A bill that would zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CD July 18 p14) starting in FY 2015 was approved Wednesday by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services. The subcommittee’s funding bill for FY 2013 was approved 8-6, a House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman said. The bill rescinds $111.3 million of CPB’s 2013 funding and its $222.5 million advanced appropriation for FY 2014, it said. The bill includes $150 billion in discretionary funding and also includes provisions to stop the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and cuts to labor, health and education programs, the subcommittee said. The legislation “represents a clear step toward returning to fiscal responsibility, while still ensuring that funding for critical and high-priority programs are maintained,” Subcommittee Chairman Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., said in opening statements. Public broadcasting has a fight on its hands, said Pat Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations. “We thought we had made a pretty good case with the chairman and his office, so to see this severe set of cuts was quite an unpleasant surprise for us.” Some progress has been made “with respect to restoring bipartisan consensus in favor of public broadcasting,” Butler said: But “there are still too many people who'd like to see funding go away."
Wireless booster maker Wireless Extenders disagrees with some of the proposed requirements in a joint industry proposal on booster standards, Wi-Ex representatives said in meetings at the FCC (http://xrl.us/bnhcf8). The proposal was endorsed by Nextivity, T-Mobile, V-COMM, Verizon Wireless and Wilson Electronics (CD June 28 p17). “Wi-Ex disagrees with the registration requirement in the Joint Proposal that consumer boosters be registered prior to operation,” the company said. “While details on how such a requirement would be imposed in practice are scarce, Wi-Ex opposes the proposed registration requirement.” Wi-Ex also “strongly opposes a scenario, advanced by AT&T for example, under which consumer signal boosters that meet the requirements set forth in any eventual technical safeguards established in this proceeding nevertheless have to be approved or certified on a carrier-by-carrier basis,” the filing said. Wi-Ex describes itself as a pioneer in the “sub-$500 consumer signal booster market.”
Canada’s Cogeco Cable said it agreed to buy the U.S.’s Atlantic Broadband, with about 252,000 basic-video customers in Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland and South Carolina. “This acquisition marks an attractive entry point into the U.S. market for Cogeco Cable,” said CEO Louis Audet. “There are sizeable opportunities for growth including increasing the penetration of the small- and mid-sized business segment, and maximizing the bundling potential of services in the residential sector.” The deal values Atlantic at about $1.36 billion, Cogeco said.
Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., are “pro-taxers” who are “trying to avoid a debate on the merits” of an e-commerce sales tax bill by adding it as an amendment to the Small Business Jobs and Tax Relief Act, the Institute for Policy Innovation said Wednesday. The amendment amounts to proposing a “tax increase” in a bill “claiming to reduce taxes,” the group said. The Marketplace Fairness Act, whose House version is to be taken up Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee, inevitably “involves trampling on Supreme Court precedent” that prevents states from taxing an entity without a “presence” in the state, said IPI Policy Counsel Bartlett Cleland in an email blast (http://bit.ly/LXNkGc). States don’t need to fix a presumed “loophole,” which is actually “firm (and re-affirmed) constitutional law,” because their tax receipts rose by an average 8.9 percent in the fiscal year ended June 2011, he said, citing April 2012 Census Bureau figures.
Comcast said it’s using advanced network diagnostics tools it calls the “Network Scout” to identify and sometimes repair signal impairments in its network. “We're extremely proud of the development of the Scout tool,” Patrick O'Hare, senior vice president-field engineering and technical operations, wrote on the company’s blog (http://xrl.us/bnhcfm). The system uses end-of-line checkpoints in more than 40 million deployed set-top boxes and cable modems to find problems.
The FCC proposed a $10,000 fine against Equity Communications for failing to enclose the antenna structure of WCMC(AM) Wildwood, N.J., with a locked fence, an Enforcement Bureau notice of apparent liability released Wednesday said (http://xrl.us/bnhcff).
A California state judge won’t block AT&T from building out 726 metal cabinets in San Francisco with telecom equipment that foes said the city shouldn’t have approved. “The undisputed record evidence is that the cabinets at issue here are small structures,” Judge Teri Jackson of Superior Court in the city wrote last week on the case by San Francisco Beautiful and other neighborhood groups against San Francisco. She lifted a stay another judge issued in the case in November. The city was right to find the 9-square-feet cabinets won’t have a significant impact on the community’s aesthetics, she wrote in an order last week. The order affirming the Board of Supervisors’ support for “AT&T’s investment in our community,” a company spokesman said. “San Francisco residents will finally have a choice in digital TV, high speed internet, and voice services."
TV stations again aired more local news than ever in 2011, the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) said (http://xrl.us/bnhcet). The average TV station devoted an average of five hours and 18 minutes to news during weekdays last year, RTDNA and Hofstra University found in a survey of stations. The amount of news the average radio station aired in 2011 was about the same as in 2010, the survey found.
AT&T Vice President Joan Marsh questioned conclusions in a report by lower 700 MHz block licensees analyzing the relative impact of Channel 51 and E block signals on Band 12 and Band 17 devices, filed at the FCC last week (CD July 16 p10). “The lengthy report claims to show that Band 12 LTE devices are unlikely to experience interference levels high enough to translate to reduced performance in a 700 MHz B and C block LTE deployment like that being completed by AT&T,” Marsh wrote (http://xrl.us/bnhcee). “While we have not yet had a chance to fully review the submission, even a cursory review of the report raises significant credibility issues for both the testing methodology employed and the field results submitted.” Among them is that the report is based on field tests using Band 12 devices in Waterloo, Iowa, even though the nearest Channel 51 transmitter “located about 30 miles away from Waterloo proper, and the drive route used for the testing was largely in the surrounding countryside even farther from the Channel 51 tower,” she said. “It is not surprising that Channel 51 transmissions originating up to 40 or 50 miles away would have little or no measurable impact on the performance of a Band 12 device -- at that distance the Channel 51 signal is simply too weak to cause a strong interfering reverse intermodulation product."
The National Weather Service is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get more emergency coordinators authorized to use its non-weather emergency message (NWEM) system, said Chief Michael Szkil of NWS’s Climate, Water and Weather Services awareness branch. Such alerts, about emergencies such as earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions, would then be passed on to the NWS radio and wire services, he said on a FEMA webinar Wednesday. The service’s HazCollect system is another way to distribute emergency alerts through the integrated public alert and warning system, in addition to the emergency alert system and the commercial mobile alert system.