The Interoperability Alliance is being formed to press for an interoperability mandate for the lower 700 MHz band. The group plans a briefing for congressional staff and reporters Monday on Capitol Hill. Rural Cellular Association President Steve Berry and representatives of Sprint Nextel and U.S. Cellular are scheduled to speak, along with former FCC official Paul Kolodzy, who directed the agency’s Spectrum Policy Task Force. “In the age of technological innovation our day-to-day lives are increasingly tied to our mobile devices and our ability to access a working network,” the alliance said in a news release. “Every user of the over 325 million mobile users in the United States relies upon wireless services to communicate, conduct commerce, and to keep us safe -- but before they can communicate with one another, their devices must work across multiple networks. The interoperability of mobile devices from network to network is critical to fulfill the promise of next-generation 4G/LTE wireless services, and also to ensure that every American enjoys those economic, innovative and public safety benefits -- not just those in our biggest of cities.”
Globalstar’s Lasso Technologies introduced what it called an innovative satellite interface which allows easy and affordable access to the Globalstar satellite network for remote machine-to-machine monitoring applications. The interface provides Globalstar smartone simplex device connectivity “to a variety of external sensors and devices,” Globalstar said. The capability to acquire data from remotely located sensors and transmit that information through the Globalstar network “gives enterprise customers the ability to make decisions based upon real-time actionable information,” it added.
The House Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing to examine the national security threats posed by Chinese telecommunications firms, it said Thursday. The Sept. 13 hearing will be held at 10 a.m. in Room HVC-210 of the U.S. Capitol. Witnesses will include representatives from Huawei and ZTE, the committee said. Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., have been investigating the extent to which these companies provide the Chinese government an opportunity for increased foreign espionage, threaten critical infrastructure, and further the opportunity for Chinese economic espionage (CD Nov 18 p5).
Rural Cellular Association President Steve Berry discussed his group’s support for “policies that will promote increased wireless competition and deliver benefits to consumers, including in rural areas,” in a meeting Tuesday with Chairman Julius Genachowski and FCC staff. “RCA expressed support for the FCC’s forthcoming Mobile Spectrum Holdings rulemaking and encouraged the FCC to ensure competitive access to usable spectrum,” the group said in an ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bnontx). “RCA also discussed the critical need to ensure interoperability in the Lower 700 MHz band and encouraged the FCC to complete its rulemaking before the end of this year. Finally, RCA discussed its support for the availability of data roaming on commercially reasonable terms. RCA expressed its interest in exploring market-based solutions wherever possible to address these and other vital public policy objectives, while noting that Commission involvement is necessary at this stage to avoid the need for more intrusive regulatory intervention down the road."
The FCC downplayed online video services’ impact in a report to Congress earlier this summer about competition in the video market (CD July 23 p6), a critic of regulation and the agency said Thursday. Online video was “for the first time a major focus of the Video Report,” wrote fellow Seth Cooper of the Free State Foundation (http://xrl.us/bnontt). “But despite a mountain of evidence in the FCC’s Video Report showing that the video market is ‘effectively competitive,’ the FCC refuses to declare it so.” The document “fit[s] with the FCC’s pattern of ignoring or downplaying the competitive effect of cross-platform competition and close substitutes,” Cooper wrote of online video. “Video services will continue to be regulated under 1990s analog-era assumptions about cable monopolies that have no continuing basis in reality."
Intelsat entered an agreement with Eastern Space Systems Romania to provide satellite capacity for a new video multiplex platform designed to serve Central and Eastern Europe. Intelsat will deliver Ku-band capacity at 1 degree west for the new service offering, Intelsat said in a news release Thursday. It said the deal will help ESS address the increasingly strong demand for video programming in Central and Eastern Europe.
Comments on TiVo’s request for a waiver of FCC open home networking standards for all two-way HD set-top boxes, for the company’s boxes that cable operators lease to their subscribers, are due in docket 12-230 on Sept. 21, replies Oct. 1. That’s according to a commission notice in Thursday’s Federal Register (http://xrl.us/bnonq2). TiVo in July sought an exemption of the rule that takes effect Dec. 1, until at least a year after operators deploy at least 100,000 each of Cisco and Google’s Motorola set-tops boxes with such an output (CD July 27 p22).
SES plans to begin SES Broadband, a satellite broadband service, in November, the company said Thursday. The service will offer download speeds of up to 2 Mbps, SES said. It reached a cooperation agreement with Gilat Satellite Technologies and Newtec “to set up the hub infrastructure and to deliver the end-user terminals for the Ka-band service to its customers,” it said. Gilat Satellite Networks will support the service by providing its very small aperture terminal Aries, which will allow European households “to benefit from considerably faster speeds for satellite consumer services, enabling Internet, video and VoIP service,” Gilat said.
CTIA filed at the FCC a paper by Recon Analytics titled The Wireless Industry: The Essential Engine of US Economic Growth. “This paper reiterates what we have said time and time again that spectrum fuels the wireless industry,” CTIA said (http://xrl.us/bnonjm). “The goal of bringing 300 MHz of spectrum over the next several years will ’supercharge’ the economy. As this paper demonstrates this new spectrum holds the promise of delivering: a $166 billion increase in US GDP, at least 350,000 new U.S. jobs, an additional $23.4 billion in government revenues, a $96.2 billion increase in wireless service provider revenues, a $22 billion increase in wireless device revenues and a $13.1 billion increase in wireless applications and content sales."
Frontier provided the FCC with updated information on specific locations targeted for broadband deployment using its Phase I Connect America Fund money (http://xrl.us/bnoixn). Frontier received $72 million to deploy broadband to unserved areas (CD April 26 p1). Frontier is in the process of reevaluating the specific locations to which it will deploy broadband, and will continue to update its deployment data until final location information is due in July, it said. “Frontier remains committed to deployment of broadband to the 92,877 households” it pledged to connect, the telco said.