The FCC Wireless Bureau approved a one-year waiver of the FCC’s Jan. 1 narrowbanding deadline for First Student, a division of FirstGroup America, North America’s largest school bus operator. First Student told the FCC it has to replace 12,000 radios and reprogram 18,000, and the process is both complex and nationwide. The company said it expects to complete work on 180 of the systems it operates by the deadline, but would come up short on 279 stations. The bureau said First Student presented “sufficient facts” to meet its high standards for a waiver (http://xrl.us/bnivpf).
SafeNet and Internet2 will cooperate to offer SafeNet’s smartcards and public key infrastructure (PKI) hard tokens to colleges and universities which choose to participate, SafeNet said (http://xrl.us/bnivnd). SafeNet is an information security company, and Internet2 is a collaborative technology consortium for U.S. research and education organizations. The cards and tokens allow secure certificate storage so researchers, faculty, students and staff can access PKI-secured resources and use email signatures and email encryption, SafeNet said. The tokens and cards also allow multi-device use of cryptographic credentials, it said.
ViewSat, based in the U.K., deployed a comprehensive digital video headend based on Harmonic’s video processing solutions. ViewSat can more efficiently “allocate satellite bandwidth for its direct-to-home service, enabling the satellite provider to deliver an exceptional quality of service to subscribers located in Africa and the Middle East,” Harmonic said. Harmonic’s encoding and transcoding solutions “help to reduce cost of satellite transmission by dramatically lowering per-channel bandwidth usage,” it added.
The American PrePaid Phonecall Association completed its first draft of industry standards for prepaid phone call products. APPPA said they're designed to protect the interests of consumers by establishing a set of minimum standards for the disclosure of rates and terms. “It is important to have well thought out standards for all the details regarding how prepaid calling product providers disclose the terms, conditions and rates of their products to consumers,” said Abe Greenfield of DollarPhone, an APPPA founding member. “A lack of clear disclosure standards has been the main source of consumer concern and APPPA has now developed a detailed standard to protect consumers.” The association’s board plans to review the proposed standard at its next meeting in early August.
U.S. Department of Transportation officials discussed the importance of dedicated short range communications (DSRC) in the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), in a meeting with the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology and the Public Safety Bureau. “ITS remains a priority for the Department and its operating administrations,” said a DOT ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bnivf7). “The Department continues to invest significant resources in ITS research, testing, and other endeavors to help enable a connected transportation environment that will improve safety and mobility. Transportation safety is the top priority of the Department, and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications, which can provide driver warnings in several safety-critical scenarios, have the potential to significantly reduce vehicle crashes and fatalities (which totaled more than 32,000 in 2011). Thus, in the Department’s view, these public benefits support the continued allocation of spectrum for DSRC.” DOT officials also discussed their progress in evaluating the benefits of ITS, including a connected vehicle safety pilot model deployment, to begin this month in Ann Arbor, Mich. “This will be a major effort involving approximately three thousand vehicles, permitting the Department to collect data for one year on how ITS can help to reduce vehicle crashes,” the filing said. “The Department invited FCC staff to learn more about ITS by observing the Safety Pilot Model Deployment or by participating in a ‘hands-on’ demonstration of the technology.” DOT officials said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “has committed to a 2013 agency decision on whether the V2V safety technology (of which DSRC is a foundational element) is sufficiently developed to support rulemaking for light vehicles.”
Premature deregulation of market power in the special access market is causing anti-competitive issues for BT in the downstream global managed network services market, executives told aides to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Friday, an ex parte filing said (http://xrl.us/bnivbn). BT urged Clyburn to vote to suspend the pricing flexibility triggers, and to quickly issue the long-pending mandatory data request. The company also asked why it couldn’t obtain in the U.S. the same remedies that Verizon calls for in the U.K. market: Prices “as low as possible in order to facilitate a genuinely competitive marketplace and drive down prices for customers,” and “a clear set of remedies” for legacy and Ethernet products, it said, quoting Verizon’s business response to a call for input by the U.K. Office of Communications (http://xrl.us/bnivb7).
The FCC must urgently address statistical and data-related issues on the transparency, accuracy and predictability of regression analysis-based caps on USF support, NTCA executives told Chairman Julius Genachowski, Wireless Bureau Chief Julie Veach, and other commission officials (http://xrl.us/bniu7c). The association also urged the commission to do testing to assess the caps’ validity and volatility, and to make the results public. The objective of ensuring next-generation innovation through sustainable access to broadband throughout America “is frustrated in the absence of clear and well-tested ‘business rules’ that provide sufficient support and enable network operators to understand with a reasonable degree of certainty what investments and operations will indeed be recoverable (or unrecoverable) through USF support prospectively,” NTCA’s ex parte filing said.
The FCC temporarily let Nexstar’s WHAG-TV Hagerstown, Md., out of online political file requirements that take effect this week. “WHAG has shown that it serves -- and has served -- a smaller market ... and is not the primary network affiliate in the Washington, DC market,” said an order granting the station’s petition for a waiver from the rules. “Requiring it to meet the same implementation deadline as the top affiliates in the top 50 markets would run counter to the rationale underlying the exemption for smaller market stations and would be inconsistent with the public interest,” it said (http://xrl.us/bniqqm).
State education departments should undertake a thorough review of the costs and benefits of showing Channel One News in classrooms and encourage school districts to stop using it until such review is completed, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood wrote in letters to education officials in the 42 states where Alloy Marketing’s Channel One News is shown to students. “No other company generates revenue by compelling a captive audience of students to watch television commercials during taxpayer-funded class time,” said a letter to Alabama State Superintendent of Education Thomas Rice (http://xrl.us/bniqpc). And some schools may be exposing themselves to liability for not following the terms of their contract with Channel One, the letter said. “We ask that your office study whether schools in your state may be exposing themselves to unnecessary liability and if so, encourage them to simply end their contract, rather than violating its terms,” the letter said. Channel One News didn’t immediately comment.
Symantec backed the sponsors of the Senate Cybersecurity Act (S-3414). The legislation “strikes the right balance between improving public-private information sharing capabilities while ensuring that privacy and civil liberties remain intact and protected,” wrote Vice President Cheri McGuire. She lauded the sponsors’ decision to embrace voluntary rather than mandatory cybersecurity standards and a federal cybersecurity approach that relies on continuous monitoring and constantly evolving security. Monday’s letter went to Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Susan Collins, R-Maine, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Tom Carper, D-Del., each of whom sponsored S-3414.