Orbcomm reported total revenues of about $15.9 million for the first quarter, an increase of 101 percent from Q1 2011. Service revenues were $11.5 million compared to $7.4 million last year, the global satellite data communications company said. This 56 percent increase was due to “an increase in the number of billable units and higher usage in core service,” including revenues from automatic identification system satellite launches and the acquisitions of StarTrak Systems and PAR Logistics Management Systems. The company added 42,000 net new subscribers, including 19,000 subscribers acquired with the land mobile satellite transaction that closed in January, Orbcomm said. As of March 31, there were about 689,000 billable subscriber communicators, compared to 589,000 last year the same time, which is an annual increase of 17 percent, the company said.
Selling telecom and IT equipment may be about to get a bit harder. Cisco told analysts late Wednesday that even though its customers have said they expect to spend more on its products in the second half of the year, they are also waiting to see how the European economy and U.S. government policies take shape before committing to major purchases. Cisco’s customers are “looking to see more certainty on the global economy and in Europe and secondly, more certainty in terms of government policies that can have major impacts on their business,” Chairman John Chambers said. Cisco shares dropped 10 percent Thursday, wiping out $10.5 billion of market capitalization. Chambers said he would bet on customers meeting their promises to spend, but “you need to know that if the situation in Europe begins to get really hard, or the global environment gets softer, or some of these governments -- whether it’s India or Argentina or the U.S. or the five or six major leading countries in Europe -- don’t resolve some of the issues, then people are in this uncertain environment, and when you're uncertain, unfortunately, you don’t spend.” Cisco has a jump on its competitors in gauging the economic landscape because of the way its customers buy its products -- typically in three-month commitments -- and because its products are so widely used, Chambers said. “We can see a hiccup in state and local spending in the U.S. perhaps two or three quarters” before Cisco’s peers, he said. Chambers also briefly discussed the company’s planned $5 billion acquisition of pay-TV software vendor NDS. “Both our service provider customers and key analysts understood the value of this deal immediately when it was announced,” he said. He said he has spoken to more than 20 customers about the transaction and Cisco’s plans to move to cloud-based video delivery through its Videoscape platform. “Every one of them understands the importance of this move and the benefits it gives to them,” he said. Cisco’s sales during fiscal Q3, which ended April 28, gained 7 percent from a year earlier to $11.6 billion. Profit increased 20 percent to $2.2 billion.
The FCC Media Bureau adopted a consent decree with Media Ministries concerning its commercial radio station KLIC(AM) and KBMQ(FM), its noncommercial educational radio station, both Monroe, La. The decree said Media Ministries “will institute and maintain, for three years, a compliance plan for the stations and make a $7,500 voluntary contribution to the U.S. Treasury,” the bureau said in an order (http://xrl.us/bm639j). In April, the bureau found Media Ministries liable for failing to retain all required documentation in the public inspection file of KBMQ(FM). The bureau canceled the $10,000 notice of apparent liability and forfeiture proposed for the company (CD April 11 p13).
Cablevision said it will “vigorously defend against this preposterous FCC finding” (CD May 10 p5) that the Game Show Network made a case on its face that the cable operator favored its own channels over GSN in not carrying the independent cable channel as widely. “Once again, the FCC has revealed its inability to administer its duties, just as it has failed to address the broken retransmission consent system,” a Cablevision spokesman said Thursday. “It should be obvious to anyone that a channel showing game shows and one showing women’s-oriented programming are not comparable.” The Media Bureau Wednesday designated for a hearing by an FCC administrative law judge GSN’s program carriage complaint that Cablevision favored WE tv and the since-closed Wedding Channel (http://xrl.us/bm632g). A GSN spokesman declined to comment.
The California Technology Agency’s Office of Information Security is working with the state Emergency Management Agency to create a new “emergency function” for cybersecurity, Keith Tresh, chief information security officer, told us. That would raise the “profile of cybersecurity to the same level as other emergency situations,” he said. Cyber-related attacks and incidents are “happening at an exponentially higher rate than in previous years,” he said.
The state of Oregon cannot meet the June 1 deadline for adopting all of the Lifeline eligibility criteria required by the Lifeline Order, representatives of the Oregon Public Utility Commission and Oregon Telecommunications Association told FCC Wireline Bureau officials, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bm63rs). “Eligibility for the state Lifeline program is restricted to participation in programs specified in Oregon law. As the current law does not permit eligibility based only on income, or on participation in a few of the qualifying programs included in the Order, Oregon statutes need to be amended to align with federal Lifeline eligibility criteria,” they said. However, the Oregon Legislative Assembly won’t convene until February 2013. Comments on OPUC and OTA’s petition for a 13-month waiver of the rules are due May 15 in docket 11-42 (CD May 8 p11).
Step one rate reductions associated with intercarrier compensation reform can be implemented more easily than some prior reforms, such as the interstate local transport restructure, AT&T representatives told FCC Wireline Bureau representatives this week, an ex parte filing said (http://xrl.us/bm6ysw). AT&T has generally been able to map intrastate rates into categories that largely correspond to the interstate rate structure, they said. But some “anomalous situations,” like intrastate access rate structures that include intrastate common line charges assessed on a per-line basis, “are causing debate within the industry over the appropriate application of the Commission’s rules,” the letter said. Whether ILECs have calculated their Step 1 revenue reductions in accordance with the Commission’s rules could also impact intrastate tariff filings, AT&T said.
Several educators asked the FCC to refrain from using the E-rate program to fund its proposed Digital Literacy Pilot, in letters posted Thursday in WC docket 11-42. “I am concerned that operating the pilot through E-Rate will undermine the important and ongoing work of E-Rate, causing delays in the program’s application and appeal processes, creating auditing problems” and resulting in “problematic precedents for E-Rate’s eligible services,” three of the letters said. The letters, sent by representatives of school districts in Alaska, Ohio, Maryland and Indiana, expressed concern that funding digital literacy training would require reallocating support from basic telecom services, further straining a program that is already “over subscribed and under funded.” Representatives from the Education and Libraries Networks Coalition met with Wireline Bureau officials Thursday to encourage the commission to make digital literacy a priority, but to fund the pilot through other parts of the USF (http://xrl.us/bm6zz2). “The vastly oversubscribed E-Rate program could not afford to fund any other services no matter how meritorious,” its ex parte filing said, arguing the addition would set bad precedent of using E-rate dollars for services “not directly focused on the delivery to schools and libraries of basic conduit access to the Internet."
"It’s a big deal for the U.S. Latino community to have an English-language network dedicated to their needs,” National Hispanic Media Coalition CEO Alex Nogales said of Disney’s ABC News and Univision planning to start a joint venture to develop a new channel for Latinos (CD May 8 p14). “The majority of these Latinos speak English, and look to English-language television for news and information,” the coalition said Wednesday night.
The FCC released a “Small Entity Compliance Guide” Wednesday to help small entities comply with net neutrality rules adopted in 2010 (http://xrl.us/bm6war). The guide lays out the three main rules adopted by the commission: Mandating transparency in the form of public disclosures of network management practices; no blocking of lawful content or non-harmful services, subject to “reasonable network management”; and no unreasonable discrimination transmitting lawful network traffic, again, subject to reasonable network management.