Rules extending outage reporting requirements to interconnected VoIP services will be effective Dec. 16, according to an FCC public notice (http://xrl.us/bn5bnj). The rules, adopted in February (CD Feb 16 p10), impose rules similar to those that already apply to legacy systems, are limited to the complete outage of a company’s own interconnected VoIP services, and don’t contemplate broadband reporting.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski asked the Federal Aviation Administration Thursday to “enable” wider inflight use of tablets, e-readers and other portable electronic devices “consistent with public safety.” Genachowski sent FAA Administrator Michael Huerta a brief letter saying the FAA inquiry “comes at a time of tremendous innovation, as mobile devices are increasingly interwoven in our daily lives.” The FAA is looking at whether to drop requirements on commercial flights that all personal electronic devices be powered off during takeoff and landing.
With TiVo having the edge in a recent claims construction in an infringement suit against Motorola Mobility, it may make sense for Google to buy TiVo to resolve the case, Janney Capital analyst Tony Wible said in a note to clients. With Google potentially positioning Motorola Mobility for a sale, the set-top supplier “would be attractive” with TiVo software and have an edge on rival Cisco, Wible said. TiVo also sued Cisco for allegedly infringing its time-warp patent that allows for recording of one program while watching another. An outright purchase of TiVo by Google “may be one of the only cost effective ways to part with the Motorola unit and resolve current litigation,” Wible said. Motorola could face damages of $720 million -- TiVo has put it at $1 billion -- if the DVR developer prevails at a trial scheduled to start in May, Wible said. Wible’s damage estimate was based on TiVo being awarded 50 cents a month on 20 million installed cable set-tops over a six-year period, he said. In a recent claims construction hearing, TiVo prevailed on 81 percent of its claims, while 5 percent went to Motorola and another 14 percent were split, Wible said.
Technical problems required KVIA-TV El Paso and KESQ-TV Palm Springs, Calif., to seek waivers of an upcoming deadline to comply with commercial loudness mitigation rules, FCC filings said (http://xrl.us/bn462b, http://xrl.us/bn462h). The stations ordered the necessary equipment and had it delivered, but “unforeseeable and complicated technical issues that have arisen” from integrating the new equipment with existing technology have made the stations unable to meet the Dec. 13 compliance deadline, letters from their attorney said.
The FCC should reject the Communications Workers of America’s calls for conditions guarding against job loss if the agency approves the T-Mobile/MetroPCS deal, Deutsche Telekom said in a filing at the commission. T-Mobile, which will absorb MetroPCS, while keeping the brand alive, also signed the filing. “As detailed in the Public Interest Statement, the proposed transaction will generate numerous public interest benefits for customers of T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS, as well as for wireless consumers as a whole,” said the joint opposition. “The proposed combination will bring together two companies that presently face significant challenges and will create a stronger carrier better positioned to compete effectively against the other ‘nationwide’ carriers as a result of expanded scale, spectrum and financial resources. By maintaining the MetroPCS brand and extending it to new areas, Newco also will be well positioned as the country’s leading value carrier.” CWA was the lone party raising objections to the transaction, though the union didn’t ask that it be rejected, per se (CD Nov 28 p5). If approved, the new company will have “sufficient spectrum to deploy at least 20 x 20 MHz LTE in many areas and will be better able to challenge its larger rivals for premium users,” the filing said.
AT&T and Akamai said they will partner to deliver content delivery network (CDN) solutions to companies. The two companies will initially focus their efforts on North America, but plan to expand within the next 12 months, AT&T said Thursday. As part of the deal, Akamai will deploy its CDN servers at the edge of AT&T’s IP network and in AT&T’s U.S. facilities. AT&T said it will transfer its own CDN operations -- as well as its customers and services -- to Akamai in 2013. The companies will also share resources on technical support, customer care, marketing and professional services support, AT&T said. The combined CDN suite will help end customers by providing “more efficient content routing and better delivery of digital content, video and Web applications, resulting in a better end-user experience,” AT&T said (http://xrl.us/bn462d).
Maine gave FairPoint its $32 million E911 contract, the telco said Thursday (http://xrl.us/bn46zi). FairPoint will supply and maintain the system for the state’s 26 911 centers, making Maine “one of the first states in the nation to deploy a Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG 9-1-1) system compliant with the National Emergency Number Association standards,” said FairPoint. The system will “link voice, data and video elements to E9-1-1 call facilities,” “transfer data seamlessly” and “provide the capability to read text messages and view video when the industry standards are developed,” said Vice President Karen Romano in a statement.
Western Pacific Broadcast asked the FCC Media Bureau to order Atlantic Broadband to carry its WACP Atlantic City station on Atlantic’s Philadelphia-area cable systems through Dec. 31, 2014. Atlantic Broadband never responded to the station’s must-carry election letters in June 2012, the complaint said (http://xrl.us/bn46zg). A spokesperson for Atlantic didn’t immediately respond to our query.
There were a “few areas of success” after nearly a week of work on the future International Telecommunication Regulations, said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation at the Dubai World Conference on International Telecommunications, in a Thursday press briefing. Kramer sees progress on the “overall wording of the preamble” of the future ITRs and also an “agreement on the definition of telecommunication.” But he acknowledged there might still be people “talking about ICT,” a concept the U.S. is rejecting for potential confusion between pure infrastructure providers and companies involved in processing or even VoIP providers like Skype. Kramer said: “If there is a dispute, we need to go back to the fundamental of the treaty,” which is “How do we advance broadband and the telecom infrastructure?” No consensus has emerged on whether the ITRs should address recognized operating agencies -- public network providers like AT&T or Verizon -- or operating agencies, including private Internet providers and government network providers. “That issue has [more] left to be worked on,” he said. While a lot of time was spent in bilateral meetings talking through this issue, Kramer said “we are not keen to get in any discussions about the Russian proposal because we think it is out of scope.” Russia proposed an Internet-related chapter. He called a short-time outage of one of the ITU websites Wednesday a helpful reminder of the need to solve the growing cybersecurity issues by cooperation of a variety of organizations. Cybersecurity was not supported as a topic in the ITRs, he said, out of the concern that what was a “seemingly harmless proposal” could develop into a situation where the monitoring of traffic and content would get governments into “making judgments about that content.” At the official press briefing of the ITU earlier Thursday, Joshua Peprah, director of the National Communications Authority of Ghana, said the ad hoc group working on Article 6, the charging and accounting schemes, would work Friday and Saturday and bring back potential results Monday.