s a new $16 million network hub coming to Wilmington, Del., said IPR International, which just signed an agreement with Delaware, McConnell Johnson Real Estate and providers Sunesys and Fibertech Networks. “IPR’s Carrier Hotel Project is dedicated to bringing a highly efficient, reliable and most importantly, competitive bandwidth interconnection point to the center of Wilmington’s business district,” the company said Monday (http://1.usa.gov/Y5fVwB).
SES, Inmarsat and Telesat urged the FCC not to use the relative number of full-time equivalent employees to allocate regulatory fee responsibility. This approach would create an unfair fee structure because “it fails to take into account the significant number of commission personnel outside the four core bureaus whose work is solely or primarily focused on a specific group of fee payers,” they said in an ex parte filing in docket 12-201 (http://bit.ly/Y59Ct5). The filing recounted meetings last week with staff from the International and Enforcement bureaus and the Office of Managing Director. They opposed Intelsat’s suggestion that non-U.S.-licensed satellite operators serving the U.S. market should pay regulatory and application fees (http://bit.ly/Yea6Mr). Foreign-licensed spacecraft, once granted U.S. market access, “do not impose significant burdens on commission resources for functions that regulatory fees were intended to cover,” the satellite companies said. Exemption of foreign-licensed satellites from regulatory fees “is also consistent with the commission’s decision not to require the ‘re-licensing’ of foreign-licensed satellites.” DirecTV stated further that under the Communications Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, changes to fee categories “must reflect changes in law and regulation, and must correspond with the number of full time employees performing specified regulatory functions” for particular classes of payers, it said in an ex parte filing about a meeting with Enforcement Bureau and OMD staff (http://bit.ly/16myX5c).
Americans should not face jail time if they choose to unlock their cellphones, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said in a statement Monday. “If a consumer is not bound by a contract, he or she should be able to unlock his or her phone,” Pai said (http://bit.ly/XjiD4a). “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as it pertains to this issue, unnecessarily restricts consumer choice and is a case of the government going too far. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: a permanent exemption from the DMCA for consumers who unlock their mobile devices. I commend the bipartisan efforts already underway to address this problem, and I hope it will be solved expeditiously.” Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and the White House raised concerns over a recent ruling by the Copyright Office limiting handset unlocking (CD March 5 p1).
The Czech Telecommunication Office last week stopped the Czech Republic’s multi-band auction for spectrum at 800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2.6 GHz because of concerns that prices were excessively high. Mark Colville, senior manager at Analysys Mason, questioned that finding in a Monday research note. Prices had reached a total of $1 billion, Colville noted. “These prices are undoubtedly high, but are they excessive?” he asked. He said those prices translate to 32 cents per MHz/POP, which he noted is not that much higher than a recent U.K. auction that brought in 22 cents per MHz/POP. “The CTO believes that high spectrum prices were likely to lead to excessive prices for consumers, particularly for 4G Internet services,” Colville said. “Whilst it is not impossible that high spectrum prices could be passed on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices, this does assume a lack of competitiveness in the market."
Privacy and consumer advocates called in a statement Monday for a simple and effective Do Not Track (DNT) option (http://bit.ly/YTZRgj). The nine groups behind the statement -- including the ACLU, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center -- said they “support the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) ongoing efforts to develop standards for how DNT should work” and “call on the [W3C] participants to agree to a standard based on respect for individuals’ fundamental privacy rights.” The groups applauded Microsoft and Mozilla for having “taken steps to meet the public demand for DNT.” But without legal or industry pressure, “it’s up to those doing the tracking to decide whether or how they will honor consumer preferences,” the groups said. The stance of some trackers to disregard DNT when it is enabled by default -- such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 -- “threatens the promise of DNT as a way to balance our right to privacy with commercial interests."
The Colorado Broadcasters Association and some of its members cautioned the FCC that the loss of a single TV translator could have a cascading, disabling effect on the other translators in a chain, they said in an ex parte filing in docket 12-268 on efforts to expand spectrum use through a broadcast spectrum incentive auction (http://bit.ly/WZpZDT). Many of the unprotected public broadcast translators and construction permits “were purchased with taxpayer dollars to build a more robust public television system,” it said during a meeting with Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and her staff. People served by these signals are going to want to know why these translators “were turned off to make room for private broadband corporations whose intentions of providing any form of free programming with their use of this spectrum is highly unlikely,” it said. The CBA also urged the FCC to undertake designated market area-specific, fact-based, public interest determinations weighing the adverse effects “which a particular ‘national’ TV spectrum reallocation goal would have on the residents served by all potentially affected LPTV [low power TV] stations and TV translators.” The CBA said it supports the return of ’tax certificates’ as a proven, effective way to accomplish the goal of easing the path for more women and minorities to own radio and TV stations. The New Mexico Broadcasters Association agreed that displacing any single TV translator could leave wide areas unserved. Preservation of TV translator service should be considered “in connection with the proposed repacking of the television spectrum,” it said in an ex parte filing also recounting a meeting with Clyburn and her staff (http://bit.ly/12xDdj8).
A new initiative by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) could be helpful as the administration moves forward on spectrum sharing, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling and U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Tom Power said in a joint blog post Monday. “Building on U.S. leadership and promoting even greater economic growth requires that the Nation make ever more efficient use of spectrum, the airwaves on which wireless services ride,” they said (http://1.usa.gov/ZzZ7hy). “Consumers are demanding more spectrum for smartphones and tablets, as are stakeholders from other sectors of the economy and society, including healthcare, transportation, and education. Many critical Government services require spectrum as well, including air traffic control systems, wireless surveillance by law enforcement, weather monitoring, and military combat training.” DARPA solicited “innovative research proposals in the area of spectrum sharing between radar and communications systems.” DARPA said in the solicitation that proposed research “should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems” (http://1.usa.gov/W1GHqh).