House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Vice Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, commended FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s recent comments about making more unlicensed spectrum available, they said Thursday in a joint news release. “We applaud Chairman Genachowski for announcing the FCC will examine the spectrum in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed devices and services, as directed by the spectrum law Congress passed last year,” Walden and Latta said. “Focusing additional unlicensed development in that spectrum, which is particularly well suited for such purposes, will enable us to maximize use of other spectrum, returned by broadcasters, for auction of wireless licenses. This approach will not only best meet our mobile broadband goals, but also maximize revenue for construction of the nationwide public safety network, another key objective of the spectrum law.” Genachowski said Wednesday during a panel at CES that the FCC will move to free up a “substantial” amount of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi (CD Jan 10 p12). He said FCC would work with Congress to make more airwaves available for Wi-Fi in that band through increased sharing with government users, including the Defense Department. Genachowski said the FCC would take up an initiative at its February meeting.
The ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF) will discuss the “multi-stakeholder model” of Internet governance and “global principles for the governance and use of the Internet.” WTPF will also explore collaboration between ITU and Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the regional Internet registries, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Society, and World Wide Web Consortium, said the ITU secretary general in a draft report for the May 14-16 meeting. One view is that the ICANN Governmental Advisory Group (GAC) “is limited by its role as an advisory body only,” the draft said. Some have noted that further integrating the GAC into multistakeholder policy development has several obstacles, including misunderstandings about the GAC as an organization of “nation state representatives,” the report said. It cited a U.K. submission to an WTPF preparatory meeting last year. Another view is that broadening the exchanges between the GAC, the ICANN board and other members of the ICANN community could overcome these misunderstandings, the report said, citing a U.S. submission to the meeting last year. There are some occasions where the ICANN board hasn’t requested GAC’s opinions or it has rejected the group’s advice, despite public policy implications of the issues under discussion, the report said, citing a document from the GAC. The secretary-general’s report aims to provide a “basis for discussion,” by incorporating the submissions of ITU government and business members, and serving “as the sole working document for the forum focusing on key issues on which it would be desirable to reach conclusions,” it said. Jan. 31 is the deadline for comments in the U.S. review.
Addressing the amount of power it takes to run data centers is an example of how the U.S. can expand the economy and tackle technological issues, two former Democratic FCC officials said. Ex-Chairman Reed Hundt and his then-Chief of Staff Blair Levin said it takes vast amounts of power to run the centers. Some estimate they account for 2 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption, Hundt said in a videotaped interview to be shown this weekend on C-SPAN’s The Communicators. The move by tech companies to put data centers in cold climates so it takes less electricity to cool them is a “stop-gap solution,” Hundt said. “In the long run, what we need is a clean-energy platform, which as the president says includes all of the above” in terms of different types of energy production, Hundt said in a discussion of The Politics of Abundance e-book by Hundt and Levin. Hundt is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, and Levin is executive director of the Gig.U project to connect universities’ communities to ultra-fast broadband. The U.S. needs “much faster networks” for genomic medicine, 4K-resolution cameras and other newer technologies to be further deployed, Levin said. His work on the 2010 FCC National Broadband Plan found many companies were worried about the amount of power data centers use, which they deemed among the “potholes in the information highway,” he said. “It is green to deliver goods and services using bandwidth and chips instead of atoms,” Levin said. “We want to do it in a sustainable way, and the United States should want to lead in how we do that."
Sirius XM Chief Financial Officer David Frear said he’s proud of his company’s 2012 performance and its 2013 performance “is reason to take another hard look at the stock.” The new year will be “relentlessly focused on improving performance,” he said this week during a webcast from the Citi Conference in Las Vegas. Sirius has gained new subscribers through introductory offers like its “freemium” promotions, he said. But more than half the people aren’t taking the service “and we keep driving at ways to make the performance better,” he said. Sirius has a competitive advantage in the car, Frear said. Sirius is working to expand its content lineup and eventually “provide a fully featured service to people that you've already hooked,” he said. The company is discussing programming deals with Fox News Channel, he said. Frear said the company is well-positioned to compete with radio over IP. “We believe in an IP-connected world,” he said. “We need to understand the technology and how our product works on that platform.” Sirius cares about the brand and content, not how people get it, he added. Dashboard integration has changed over the years and it will evolve into a better user interface in cars, Frear said. “We do expect there to be an awful lot of new apps to come into the car.” Frear also said he disagrees with the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to raise Sirius’s royalty rates to SoundExchange. The CRB imposed an increase from 8 percent of annual revenue to 9 percent of gross revenue in 2013 (CD Dec 18 p8). The rates are too high, he said: “We're the smallest user of music in the marketplace and paying the largest amount of royalties.” As a result, Sirius will increase its music recovery fee, he added. In a separate webcast at the conference, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said Sirius could be an independent company, but it won’t happen soon. “We've had this SIRI stake for quite a while,” he said. Liberty Chairman John Malone has “said someday SIRI will be an independent company,” he said. “I think he’s right in pointing out that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to happen in 2013 or [20]14 … Somewhere down the road, that'll be the way it is.” Maffei said he thinks Liberty will look harder at expanding internationally, he said. Sirius has done more in Canada and Mexico, he said: “It’s not an easy path everywhere, but where you have existing satellites and existing orbiting structure, [that] makes it a lot easier for sure.”
Intelsat requested a 30-day special temporary authority license for use of a 9.2-meter Ka-band antenna. Intelsat plans to use the STA for the antenna at its Riverside, Calif., teleport “to perform in-orbit testing of the Ka-band payload of the Amazonas-3 satellite” at 67.5 degrees west, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://xrl.us/bn983y). SES Americom requested a 60-day STA beginning Jan. 18, to use earth station E970336 to communicate with the foreign-licensed QuetzSat-1 satellite at 77.05 degrees west. The earth station will be used “to perform additional in-orbit testing and tracking, telemetry and command functions,” it said in its application (http://xrl.us/bn984t).
A broadcaster that has made several FCC must-carry complaints clarified one to ask that the Media Bureau recognize an additional pay-TV provider to face a complaint. Western Pacific Broadcast asked that its complaint, which seeks guaranteed carriage for WACP Atlantic City, N.J., on Service Electric Cablevision, add Service Electric Cable Television. Those cable operators are “related yet separate legal entities,” Western Pacific said in a clarification posted Thursday in docket 12-1 (http://xrl.us/bn985o). The broadcaster has been seeking carriage for WACP on Philadelphia-area systems (CD Jan 9 p15).
Two owners of same-market daily newspapers and radio stations want the FCC to approve a draft order that would allow new instances of such common ownership. Bonneville International and Scranton Times had “hoped that the FCC would go even further” than the draft to change “all of its outdated ownership regulations,” they said in a news release Thursday. “The potential impact of the draft order apparently would be quite modest. But we believe that, at the very least, the record before the FCC on newspaper/radio issues requires the lifting of that rule, and we hope the five commissioners will soon act on it.” The companies filed last Friday (http://xrl.us/bn9szm) what agency officials have said likely will be the last round of comments on ownership before the draft is perhaps changed and then voted on (CD Jan 8 p4).
President Barack Obama on signed HR-6671, the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act, Thursday. The legislation requires video providers to receive informed, written consent from a consumer in order to be authorized to disclose personally identifiable information to a third party. The law specifies that the consent would have to be either given at the time the disclosure is sought or given in advance for a set period of time of up to two years or until the consumer withdraws the consent, whichever is sooner. The law modernizes the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a 1988 bill which prohibits video service providers from sharing consumer video viewing practices on an ongoing basis with third parties. The videotape-era law has prevented video streaming companies like Netflix and Hulu from allowing their users to engage in so-called frictionless sharing -- that which requires one-time informed, written consent -- with social media sites like Facebook. Netflix plans to introduce new social features for its U.S. members in 2013 that give consumers “more freedom to share with friends when they want,” its spokesman said last month (CD Dec 26 p5).
The Wisconsin Public Service Commission has $90,000 in grant funding to support broadband baseline data collection in 2013, it said (http://xrl.us/bn98x8). Its application window opened Wednesday and proposals are due Jan. 30, with notifications sent to winners Feb. 25 and the grants beginning March 1. “Applicants are asked to submit proposals that will execute paper-based, mailed surveys to all nine, multi-county regions identified by LinkWISCONSIN and the State Broadband Office at the PSC,” the commission said. The data collection is intended to further “regional projects and future planning to improve broadband availability and adoption throughout the state,” the application said.
Rockrose Development Corp. will allow Verizon to install FiOS in its two properties, as the telco wants, it said. Verizon had petitioned the New York State Public Service Commission to allow entry into six Verizon-served properties, damaged by Superstorm Sandy, whose owners refused to permit their copper service from being replaced with FiOS (CD Jan 4 p12). Rockrose handles two of those properties. “In November, when Verizon initially approached us about our Lower Manhattan buildings our sole focus was on restoring full services to our tenants in the wake of Sandy -- not on introducing new options,” a Rockrose spokesman told us in a statement. “We are now in a position to welcome their proposals.” The spokesman described agreements with multiple service providers, including Verizon. The telco is attempting to confirm this newfound cooperation, a spokesman told us Wednesday night.