Softbank’s purchase of 70 percent of Sprint Nextel “should be fine in Washington,” said Guggenheim Partners’ Washington Research Group Wednesday in an analyst note. “With no loss of wireless competition -- and with Sprint strengthened financially -- this deal seems highly likely to win” FCC and Department of Justice clearance, Guggenheim analyst Paul Gallant said in the note. Softbank announced Monday it had a deal to buy control of Sprint Nextel for $20.1 billion (CD Oct 16 p1). Foreign ownership is also unlikely to be an issue, Gallant said, though he said he would not be surprised if Congress decided to hold hearings on the issue. “In some ways Softbank should be an easier sell because [Deutsche Telekom] was partly owned by the German government, whereas Softbank is privately owned,” Gallant said. If Softbank’s purchase is finalized, it could make any Sprint attempt to buy T-Mobile USA more difficult. “We suspect Sprint and T-Mobile will now have a harder time arguing that they need a merger to compete against [Verizon Wireless] and AT&T,” Gallant said. “The argument for the merger probably gets incrementally harder if Sprint ends up acquiring Clearwire or gains wireless capacity from Dish, and if T-Mobile buys Leap (and/or acquires spectrum from Dish).” The odds of such a deal clearing regulatory hurdles are such a “close call in our mind that it might well turn on whether [President Barack] Obama or [Gov. Mitt] Romney wins the election,” he said, saying the odds may also depend on what conditions regulators place on the merger. If Sprint does acquire Clearwire or spectrum from Dish, it would improve AT&T and Verizon Wireless’s chances of acquiring additional broadcast spectrum since Sprint would be less likely to make its own bid at a future auction, Gallant said.
Investors should expect TV station groups to report strong earnings in Q3 as the Summer Olympics and political ad sales helped revenue, Benchmark analyst Edward Atorino wrote in a note. “We expect growth accelerated in Q3 and will continue over the balance of the year,” he wrote. “Broadcasting stocks have shown substantial appreciation in recent months, but remain well below historical levels,” he said. “Despite the challenging outlook for 2013,” the long-term growth prospects for TV operators are “favorable” with much of the growth coming from high-margin retransmission consent and digital revenue lines, he said.
Oceus Networks opened a new 15,000-square-foot facility in The Colony, Texas, the 4G LTE broadband networking solutions company said Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnuqe6). The new facility “handles manufacturing, staging and shipping of communications solutions for customer engagements” and will be its global customer service center, Oceus said. CEO Randy Fuerst said the company already had a Plano office.
With the changing landscape in how media services are delivered to consumers, satellite operators must figure out the role they want to play, said Edward Horowitz, ViviSat chairman. The industry must figure out “what’s next for our business,” he said at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event Tuesday. There are more than 1.3 billion smartphones in circulation, he said. “As a consequence, there’s a massive attack on satellite television broadband frequencies by terrestrial operators and regulators that are looking to feed the voracious appetites of the handheld networks.” This continued shift to serving the untethered customer “is providing opportunities for satellite operators to expand outside of their traditional swim lanes,” he said. Direct-to-home continues to evolve around the world, he said. Dish Network’s ad-skipping feature, the Hopper, and DirecTV’s Whole-Home recording service are “changing the in-home viewing experience,” he said. Due to the distribution of increasingly more untethered devices, “I think the industry has the potential to redefine itself,” Horowitz said. The commercial satellite industry must lead the government to buy its services, he added: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “don’t have a problem issuing multi-year contracts for services … Why is it that DOD [Department of Defense] cannot?” Industry must help DOD figure it out, he said. Horowitz urged the satellite industry to engage in expanding over-the-top services: “How do we bring Google and Yahoo and Netflix and Twitter somehow into the satellite world?”
Starting Saturday, some Californians with a 408 area code will need to start dialing more numbers to make their calls, the California Public Utilities Commission said Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnup9n). “Last year, the CPUC approved an all-services overlay that added a new 669 area code to the same geographic region as the existing 408 area code in order to provide additional telephone numbers to meet increasing consumer demand.” The change won’t affect cellphone customers, the CPUC said. Now, wireline customers in the 408 area code region, primarily in Santa Clara County, need to enter “1” plus the area code and seven-digit number, the CPUC said. Those callers who fail to do so will fail to complete their calls, it said. Calls made to 911, 311, and other three-digit public numbers can still be made as currently, the CPUC added. It advised people to ensure certain equipment is updated with the new dialing procedure and pointed to life safety systems, fax machines, Internet dial-up numbers, alarm and security systems, speed dialers, gates, mobile phone contact lists, call forwarding settings and voicemail services that may be programmed with numbers. The CPUC approved the overlay exactly one year prior to the new dialing procedure’s start date, said its advisory site on the area code (http://xrl.us/bnup9x).
The FCC should update its rules to account for Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology and the broadband capabilities it makes possible, TelePacific, a business Internet, phone and data service provider told an aide to FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell Friday (http://xrl.us/bnup8y). The telco has made “substantial investments” in deploying EoC, but it needs regulatory certainty to continue making such investments, it said. EoC gives TelePacific the ability to deliver broadband speeds of 10 to 50 Mbps over bare copper loops, and lets it use existing plant instead of digging up streets to install new fiber, it said. EoC has the potential to “increase broadband adoption rates where price is the primary reason for lack of adoption,” but under current rules, “if an ILEC retires the copper feeder TelePacific uses,” it is “not clear that TelePacific is permitted to object,” the telco said.
Best Buy violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) when it made a series of robocalls to its customers, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnup6d). A customer filed a class action suit against the company after it autodialed him and others to provide information on the number of purchases required to remain in its “Reward Zone” program. The customer was registered on the National Do Not Call Registry. Best Buy had argued its calls were “purely informational courtesy calls” permitted by the TCPA. The U.S. District Court in Seattle granted summary judgment for Best Buy, but the court of appeals said Best Buy’s calls seemed to be “dual purpose” calls -- those with both an informational and a marketing component -- prohibited by the TCPA. “These calls were aimed at encouraging listeners to engage in future commercial transactions with Best Buy to purchase its goods,” the court wrote. “They constituted unsolicited advertisements, telephone solicitations, and telemarketing, and were prohibited by the TCPA, the [Washington Automatic Dialing and Announcing Device Act], and the [Washington Consumer Protection Act].” A Best Buy spokeswoman declined to comment.
Connect2Compete said it will help Comcast get affordable computer equipment to low-income would-be broadband subscribers. Through the partnership, Comcast will offer its Internet Essentials customers an opportunity to buy a $150 refurbished computer through Redemtech.
The FCC Wireless Bureau scheduled an educational workshop for Tuesday on the Section 106 process for construction of new communications towers and collocation of communications gear on other structures. The workshop is in the Commission Meeting Room, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern. It “will provide guidance to its licensees and their consultants, and for those who construct communications facilities for FCC licensees, on the Section 106 process required by the National Historic Preservation Act and by the Nationwide Programmatic Agreement for Review of Effects on Historic Properties for Certain Undertakings Approved by the Federal Communications Commission,” the bureau said (http://xrl.us/bnup6w). “Among the topics to be discussed are improvements to the submittal of documentation to the FCC, State Historic Preservation Offices, and to Indian Tribes. A particular focus will be the effects of communications projects on historic and Tribal landscapes and on Tribal religious and cultural properties.”
Spending on big data will account for $28 billion of IT spending across the world in 2012 and $34 billion in 2013, technology research and advisory firm Gartner projected (http://xrl.us/bnup9c) based on a company report (http://xrl.us/bnup9g). The use of big data will continue to grow such that by 2020, predicted Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner, “big data will once again become ‘just data’ ... architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this ‘new normal’ will be retired.” Companies that do not adapt “will suffer severe economic impacts,” he said.