SBA Communications plans to buy 2,007 towers in Brazil from Brazilian wireless carrier Oi for $645 million, SBA said Wednesday. SBA will own or otherwise control more than 5,000 towers in the country following the deal’s expected close in Q1 -- about 22 percent of its total tower holdings (http://bit.ly/IEsxpW). The company in July bought exclusive rights to 2,113 towers in Brazil from Oi for $303 million (CD July 16 p10). The Grupo Oi deal “is in line with management commentary regarding further expansion into Brazil,” Evercore Partners analyst Jonathan Schildkraut said in an investor report. After the deal, SBA will get 8-10 percent of its revenue from Brazil-based towers, Schildkraut said.
The engineering/infrastructure task force of the Fast Access for Students, Teachers and Economic Results Arkansas committee submitted its recommendations to Gov. Mike Beebe (D) on how to improve broadband access to schools, in a report Tuesday. Act 1280, signed into law in April, will require Arkansas public school districts to provide at least one digital learning course to their students beginning in the 2014-2015 school year (http://bit.ly/18ma5Jz). The task force recommended the state’s network have the capacity to “provide concurrent access” to world-class educational content for all students and staff and the ability to grow and adapt to meet future demands, said the report. For the 2014-2015 school year, the task force recommends making 100 kbps available at minimum for each student and staff member and at least 1 Mbps available by the 2017-2018 school year, it said. Management for statewide network support services should be centralized, including operations for billing, E-rate applications, network recommendations/implementation/construction, network monitoring and problem resolution while the individual school districts should manage local area networks that interconnect school buildings, it said. The Arkansas Research Education Optical Network should be extended to provide connectivity to K-12 institutions, said the report.
Harris Broadcast agreed to buy Imagine Communications, a provider of digital video solutions, said Harris Broadcast and its parent company, The Gores Group, in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1jlML6m). Imagine Communications will strengthen Harris Broadcast’s end-to-end solutions portfolio by enhancing its over-the-top, mobile video and multiscreen TV Everywhere capabilities, while furthering interoperability of technology and systems in linear and nonlinear TV viewing, said the companies. Imagine’s combination of next-generation video processing, adaptive bitrate transcoding and statistical multiplexing technology provides “bandwidth efficiency and density” to meet the demand for TV Everywhere services, they said.
The Senate Commerce Committee confirmed that it plans a full committee hearing on the voluntary incentive spectrum auction, as expected (CD Dec 3 p8), on Tuesday, it said in a notice Wednesday. The hearing will take place at 2:30 p.m. in 253 Russell. The notice said the hearing will examine issues of auction implementation. Witnesses have not been announced.
Internet Broadcasting Systems signed an agreement with Hubbard Television to provide digital ad operations for its Minnesota TV stations, said the companies in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/18CyHn5). By partnering with IB, Hubbard will be able to grow its digital revenue and provide its sellers with access to a “broad spectrum” of digital ad products to “maximize” its advertisers’ outcomes, said the companies. IB will deliver nearly 30,000 ad campaigns in 2013, it said.
"Digital enterprise, in my mind, is under some stress” due to privacy concerns, said Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at the Small Business Forum hosted by The Atlantic Wednesday. “The governance of the Internet today is run by ICANN and there’s a lot of pressure globally” for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers not to govern independently, but “to be run by the U.N.,” or other multilateral organizations, which Commerce doesn’t support, she said. The Internet should be “as fluid and flexible and free as it has been,” said Pritzker. Commerce is “sitting on a treasure trove of data,” she said. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produces 19 terabytes of information daily, but only 2 terabytes are made available to the private sector for weather information, she said. The department’s job is to determine “what do we do with that data and how do we make it available,” which Pritzker described as a “long-term process.”
Lawmakers and industry stakeholders applauded NTIA’s announcement it would convene multistakeholder discussions on facial recognition technology. But some privacy advocates said the decision further avoids addressing the heart of the privacy issue. The talks are another step in implementing the White House’s Privacy Bill of Rights (http://1.usa.gov/1hwy3KA), said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling in a blog post Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/18B9klC). “Facial recognition technology has the potential to improve services for consumers, support innovation by businesses, and affect identification and authentication online and offline. However, the technology poses distinct consumer privacy challenges.” Senate Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken, D-Minn. -- who has sent a letter to the NTIA asking the agency to conduct these talks (CD Nov 25 p10) and held a hearing on the issue -- called the announcement “great news for privacy.” He said “expansive facial recognition programs” from “major companies like Facebook and government agencies like the FBI” have shown that “while facial recognition can be useful, these programs don’t do enough to protect privacy -- and they are just the beginning of what is a growing technology.” Center for Digital Democracy Executive Director Jeff Chester disagreed, saying the announcement showed the NTIA was bowing to industry pressure. “Industry lobbyists pressed the NTIA to focus on creating a self-regulatory scheme for facial recognition, so marketers can expand without worry how they capture our physical features and combine it with other personal data,” he said. NTIA scheduled its first facial recognition meeting for Feb. 6, said the announcement.
The FCC Media Bureau granted a Time Warner Cable petition Tuesday to exempt it from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices for the island of Hawaii, said a Media Bureau order (http://bit.ly/1bGRU7p). TWC’s petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. Hawaii’s Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs had objected to TWC’s petition, saying TWC didn’t face sufficient competition and challenging the cable company’s subscriber numbers. But the bureau ruled that sufficient evidence for “both prongs of the competing provider test” had been submitted, and ruled in TWC’s favor. The deregulation affects just under 66,000 households on the island.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler defended the agency’s rulemaking that may open the possibility of cellphone conversations on airplanes and emphasized the technical role of the agency. The Federal Aviation Administration decides on safety, and the airlines make the call on what to allow, Wheeler said. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, had voiced his objections in a Nov. 22 letter (http://fcc.us/1hwhhLx), joining other lawmakers who have criticized the proposal. “While the thought of listening to the constant babble of phone conversations during commercial flights already makes my head hurt, I am writing not about the annoyance such calls would bring, but rather about the more serious topic of in-flight safety,” Begich wrote. He said “an already-distracted flying public would pay even less attention to safety-related announcements. They could miss announcements related to pending turbulence, preparations for landing, or even more serious in-flight emergencies.” He cited “incidents of ‘air rage'” and asked the FCC to withdraw the NPRM, slated for consideration at the agency’s Dec. 12 meeting. Wheeler replied in a Monday letter, released Tuesday (http://fcc.us/IKjzbE). “As a frequent airline passenger, I would prefer that voice calls not be made on planes,” Wheeler told Begich. “However, the responsibility of the Commission is to make technical judgments, and on that matter the evidence appears clear. Nothing in this proposal limits the ability of airlines to ban voice conversations.” Wheeler expects “months of public comment and debate on the specific issues raised in the proposal,” if adopted, according to his letter. Airlines can even “disable the ability of devices to make voice calls should the airline so determine,” he said.
Reply comments on the NPRM for licensing models and technical requirements in the 3.5 GHz band are due March 20, the FCC said in a Federal Register notice to be published Wednesday. Replies were initially due Dec. 20 (http://bit.ly/IFj6H0). Initial comments are still due Thursday. The FCC launched the NPRM last year (CD Dec 13 p6).