The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a case alleging Verizon improperly reassigned a worker from the night shift to the day shift, and unfairly deprived him of overtime pay. A federal district court in New York held in 2011 that the plaintiff had failed to state an actionable claim when he complained that Verizon had improperly rotated him off the night shift, violating a collective bargaining agreement dealing with determining eligibility of future overtime work. In August, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal. “It is undisputed” that the Communication Workers of America “did not attempt to exhaust the three-step grievance procedure or arbitration remedy available under the [collective bargaining agreement],” the circuit court wrote. The plaintiff did not prove that the union breached its duty of fair representation, and therefore the plaintiff’s challenge against Verizon correctly fails, the court said.
Sensio Technologies is in talks with additional device makers to support its 3DGO! on-demand 3D movie service, Chris Saito, the service’s general manager, told us Monday. It’s too soon to name any of the companies, he said. Only select Vizio 3D TVs in the U.S. will offer the service at launch this month, via an app. But Sensio is hoping to get its service offered on more TVs, as well as via set-top boxes and “hopefully” through videogame consoles, said Saito. Sensio will offer 3D content from Disney on the service as part of a new content license deal, Sensio said earlier Monday. The Disney content will be available on compatible CE devices in the U.S. starting on an unspecified date this month when the much-delayed service finally arrives, according to Sensio. Initially, more than 20 Disney 3D on-demand titles, including animated classics and live-action adventure movies, will be made available, Sensio said. The titles will include Brave and Frankenweenie, Sensio said in a news release. Coming Disney titles will include Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and his live-action Alice in Wonderland, Monsters, Inc., all three Toy Story animated features, Tangled, Up, Chicken Little, Tron: Legacy, Meet the Robinsons, the Robert Zemeckis animated movie A Christmas Carol, Finding Nemo, G-Force and Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, according to Sensio’s website. Sensio is “more determined than ever to realize our promise to address the lack of 3D content to the home and to support” its Hi-Fi 3D technology customers with “the best library of 3D content in the market,” CEO Nicholas Routhier said in the news release. The company is “looking forward to the next few months, as more content providers will join us in this effort,” he said. Sensio is now hoping to start its several-times-delayed service in mid-March with “around 50” titles from all content providers, said Saito. The delay had “nothing to do with us,” he said. Sensio was waiting for Vizio to make a needed “firmware upgrade” to its TVs, he said. Vizio didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Hi-Fi 3D is a “frame-compatible” technology that Sensio said provides “high-fidelity stereoscopic images using conventional 2D channels.” The technology currently is being deployed in passive 3D TVs, but can be modified for use in active-shutter TVs as well, said Saito.
Any FCC waiver giving Vonage direct access to numbering resources should provide “sufficient scope and certainty that other providers will have incentives to negotiate agreements to interconnect and exchange traffic with Vonage on an” Internet Protocol basis, it told an aide to Chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/14lQAOC). It said such a waiver will “foster the success of efforts to establish IP interconnection arrangements that allow the provision of higher quality and less costly service."
Purple wants a 30-day waiver of a new rule requiring that IP Captioned Telephone Service equipment have a default setting of “captions off,” it told the FCC Friday (http://bit.ly/XGSvwx). It will take that long for Purple to complete its software upgrade to meet the FCC’s new requirements, it said. It’s seeking the waiver only for service provided through Cisco IP phones. Thereafter, Purple wants a waiver related to the installation of those software upgrades in enterprise IT environments where customers are using Cisco IP phones. “Upon receipt of the new default-off requirements ... I immediately started work on developing specifications for the upgrade,” said an attached statement of Purple’s director of R&D. But the complexity of Cisco’s phone software means that Purple will be unable to install the new software until around April 1, he said.
Sorenson’s ongoing practice of requiring non-competition agreements for its Video Relay Service interpreters for a year after leaving the firm “is contrary to the public interest and should be declared void as against public policy,” Purple Communications told the FCC in a letter sent Friday (http://bit.ly/ZXQ9JT). Artificially removing interpreters from the labor pool harms competing providers and ultimately consumers, said Purple, which competes with Sorenson in providing services to those with hearing impairments. Eventually “the public in general” is harmed by having to pay higher interexchange telephone service rates to subsidize VRS service, Purple said. It’s been “directly impacted” by Sorenson’s restrictions, unable to hire interpreters who were “fearful” of “the economic or legal risks posed by the noncompetition provisions” of their Sorenson employment, Purple said. The commission should “expeditiously bar such covenants as a way of decreasing VRS costs, improving service quality and promoting competition,” Purple said.
The FCC should proceed cautiously in establishing a more elaborate Connect America Fund Phase I support program because it was designed to be only a limited, interim program to be used until the Phase II cost model could be worked out, the American Cable Association told Wireline Bureau officials Wednesday (http://bit.ly/13AY989). The commission should change the rules only if it has evidence they are “so restrictive or arbitrary” that they do not meet the objectives for the program, ACA said. The commission need not increase the amount of support per location, or establish a new second-mile fiber component to the program, ACA said. ACA proposed that price cap LECs first be required to serve lower-cost unserved locations with up to 768 downstream/200 upstream kbps, before deploying broadband to areas that see less than 4/1 Mbps broadband. “Under ACA’s proposal each price cap LEC will now have more than a sufficient number of lower cost unserved locations,” the association said. ACA also cautioned about ILECs that might game the system by returning support they accepted in 2012, and then reclaiming the support in 2013 for use “under more lenient amended rules."
Time Warner Cable asked the FCC to let it out of basic regulation in a dozen Kentucky communities, two petitions for special relief show (http://bit.ly/ZXR0dj, http://bit.ly/W0r5SA). The cable operator said it is subject to effective competition in those areas either from satellite providers or Cincinnati Bell.
The Central Illinois Regional Broadband Network will go live Aug. 1, according to a blog post from Broadband Illinois (http://bit.ly/15tUJCv). Illinois State University is helping coordinate the network, and schools are receiving service proposals now, but with rates not public yet, it said. The network is looking toward 109 organizations for service, a planned 241 sites in 19 communities and six counties, it said.
Recent acquisitions should make Sinclair Broadcast Group’s stock more valuable, Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker wrote in a note to investors. “What we really like about these transactions is their accretion,” she said, referring to the fact that they will boost the company’s gross earnings and not change its debt profile. We like SBGI’s scale, leverage and opportunistic approach to M&A and anticipate there is more to come,” she said. Sinclair’s stock gained 7.2 percent to close at $17.00 Monday.
More smartphones than feature phones are expected to ship globally in 2013, which would be a mobile phone industry first, said International Data Corp. Monday. Phone vendors will ship 918.6 million smartphones this year, or 50.1 percent of total mobile phone shipments globally, IDC said. Smartphone prices have fallen globally and “the roll-out of data-centric” 4G wireless networks are major factors that have made the devices so appealing to consumers, it said. By the end of 2017, IDC forecasts 1.5 billion smartphones will be shipped globally, which “equates to just over two-thirds of the total mobile phone forecast for the year,” it said. To date, much of the world’s smartphone shipments were from demand in “mature economies” including the U.S., it said. “The balance of smartphone demand is gradually shifting, however, to emerging markets where smartphone user bases are still relatively small and economic prospects are considerably higher,” it said. Smartphone shipments to China, Brazil, and India will make up a growing percentage of shipment volume in each forecast year, it said. China, which passed the U.S. last year as the global leader in smartphone shipments, is “at the forefront of this shift,” it said. China’s share of the global smartphone market will be “diluted somewhat as more smartphones are shipped to India, Brazil, and other emerging markets,” it said.