T-Mobile US said it added more than 1 million net customers during Q3, including the addition of 648,000 net postpaid subscribers, largely because of its “Uncarrier” strategy (http://bit.ly/HDyu6S). T-Mobile has sought to distance itself this year from its fellow wireless carriers by doing away with annual contracts and allowing more frequent smartphone upgrades. The carrier also began offering fee-free international data use and text messaging to its subscribers Oct. 31 (CD Oct 11 p16). The Uncarrier strategy “is resonating with customers because we are fixing the things that drive customers crazy,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said Tuesday in a statement. Legere also attributed the growth to its buy of MetroPCS. T-Mobile’s revenue rose to $6.7 billion in Q3, from $4.9 billion during the same period last year.
Frontier responded to several challenges of census blocks where it proposed to deploy Connect America Fund money. Comcast made a “sweeping” and “unsupported” declaration that 2,217 census blocks in price cap carriers’ CAF elections are ineligible because Comcast serves those areas, but Comcast failed to produce an adequate certification and provided no additional information “beyond conclusory statements,” Frontier said in its Monday filing (http://bit.ly/186r8Pu). Frontier said it lacked sufficient information to make “informed rebuttals” in several circumstances. “Regardless of the outcome of the challenge process, it is now clear that the majority of census blocks for which Frontier sought funding were not implicated in the challenge process,” Frontier said. “The Commission should immediately release the funds associated with the census blocks for which no challenges have been filed.”
Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning will testify Thursday at the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee’s hearing on the impact of demand letters sent by patent assertion entities, the Senate Commerce Committee said Tuesday. Bruning is known for his attempts to use his state’s competition law to prosecute PAEs for sending demand letters. Others set to testify are Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler, Application Developers Alliance President Jon Potter, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Julie Samuels, BrandsMart USA Executive Vice President Larry Sinewitz and George Mason University School of Law professor Adam Mossoff. The hearing will also focus on whether legislation is needed to protect small businesses, consumers and innovators targeted by the letters (CD Nov 4 p15).
CEA and Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI) differ at the FCC on whether device manufacturers should be required to make products that synchronize closed captions with video delivered over the Internet and DVD and Blu-ray players that render captions, according to comments filed in docket 11-154 (http://bit.ly/1bWbMzp). A manufacturer requirement is the last step to making sure every link in the supply chain of closed captions is held responsible for making them work, said TDI. Video programming distributors are already required to maintain timing data, and the commission has an open proceeding on quality standards for TV closed captions. “The Commission should complete the chain of accountability for synchronization problems by requiring apparatuses to render captions according to the timing data included with video,” said TDI. “If every step of the delivery chain is covered by a synchronization requirement, consumers will finally be able to seek remedies when problems occur.” CEA said such rules would improperly assign the blame for caption sync problems to manufacturers. “A synchronization requirement for apparatus would implicitly assume that consumer devices somehow introduce synchronization issues into caption decoding, but CEA is unaware of any such behavior,” said CEA. If the commission does pass a rule, it should require devices to render captions according to the timing data included with the video programming, said CEA. “This ‘do no harm’ standard would mean that if a device receives properly captioned content, then it would have to appropriately decode and display, or pass through, the content and captions.” Improperly timed captions wouldn’t function on such devices, CEA said. “Viewing media with unsynchronized captions is as disruptive for a viewer who is deaf or hard of hearing as watching media with an unsynchronized audio track is for a hearing viewer,” said TDI. The consumer group said caption rules for removable media players are necessary because such devices are increasingly reliant on HDMI connections. “Because the current HDMI standard does not support the pass-through of caption data, captions cannot be viewed using an HDMI-only player if the player does not render the captions,” said TDI. However, CEA said DVD and Blu-ray already support subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, and therefore already comply with the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. “Because streamed media is increasingly prominent in the consumer marketplace, additional regulations on removable media players will simply raise costs for consumers and hasten the decline of removable media technology,” said CEA. The association and copy protection company Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator both also argued against a proposal in the FNPRM that would require removable media players to include an analog connection to properly display captions.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler must “stay the course and ensure parity in broadband services throughout the country, regardless of the geography,” One Country Connected Executive Director Mark Rubin said in a statement Tuesday. The organization, which advocates on behalf of rural Americans, urged Wheeler to build on the successes of Phase I of the Connect America Fund and “stay committed to the second round of funding” that will bring broadband to “hundreds of thousands of rural Americans."
Two law professors defended the constitutionality of appointing a constitutional advocate to participate before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Georgetown University Law Center Professor Marty Lederman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, and American University Washington College of Law Professor Steve Vladeck, a co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, outlined their arguments in a Just Security blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/1b1Yx0a). They responded to an Oct. 25 Congressional Research Service report (http://bit.ly/17KJKrV), prepared for members of Congress, examining the constitutionality of such a FISC advocate, a position which has been proposed in multiple bills to change surveillance law this year. “The concept of a public advocate is a novel one for the American legal system, and, consequently the proposal raises several difficult questions of constitutional law,” that report said. But “as long as Congress provides that such an advocate would be merely another lawyer participating in proceedings before the FISA Court and FISA Court of Review (either as an amicus or as a representative of third parties), such a reform should not raise any new constitutional concerns, at least so long as the advocate is not afforded a statutory right on her own behalf to appeal FISC decisions,” Lederman and Vladeck argued.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., now co-sponsors the USA Freedom Act, written by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and House Judiciary Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and introduced in late October. HR-3361 and S-1599 has more than 100 co-sponsors in the House and Senate and would end the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Wyden in September introduced a similar bill with Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Udall and Blumenthal previously came out as co-sponsors of the USA Freedom Act, but Wyden was silent. “As written this bill will also make these vital reforms, and now that the Senate Intelligence Committee has decided to preserve surveillance business-as-usual, Chairman Leahy’s legislation is now our best hope for reform in this Congress,” said Wyden in a written statement Tuesday. “I urge everyone who has supported Senators Udall, Paul, Blumenthal and myself in our efforts to lend their support to Chairman Leahy as he works to advance the USA FREEDOM Act.” Wyden said Leahy is also now a co-sponsor of Wyden’s Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act, which he reiterated “sets the bar for real, meaningful reforms to surveillance law.” Wyden also wants to keep working with Paul to “ensure that law-abiding Americans who have been harmed by intrusive government surveillance programs have an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of these programs in court,” he said. Changes to surveillance law will require bipartisan support and should take advantage of every stage of “procedural opportunity” to move forward, Wyden told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday. He said this focus is taking place in Congress now. Wyden described “the tech community really rallying” behind the push for surveillance law updates, an outspokenness that Wyden judged unusual compared to times past. Wyden, a Senate Intelligence Committee member, fought unsuccessfully to integrate changes into a legislative proposal that cleared Senate Intelligence last week (CD Nov 4 p10). Observers have said the proposals of Wyden and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are at odds with that Senate Intelligence bill, called the FISA Improvements Act, and “far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform,” Wyden said after its committee clearance.
Comments are due Nov. 27 on the FCC’s proposed revisions to the Form 499 annual and quarterly Telecommunications Reporting Worksheet, said a notice in the Federal Register Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/186pOff). The annual form will be used in 2014 to report 2013 revenue, and the quarterly form will be used in 2014 to report projected collected revenue on a quarterly basis, the notice said.
House Judiciary Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., will keynote at a Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law and National Security Law Society event Nov. 19. Sensenbrenner wrote the USA Freedom Act. The event will include a panel with Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt, former National Security Agency General Counsel Matthew Olsen, Electronic Privacy Information Center President Marc Rotenberg and American Civil Liberties Union Center for Democracy Director Jameel Jaffer. The event will be 9:30 a.m. to noon in Georgetown University Law Center’s Hart Auditorium. Sensenbrenner is working with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on his surveillance law overhaul. Leahy advocated for surveillance law changes at a similar Georgetown event in September.
Instagram video generates six times more mobile traffic than Twitter’s Vine video service, and Facebook drives “substantially less traffic” on Android than on Apple iOS devices, according to the new Citrix Mobile Analytics Report for Q4 (http://bit.ly/1iKdJ4A). Vine, which allows users to post six-second videos, was released in January. Instagram followed in June by allowing users to post 15-second videos. Videos now are 15 to 30 percent of all Instagram data traffic on mobile networks, according to a release about the report (http://bit.ly/HykECx). On Android devices, three mobile apps -- media player, mobile browser and Google Play -- account for 83 percent of all mobile data volume. On Apple’s iOS devices, four apps drive a comparable 82 percent of all mobile data volume: media player, Safari, App Store and Facebook. “At a macro level, the report findings reflect not just the worldwide proliferation of smartphones but the pervasive nature of mobile video in everyday life and commerce,” said Mark Davis, Citrix senior director-product marketing.