The FCC said Tuesday that comments are due Jan. 17 on an NPRM seeking to require wireless carriers to disclose a list of towers they take out of service during emergencies. Replies are due Feb. 18 (http://bit.ly/1iAjPJS).
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is drafting legislation to fight fraudulent robocalls, she said in a press release Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/19hFsVY). “While some legitimate questions still exist around the technologies that would help prevent these scams, it’s clear that the industry does not intend to pursue such technologies or other solutions to quickly address the issue of fraudulent robocalls -- a problem that has plagued consumers for years,” she said in a statement. McCaskill has questioned USTelecom and CTIA on technologies that would help solve the problem but expressed disappointment at their responses. She discussed the concerns at a hearing on the issue earlier this year: “In the face of their inadequate approach, I will start drafting legislation to provide regulators with a robust set of tools to fight these fraudsters and start gaining back ground for American consumers against robocallers.” CTIA Vice President-Government Affairs Jot Carpenter shot back in a statement. “We understand Senator McCaskill’s desire to crack down on robocallers, but the assertion that the wireless industry isn’t doing enough to help is simply wrong,” Carpenter said. “The wireless industry has a long history of working with the FCC and FTC to investigate and stop fraudulent robocalls and we stand by our record in this area. As we pointed out both in testimony and our follow-up correspondence, wireless companies and other common carriers are prevented by law from picking and choosing which calls to deliver.” USTelecom is “disappointed” McCaskill has “chosen to ignore the in-depth analysis USTelecom provided her,” Senior Executive Vice President Alan Roth said. “We thoroughly analyzed the issues surrounding proposed technological solutions to the problem of identifying and mitigating illegal robocalls. Our response clearly demonstrated that the services marketed thus far pose various technical, legal, and public policy problems.” Industry is working to solve the problem in various ways, he said.
The FCC Wireless Bureau identified 14 complete applications out of 34 applications to bid in the H block auction next month. Each of the 20 applicants with incomplete applications will receive overnight correspondence “indicating the information that is required to make its applications complete,” the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1bgTpXd). Corrected applications must be filed by 6 p.m. ET Dec. 18, it said. PCS Partners, Teleguam Holdings and Lynch 3G Communications are among the companies which submitted incomplete applications, it said (http://bit.ly/IOx5Lo). NTelos, Triad 8, Puerto Rico Telephone Co. and others have filed complete applications (http://bit.ly/IsM8d7). With a sufficient number of bidders, the FCC confirmed that the auction will be Jan. 22, said Paul Gallant, a Guggenheim Partners analyst. The commission “is in a position to grant Dish’s request for the flexibility it wants to potentially convert its AWS-4 uplink to downlink spectrum,” he said in a research note. If Dish is granted this request by Dec. 22, then it agreed to bid about $1.6 billion i the auction (CD Nov 13 p5). “By ensuring the H block auction will happen, Dish will (if the FCC approves its waiver) lower its E block transmit power, which is a key step toward making Verizon and AT&T’s A and B blocks of spectrum more usable."
"Everything everybody thinks about clean energy is wrong,” and in “the same way that they were wrong about telecom 20 years ago, when I became the FCC chair,” said Reed Hundt, discussing what his new e-book, Zero Hour, says about building so-called clean power. Twenty years ago, many underestimated the impact of the Internet on long distance and other types of phone and telecom service, he said in an interview Wednesday. “All these statements were wrong for the exact same reason that everyone underestimates what will happen with clean energy,” in that Moore’s Law will apply to power generation too and will lower costs, said Hundt. “The power platform is where the knowledge platform was in 1993,” said the e-book (http://amzn.to/1jmDSJO). “From approximately that date, digitization, regulatory reform, and low cost capital changed the platform of all modes of information consumption in less than a decade.” Hundt, an FCC chairman under President Bill Clinton, now is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital.
The FCC’s pending media ownership proceedings don’t prevent it from intervening in Sinclair’s proposed buy of New Age Media’s TV stations, said the American Cable Association in comments filed Wednesday (bit.ly/1cbE2gy). Sinclair and other companies have argued that ACA and public interest objections to mergers raise issues that should be hashed out in larger rulemakings rather than in individual transactions (CD Oct 28 p15), but ACA said that’s not the case. “It is well established that the Commission may choose to proceed either by adjudication or rulemaking and need not tackle all instances of a problem associated with particular behavior at one time, but may choose to proceed in a deliberative fashion,” said ACA. Sinclair’s proposed deal, which includes sharing agreements with Cunningham Broadcasting in two Florida markets where Sinclair already owns stations, should be considered by the full commission because it raises “novel” issues, ACA said. The lack of “specific findings” allowing contracts that let stations coordinate retransmission consent negotiation “precisely speaks to the novelty of the issue in this transaction,” said ACA. However, ACA said it doesn’t object to sharing arrangements in general. ACA is challenging only portions of the sharing agreements that show “the contemplated posttransaction behavior of the Applicants in colluding in the sale of their retransmission consent,” said ACA. “The Applicants designed the transaction to attempt to cynically observe the letter of the Commission’s rule,” ACA said.
DirecTV invested in digital video developers LiveClips and i.TV, deepening its stake in second-screen applications, DirecTV said. The size of DirecTV’s investment in the two companies wasn’t disclosed. It has already deployed LiveClips for its NFL Sunday Ticket package. LiveClips, which raised $2.15 million from investors earlier this year, delivers real-time sports video clips to Internet-enabled and mobile devices, LiveClips said. Its video technology takes in live feeds from games and delivers searchable clips of every play to mobile devices within 10 seconds of live action, LiveClips said. LiveClips also has provided in-game video highlights for NCAA college football games, the company said. LiveClips received $1.15 million in December 2012 from Advantage Capital Partners and Ironwood Capital Connecticut, supplementing the $1 million investment made in 2011 by Amazing Grace Media, a firm headed by LiveClips CEO Lewis Bakes. I.TV, which developed a TV listings app for Apple’s store, designs and builds second-screen platforms for AOL, Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly and Nintendo. I.TV recently acquired GetGlue, the developer of a second-screen and TV check-in app that has more than 4.5 million registered users and 75 TV network partners, i.TV said. DirecTV’s investment in the two companies gives it “unique capabilities to embed in our products and the ability to influence roadmaps,” Tony Goncalves, DirecTV senior vice president of digital entertainment products, said in a statement. “In turn, these companies gain access” to DirecTV’s technology group and “subscriber scale."
Iridium and Wyless joined the International M2M Council. Other sustaining members include Orbcomm, Deutsche Telekom and Digi International, IMC said in a news release. AT&T joined the London-based group earlier this year (CD Oct 16 p16). More companies are expected to join the organization in the coming weeks, the council said.
The FCC should allow package bidding in the spectrum incentive auction if it adopts the Competitive Carriers Association’s proposal that the commission use Partial Economic Areas (PEAs) as a geographic licensing area for the auctions, AT&T said Tuesday in a filing (http://bit.ly/1cXfv0H). CCA argued that PEAs would be a beneficial midpoint between smaller Cellular Market Area licenses and larger Economic Area (EA) licenses (CD Nov 29 p17). It’s “all the more imperative” that the FCC allow package bidding if it uses PEAs as its licensing regime because it would “address the even greater exposure risks that would be created by more disaggregated license areas,” AT&T said in its filing. “As AT&T has previously shown, package bidding is necessary, even under an EA licensing regime, to avoid a bid-suppressing exposure problem that is well-recognized both in Commission precedent and in the auction literature. Shrinking the license areas only exacerbates that problem and accentuates the need for package bidding.” If the FCC doesn’t allow package bidding, “a carrier might well get stuck ‘winning’ unwanted licenses because it would have to bid separately for licenses in every geographic area within its footprint,” AT&T said.
CSG bought “key assets” of Volubill, which helps ISPs and mobile and satellite companies send bills to subscribers, said CSG in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/IEv5o3). CSG, which helps about 500 companies manage such functions, said the deal lets it “rapidly expand its charging and policy reach and expertise.” Terms weren’t disclosed,
Time Warner Cable is opening a facility in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for six days immediately before the Feb. 2 Super Bowl to show off its products and cable networks from companies including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, 21st Century Fox and Disney, said the cable operator in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1gEOykI). It said more than 25,000 of the operator’s customers are expected to visit the facility Jan. 27-Feb. 1, and there will be social media, online and video-on-demand tie-ins.