Journalists, “troubled that the FCC may now move forward with a vote on relaxing media ownership rules” (CD Dec 13 p23) before examining the impact on minorities and women, asked the agency to first do studies. The commission should “properly analyze the information for an honest and complete assessment of minority and female media ownership and the potential impact of rule changes on these ownership levels,” Unity Journalists wrote in a filing posted Wednesday to docket 09-182 (http://xrl.us/bn6a6e). Media Bureau data released last month on Form 323 ownership filings “confirms the embarrassingly low level of broadcast ownership diversity in the country,” wrote the group of 10,000 journalists that represents the Asian American Journalists Association, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Native American Journalists Association (http://xrl.us/bn6a7h).
There will be more than 1 billion users of over-the-top (OTT) mobile VoIP services by 2017, Juniper Research said Thursday in a report. The firm said its forecast signals a “dramatic shift” in how voice traffic will be carried over the next five years. Improvements in network technology, increased competition and telcos’ efforts to move into the OTT space will converge to give the mobile VoIP market a “second wind,” Juniper said, though the firm noted that just as with Skype, only a small proportion of mobile VoIP users will pay for the service after this shift. “Many subscribers sign up to an OTT service without ever planning to pay a cent for it, and some industry players do not have a short-term revenue model at all,” said Anthony Cox, the report’s author, in a news release. The arrival of 4G is giving users an additional incentive for telcos to take up mobile VoIP, though that will also mean an accelerated decline in overall voice revenue, Juniper said (http://xrl.us/bn6az4).
Software-defined networking (SDN) will be the catalyst for enabling more flexible, scalable and intelligent networks in the future, research firm Ovum said Thursday in a new report. SDN will replace traditional network hierarchies that are struggling to keep pace with increasingly dynamic applications and services, Ovum said. The current three-tier hierarchy -- access, aggregation and core -- is being phased out; SDN’s flatter architecture, virtualized application software and more programmable network infrastructure are taking its place, Ovum said. “SDN provides an opportunity to completely reexamine network architectures, introduce virtualization, and provide truly innovative solutions,” said David Krozier, principal analyst on Ovum’s network infrastructure telecoms team, in a news release. SDN’s emergence shows the focus of networking has shifted from the “feeds and speeds of the data plane to the intelligence inherent in the control plane and related network services,” Ovum said.
Joe L. Allbritton, 87, whose company owns eight ABC-affiliated stations including WJLA Washington, and a D.C.-area cable news channel that was among the first of its kind and which he helped start in 1991, died Wednesday in Houston. After making his mark, and money, in banking, in 1974 Allbritton bought The Washington Star and sold it four years later to comply with FCC cross-ownership rules. He’s survived by wife Barbara, son Robert who is CEO of Allbritton Communications, and two grandchildren.
Britons lead the world in using the latest TV technology, including accessing TV online and owning smart televisions and digital video recorders, the U.K. Office of Communications said Thursday in an international communications market report (http://xrl.us/bn59vp). The report compared the U.K. with France, Germany, Italy, the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China. U.K. consumers are most likely to access TV over the Internet, with 23 percent of Internet users claiming to do it every week, driven by the popularity of catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, it said. The U.S., where 17 percent of Internet users said they access TV content online, came second. But despite the increase in online TV availability, scheduled linear TV remains popular, with minutes of viewing per person up among most of the countries surveyed, Ofcom said. Italy and the U.S. led the list, with the U.K. third, it said. By the end of 2011, 99 percent of U.K. homes had digital TV, surpassed only by Spain, whose digital switchover is now complete. Satellite TV was the largest platform in the U.K. (44 percent), while terrestrial TV was the main platform in 38 percent of TV homes, it said. Value-added services such as digital video recorders and high definition TV continue to grow, with Britain having the greatest uptake in DVRs in 2011, followed by the U.S. The U.K. also had one of the biggest percentages of TV homes with HDTV, higher than France, Germany and Japan but behind the U.S. The U.K. had the highest rate of digital radio take-up, Ofcom said. The fastest-growing radio markets are India, Brazil, Russia and China, but radio markets in Sweden, the U.S. and Germany generate the most revenue per head of population. Spending on laptop and desktop Internet advertising is highest in Britain, followed by Australia, the regulator said. The U.S. mobile Internet advertising spend grew by 2.5 times, reaching Japan’s level, it said. U.K. Internet users access the Web via laptop more than those in any other country, it said. The most searched for term online, except in Japan, Russia and China, was “facebook,” it said. In the telecom arena, U.K. users consume the most mobile data per connection, with 424 MB of data downloaded per mobile connection in 2011, it said. The U.K. is also a leader in text messaging, with the average person sending 199 SMS messages per month last year, up 17 percent from 2010 numbers. Fixed-voice revenue, however, fell in all countries, and fixed-voice call volumes dropped in all except France. Five percent of U.K. broadband connections were superfast (advertised speeds of 30 Mbps or more) by the end of 2011, it said. Other findings included that total telecom, TV, post and radio sector revenues rose 7.3 percent, reaching $2.1 trillion; and that global advertising expenditure rose nearly 4 percent, to $481 billion, the highest since 2007.
The Senate Democratic Steering Committee named Tom Carper, D-Del., as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He'll replace the retiring Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who unsuccessfully sought to advance cybersecurity legislation in the 112th Congress. Securing U.S. critical infrastructure from cyberattacks will remain a challenge that the committee will address in the coming year, Carper said in a news release Wednesday.
The FCC approved an order reforming the smallest of the four USF programs, the Rural Health Care Program, creating the new Health Care Connect Fund. The program is the last of the four to be tackled by the commission. The changes are aimed at expanding provider access to broadband especially in rural areas and encouraging the creation of state and regional broadband healthcare networks, officials said Wednesday. The order builds on lessons learned from a pilot program approved by the commission in 2008. The order also creates a pilot program slated to start in 2014, to study how the program could be expanded to optimize care for patients in skilled nursing facilities. A commission news release said the order removed “artificial limitations on technology and provider type that hampered legacy universal service health care support,” requires participants to contribute 35 percent of the costs “increasing fiscal responsibility” and supports broadband services “purchased from diverse communications providers, while also allowing health care providers to construct new broadband networks when that is the most cost-effective option.” Parts of the reform efforts proved controversial. Commissioner Robert McDowell would only concur with parts of the order. McDowell complained that the program rules only require that a “majority” of consortia members be rural. “While some rural health care participants may benefit by using the experts and specialists that non-rural participants can offer as members of a consortia, simply requiring a ‘majority’ of the members to be rural is insufficient,” he said. “The intended focus of this USF program should be for rural America, that is, parts of the country that typically are far from hospitals.” McDowell also said he was pleased that the program remains capped at $400 million per year. “I am not convinced that the annual demand will stay below the cap in the foreseeable future, as projected in this order,” he said. “As such it would have been more prudent for the commission to include in this order a contingency plan to allocate priorities if the program does approach the spending cap.” McDowell also opposed the new pilot for skilled nursing facilities. “We certainly shouldn’t be laying the foundation for inflating the program before assessing the effect of the other reforms we adopt today,” he said. Commissioner Ajit Pai dissented to parts of the order. Pai was also concerned about the new pilot program. “The order recognizes that, ‘on this record,’ this program may not comply with Section 254 of the Communications Act,” he said. “That provision directs us to support ‘health care providers,’ and yet the order reaches ‘no conclusion about whether or under what circumstances a [skilled nursing facility] might qualify as a healthcare provider under the statute.’ It’s also fair to say that we have not had the chance to assess how the reforms we implement today will work on the ground and how much the new Health Care Connect Fund will cost.” Pai also questioned budget caps in the order. “The order defers hard decisions about enforcing these caps,” he said. “This leaves in place the current first-come-first-served system. As a result, everyone who submits an application will get fully funded, until one day, they won’t.” But Commissioner Mignon Clyburn was more enthusiastic. “This marks the fourth tine under the leadership of Chairman [Julius] Genachowski that the FCC has voted to reform a Universal Service Fund program as recommended by the National Broadband Plan.”
Proposed FCC rules covering cable operators’ signal quality and signal leakage for digital cable systems are unnecessary and should not be adopted, Verizon said in response to a notice of proposed rulemaking on the subject (CD Aug 6 p10). The NPRM’s proposals run counter to the president’s directive against adopting unnecessary regulation, Verizon said (http://xrl.us/bn54z4). Though the FCC was right to recognize that rules written for analog cable systems are outdated, “it is inappropriate to adopt rules for digital cable simply because rules may have once made sense in the context of monopoly cable operators using analog technology,” Verizon said. The NTCA and the Organization for the Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies also questioned the need for new rules. “Rather than applying legacy rules designed for earlier systems and a less competitive marketplace to new technologies, the Associations respectfully question whether specific rules are even necessary for” pay-TV operators that aren’t using traditional quadrature amplitude modulation technology, they said (http://xrl.us/bn542i). Though complying with signal leakage rules that protect aeronautical safety remains an important goal, “burdensome new rules are unnecessary to achieve this goal,” the NCTA said (http://xrl.us/bn542n). New FCC rules should let cable operators demonstrate compliance without requiring them to buy expensive new test equipment, the NCTA said. It supported the NPRM’s proposal to adopt the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ SCTE 40 for assessing signal quality. “The cable industry has long operated under the SCTE 40 specifications,” it said. But requiring operators to prove they comply with the specifications is unneeded, it said, citing technical and competitive reasons. The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors praised the commission for taking up the issue and proposed several additional requirements to the NPRM, related to testing and recordkeeping (http://xrl.us/bn543m).
The Senate Democratic Steering Committee (DSC) selected Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Wednesday to join the Senate Commerce Committee in the next session of Congress. He'll fill the seat vacated by Tom Udall, D-N.M., whom the DSC selected to join the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Blumenthal will strengthen the committee’s “efforts to protect consumers and bolster personal privacy,” in a news release. The former Connecticut attorney general is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and offered several bills this session to protect wireless customers and Internet users from abuse. Blumenthal is the sponsor of the Consumer Mobile Fairness Act (S-1652) and the Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act (S-1695). He also authored the Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act (S-1535), the Internet Abuse, Stalking and Domestic Violence Prevention Act (S-1923) and the Child Protection Act (S-3456).
Competition from satellite pay-TV operators has had a “minuscule impact on curbing the market power of incumbent cable operators,” Montgomery County, Md., said in an opposition to Comcast’s petition to the FCC to be let out of local rate regulation in that area. “The Commission should no longer make findings of effective competition based on DBS penetration alone,” the county said. “To do so would go against the Commission’s obligation to grant relief only when it would serve the public interest.” It urged the FCC to deny Comcast’s petition and to consider suspending its rules that allow for a finding of effective competition based solely on DBS-operator penetration. The commission took a similar step recently in suspending some special access competitive showings “because they turned out not to be accurate indicators of competitive pressures sufficient to constrain prices,” the county said.