An FCC program carriage hearing was delayed a week, to start March 26 at 10 a.m., with additional days of testimony in Game Show Network v. Cablevision to begin at 9:30 a.m., the administrative law judge handling the dispute ordered. That gives him “sufficient time to rule on the parties’ objections” because other dates in the case were also changed at the request of the two companies, said the order by Chief FCC ALJ Richard Sippel that was posted Thursday in docket 12-122 (http://bit.ly/1204tqj). The Enforcement Bureau didn’t object to the plaintiff and defendant’s request (http://bit.ly/XQSzXe) for Sippel to require that trial briefs and written direct testimony be exchanged March 5, a few days later than required in a previous order by the ALJ, the new order said. GSN alleges Cablevision didn’t carry it as widely as the operator’s affiliated channels because the plaintiff’s not owned by the defendant. Cablevision contends GSN’s programming is different from that of the affiliated networks (CD Dec 15 p8).
Cloud hosting company Rackspace said it’s lowering prices for cloud bandwidth and content delivery network (CDN) services by a third, and implementing tiered pricing for cloud services, starting with the “object storage service” Cloud Files, where pricing changed Friday. Other new prices will take effect “over the next several weeks,” Rackspace said. The price for cloud and CDN bandwidth will fall from monthly charges of 18 cents per gigabyte to 12 cents. Volume discounts in tiered pricing range from 10 cents per gigabyte per month for the first terabyte, going down to 7.5 cents after that and “even lower” for storage amounts over 1024 TB, it said (http://bit.ly/158UHA2).
States may be able to receive a waiver from the matching requirements in the FirstNet State and Local Implementation Grant Program but “only in extraordinary circumstances,” NTIA Program Specialist Laura Pettus told state and local groups during a Friday webinar. She cautioned that such waivers tend to be very rare, citing two waivers granted out of roughly 230 Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grants. There’s a minimum 20 percent match expected of states as part of the grant awards. NTIA released grant application forms earlier this month and set the application deadline for March 19. She discussed details of the two-part $121.5 million implementation grants and how states can best integrate their resources and seek input from stakeholders, especially important in serving rural areas of the state. The grants are designed to be “capacity building” to allow states to build up their outreach efforts, she said. The webinar was a joint effort of NATOA, the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties.
Too-stringent intellectual property protection in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) continues to be a concern of various advocacy groups. Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge vice president-legal affairs, said in an interview Friday that he isn’t against abolishing intellectual property protections, but what’s being pushed in international trade agreements like the TPP goes beyond baseline protection. “We're seeing a much more specific type of agenda with regard to particular types of enforcement.” Siy gave the example of countries creating penalties for circumventing technological protection measures, then requiring those penalties to be a separate offense, independent of whether there is any actual intellectual property infringement. Another danger with the TPP, Siy said, is pushing intellectual property protections in an international setting, where countries can take a controversial idea at home and try to “push it in a trade agreement where there’s going to be less debate.” Speakers at a Thursday U.S. Chamber of Commerce-organized discussion said they were encouraged by the chance to spread intellectual property protections globally, especially in developing countries. TPP is also a chance for the U.S. to reclaim trade supremacy, lost to Europe and Asia in the years since 2001, said Patrick Kilbride, senior director-the Americas at the chamber. “We've seen the cost of not being competitive,” he said. TPP can change that, and “intellectual property protection is going to be critical to this.”
The FCC should do more to collect information on “the practical effects of various options” for improving “receiver performance, including consideration of small-scale pilot tests of these options,” the GAO said in a report released Friday. GAO said that in its response to the report (http://1.usa.gov/1202Jxb) the FCC described various actions under way at the agency to look more closely at receiver standards. But more may need to be done, GAO said. “We do not believe that these actions will provide information on the practical effects of options that FCC might get from a pilot test or other information-collection efforts, which, as we note in the report, will allow FCC to make more informed spectrum-management decisions,” the report said. The report was addressed to the leaders of the Senate and House commerce committees. GAO found that receiver performance is likely to remain a hot topic. “To date, there have been a limited number of instances where interference concerns driven by receiver performance have impeded a licensee’s planned use of adjacent spectrum,” GAO said. “Even so, [the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology] and FCC, among others, have recognized the growing impact of receivers on efficient spectrum use, and adjacent-band interference concerns may increase in years to come as spectrum management agencies look to allocate additional spectrum for wireless broadband and other new services in an already crowded environment.” Challenges include “the lack of coordination across industries when developing receiver standards, the lack of incentives to improve receivers, and the difficulty accommodating a changing spectrum environment,” GAO said. In December, members of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council said the group will recommend creation of a multistakeholder group to oversee voluntary receiver standards and interference limits (CD Dec 11 p2). Also last year, the FCC held a two-day workshop on receiver standards (CD March 14 p1). “The overall sense here is that something needs to be done,” FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said then. “We don’t know what that is.” Receivers include everything from TVs and radios to Wi-Fi systems, to GPS devices, to police radios.
The FCC Media Bureau denied the petition of Hampton Roads Educational Telecommunications Association to change the community of license of its WHRO-TV Hampton/Norfolk, Va. The bureau had sought comment on HRETA’s proposed modification of the license to specify Norfolk, Va.-Elizabeth City, N.C., after HRETA made the request in 2010 (CD Dec 7/10 p10). The bureau “cannot conclude that Norfolk and Elizabeth City have sufficient common interest or interdependence to warrant hyphenation,” it said in an order (http://bit.ly/Xuvive). Because there are three TV stations other than WHRO licensed to Norfolk, “we cannot conclude that Norfolk is unable to support WHRO-TV on a stand-alone basis,” it said.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau Thursday granted a petition for reconsideration by Maine, giving the state until Nov. 5 to build out communications facilities under 17 call signs. In December, the bureau notified the state it had placed the licenses under “Termination Pending” status after it failed to meet an earlier buildout deadline or to ask for a time extension. “In its Petition and extended implementation request, Maine states that it ‘is in the final stages of implementing the Maine Statewide Communications Network -- MSCommNet,’ which it describes as ‘a multi-million, multi-agency, statewide communications project,'” the order said. Maine’s arguments were sufficient to get it more time, the bureau said (http://bit.ly/159g2t1).
Globalstar urged the FCC to reject Iridium’s motion to consolidate and its petition concerning Globalstar’s request for a rulemaking to use its Big low earth orbit spectrum for terrestrial transmissions. Iridium petitioned the FCC to designate the 1616-1618.725 MHz portion of Big LEO for use by mobile satellite service systems (CD Feb 13 p14). Iridium also requested a consolidation of the petitions and one NPRM to address a re-examination of the Big LEO band. Globalstar objected at that time, saying it doesn’t intend to give its allocated spectrum to Iridium. The commission has already examined and rebalanced the Big LEO band plan “and there is no basis for revisiting these prior decisions now,” Globalstar said in its opposition filing (http://bit.ly/13aGunB). Iridium’s proposed “spectrum grab” is irrelevant to reforms “that will enable consumers to benefit from Globalstar’s proposed terrestrial low-power service,” (TLPS) it said. “Tying these proceedings together would only delay the delivery of important public interest benefits to the American public.” Iridium provides no evidence that Globalstar “no longer needs its Lower Big LEO spectrum at 1616-1618.725 and will not be harmed by the loss of this capacity,” it said. If the FCC consolidates Iridium’s proposal with Globalstar’s proposed rulemaking, “it will delay consumer access to TLPS and the various public interest benefits that this service will generate,” Globalstar said.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau approved, with conditions, a request by New Jersey’s Office of Information Technology for a waiver to permit licensing of a “deployable temporary [700 MHz] trunked repeater system” that will operate on eight 12.5 kHz narrowband interoperability channels. “Based on the particular factors presented here, we find New Jersey’s request sufficiently similar to our precedent to warrant a waiver,” the bureau said (http://fcc.us/11ZLYlH). But the bureau required, consistent with past orders, that the operations must be on a secondary basis: “i.e., the repeaters (a) must not cause interference to, and must accept interference from, any fixed base station, and its associated mobiles, operating on the narrowband interoperability channels, and (b) must not cause interference to, and must accept interference from, any mobile or portable unit operating in the ‘direct,’ i.e., unit-to-unit mode."
Correction: The International Intellectual Property Alliance asked the U.S. Trade Representative to elevate Costa Rica to USTR’s Priority Watch List and to keep Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia and Russia on that list (CD Feb 21 p14).