Samsung was the top handset manufacturer in the U.S. during the three-month period ending in October, comScore said Friday in a market report. Samsung had a 26.3 percent market share for the period, up from 25.6 percent during the period ending in July, comScore said. Apple was in second place at 17.8 percent for the October report, up from 16.3 percent in July; LG was third with 17.6 percent, Motorola was fourth with 11 percent and HTC was fifth with 6 percent, comScore said. Google’s Android remained the leading smartphone platform in the U.S. for the October report, with 53.6 percent of subscribers; Apple remained in second place with 34.3 percent, while Research In Motion remained in third, comScore said. The firm said it surveyed 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers to get the market report results (http://xrl.us/bn39fy).
The problems of cyberthreat information sharing are “going to take awhile to solve because [they're] not simple,” said Roberta Stempfley, deputy chief information officer and vice director for strategic planning at the Department of Homeland Security, during a panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Thursday. Internet users need to be better educated on what constitutes cyberthreat information and what to do with it, she said. Robert Pate, vice president-cybersecurity solutions at SAIC, said companies run into threat information sharing problems when interacting with classified information. Enterprises would be “significantly more protected” if they had the ability “to combine the open source threat information [with] the classified threat information,” he said. Chris Folk, program director of cybersecurity and communications at MITRE, disagreed, saying MITRE can “rely on the information within the partnerships that we already have.”
Sprint Nextel extended the deadline for filing a proxy statement related to its deal to sell its majority control to SoftBank. The two companies said late Thursday they were extending the deadline to file a registration statement on Form S-4 to Dec. 21; the original deadline was Thursday. SoftBank reached a deal in October to buy 70 percent of Sprint for $20.1 billion cash (CD Oct 16 p1). Sprint will send its proxy statement to its shareholders once the Securities and Exchange Commission declares the registration statement effective, the carrier said (http://xrl.us/bn39d6). The extension could be a precursor for a Sprint counteroffer on MetroPCS, Guggenheim Partners analyst Shing Yin said Friday in a note to investors. Deutsche Telekom is in the process of getting regulatory approval for its proposed merger of T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS, which has thus far received little opposition in FCC filings (CD Nov 28 p5).
The Copyright Office extended its orphan-works comment deadline to Feb. 4 and reply comments to March 6. The original deadlines were Jan. 4 and Feb. 4. “Due to the number and complexity of the issues raised in that Notice, it appears that some stakeholders may need additional time to respond,” the office said in a Federal Register notice Friday (http://xrl.us/bn39ee). In the proceeding, the office asked for suggestions about the viability of previously considered systems for making legal use of orphan works, and also about the definition and legal framework for mass digitization of orphan works.
Democrats stand to gain at least one seat on the House Commerce Committee after GOP losses in the 2012 election tilted only slightly the balance of the committee in the next Congress. Though Republicans still maintain a 33-seat advantage in the House, voters gave Democrats eight new seats in the next Congress, enough to narrow the Republican majority in some committees. In total, six of the 31 House Commerce Republicans will depart at the end of the year and Democrats will lose four of their 23 current committee members. Last week Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., named five new Republican members for the next Congress: Reps. Gus Bilirakis of Florida; Renee Ellmers of North Carolina; Ralph Hall of Texas; Bill Johnson of Ohio; and Billy Long of Missouri. The majority lost a pair of California committee members, Brian Bilbray and Mary Bono Mack, in the November elections and Charles Bass lost his New Hampshire race to Ann McLane Kuster, a Democratic lawyer. Three other Republican seats on House Commerce were vacated when Sue Myrick of North Carolina announced her retirement, while Cliff Stearns of Florida and John Sullivan of Oklahoma lost their primary races earlier this year. The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee will appoint members in December to fill any vacant and new committee seats, a minority spokeswoman said. The members will be subsequently approved by the Democratic Caucus and officially named to the committee. The steering committee will also appoint and the caucus will then approve the House Commerce ranking member, the spokeswoman said, saying there’s “no reason” that Henry Waxman, D-Calif., won’t be selected to stay on as ranking member for the next session. The four Democrats who will not return next session are the retiring Edolphus Towns of New York, Mike Ross of Arkansas and Jay Inslee, who announced his retirement in March to run for Washington governor. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin retired from the House and won the Senate seat held by the retiring Herb Kohl, D-Wis.
TDS Telecom is nearly done with a Michigan broadband project, with 125 miles of fiber cabling and 29 cabinets, designed to protect electronic equipment, installed. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act helped fund TDS’s work in Chatham, Mich., where 96 percent of TDS customers can now sign up for high-speed Internet, the telco said Thursday (http://xrl.us/bn39an). The stimulus-funded area near Au Train should be done by summer, TDS added. Stimulus grants have helped TDS improve its broadband in 20 states, it said.
Don’t feel sorry for me for being incarcerated for about 20 years, feel sorry for my grandmother who often had to hang up from speaking to me mid-call because of high prison phone rates, said the grandson of Martha Wright. Wright’s petition (http://xrl.us/bn389d) to the FCC to reduce such rates is the subject of a rulemaking notice that’s circulating (CD Nov 16 p13). Her grandson Ulandis Forte, who said he was released this year from jail, spoke Friday at a Rainbow/Push Coalition telecom conference. “This is a cash cow for local sheriffs,” said coalition President Jesse Jackson. “We're asking all carriers to take a position with us against exploitation."
Two Texas Public Utility Commission proceedings still actively target Halo Wireless, liquidated more than four months ago. Several telcos have demanded judgment and relief from what they deem to be Halo’s avoidance of access charges. Several state commissions have ruled against Halo on this count (CD Aug 2 p8). Halo’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy “Trustee is unlikely to supply a brief, however, and this means the Petitioners will likely be the only ‘party’ to provide briefing,” said Matthew Henry, former counsel to Halo, in a Thursday briefing (http://xrl.us/bn386z). His firm no longer represents Halo, but he argued that there have been “several significant misstatements and misrepresentations” in Texas and that Halo deserves “fuller commentary.” The two Texas proceedings are redundant as well as off the mark, he said. He clarified several points he believed were distorted and said the proceeding, on a former interconnection agreement, “must be dismissed” without any relief granted because the PUC lacks jurisdiction and there are no longer any agreements. Several petitioners want “a ruling as to whether access is due on Halo’s traffic to perfect their claims as to the amounts Halo owes them,” as they said Thursday in that same proceeding (http://xrl.us/bn387f). In a second complaint proceeding, many of the same companies have continued to stall on account of the first proceeding and asked Wednesday to delay a status report deadline from Nov. 28 to Jan. 9. Judgment on the first proceeding “may substantially resolve the issues pending in this matter” and they want to wait until that’s done, they said (http://xrl.us/bn387m). Henry, however, insists any “finding of liability for intercarrier compensation payments” must be found in that complaint proceeding and not the one on the defunct agreement.
Nearly three dozen new reports of numbering misuse were submitted to the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau the week of Nov. 26 in the run-up to the World Conference on International Telecommunications, we've learned. Preparatory discussions had identified numbering misuse as an area the conference could address. The reports detail artificial inflation of traffic, fraud, misrouting of traffic and other problems associated with a variety of numbering ranges. The apparent misuse came from the U.K., Aruba, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Latvia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Maldives, Belarus, Somalia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Austria, Bulgaria, Cuba and others. The reports were submitted by Canada, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, India, Malta, Turkey, Andorra and Switzerland.
KRBK Osage Beach, Mo., wants interference protection for its distributed transmission system, as that DTS facility was being built out when the Spectrum Act became law Feb. 22, the TV station told the FCC. In any repacking of TV channels as part of an incentive auction of broadcast spectrum, the DTS facilities “should be preserved in terms of coverage area and population served,” a filing posted Thursday to docket 12-268 said (http://xrl.us/bn382r). KRBK knows of no other such situation where a DTS system being built out when the spectrum legislation became law later was licensed, its lawyers told FCC incentive auction task force head Gary Epstein and officials from the Media Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology.