Friday’s FCC meeting starts at 10 a.m., an hour earlier than planned, and one less item will be voted on, commission spokespeople said (http://xrl.us/bm45rf). A rulemaking notice on letting noncommercial educational stations air fundraisers for third parties, such as charities, was approved on circulation, a Media Bureau spokeswoman said. An order (CD April 23 p10) allowing TV stations to share the spectrum now used by each broadcaster and scheduled to be voted on Friday adopts some FCC proposals that aren’t controversial, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake told an industry luncheon Wednesday. The other media order still scheduled for a vote at the meeting is on requiring TV stations to post their public-inspection files online. (See report below.)
Sprint Nextel questioned the effect on backhaul and Wi-Fi of various commercial agreements between Verizon Wireless and cable operators, announced concurrent with Verizon’s agreement to buy AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and Cox. Sprint reported on a meeting with various FCC officials (http://xrl.us/bm45ot). ILECs and the cable operators “control the only two wired ecosystems in most areas of the nation,” Sprint said. “As a result, they have natural incentives to be spirited competitors.” But the commercial agreements “could negatively affect these incentives, especially in the provision of backhaul services to wireless carriers, by eliminating the Cable Companies as future providers,” Sprint said. “The Sprint representatives also pointed out that Verizon and the Cable Companies could leverage their legacy control over the wired ecosystems to disadvantage Sprint and other wireless carriers through restrictions on access to wide-area Wi-Fi networks."
Element Mobile reached a $248,000 settlement with Wisconsin regulators over consumer complaints, according to the state Consumer Protection Bureau (CBP). The company took over service from Alltel Wireless in eight central and northern Wisconsin counties in January 2011 after Verizon Wireless acquired Alltel. The CPB said the agency was soon swamped with customer complaints over call quality, roaming charges, text messages and voicemail. Element Mobile had said it had some problems but that it was nothing out of the ordinary for a new service. Under the settlement, customers who paid an early termination fee to get out of an Element Mobile contract may be eligible to have the fee waived or repaid. Customers who had service outages and interruptions in the first three months of 2011 may be eligible for a waiver or repayment of fees. For consumers whose accounts were referred to collections for one of the issues, Element Mobile will stop collections efforts and will contact the three major credit bureaus to delete negative information on the consumers’ credit reports caused by the collections. The company will also send the three major credit bureaus a statement explaining that the collection effort was in error and provide a copy to consumers for their records. By mid-May, CBP will contact qualifying customers to verify the amounts they may be entitled to receive under the settlement.
Verizon Wireless, the SpectrumCo partners and Cox countered arguments made by the Communications Workers of America (http://xrl.us/bm4yw6), which asked the commission to stop the clock on the review of the sale of AWS licenses from the cable companies to Verizon. CWA cited “a combination of delays in document production, the volume of documents recently produced, and the manner of production” in asking for more time. “CWA claims it was not timely provided with copies of several of Applicants’ responses to the Commission’s information and discovery requests or that it could not access those copies,” Verizon and the cable companies said in response (http://xrl.us/bm45ey). “CWA’s allegations are meritless and provide no grounds for delaying the Commission’s completion of its review of the transactions.” The filing contends, “In the few instances where CWA was delayed in accessing any of the productions, the cause lies with CWA, not with the Applicants.”
The FCC approved the transfer of AWS spectrum licenses from AT&T to T-Mobile USA, which was agreed to as part of the breakup fee when AT&T broke off an agreement to buy its smaller competitor last year (http://xrl.us/bm45dv). The transfer gives T-Mobile additional AWS spectrum in 128 cellular market areas, including 12 of the top-20 U.S. markets. “Securing this additional spectrum was a key catalyst for our plans to launch LTE in 2013 and is therefore good news for our customers,” said Neville Ray, T-Mobile chief technology officer.
The FCC should hold a “full and proper public field hearing with the full Commission in attendance” on the agency’s rulemaking proposing some media ownership deregulation, two Democratic lawmakers from Washington state wrote Chairman Julius Genachowski. “While the Commission’s practice of holding local hearings on this issue is well-established, it has yet to hold similar public hearings in the context of the 2010 media ownership proceeding.” A 2007 field hearing in Seattle “was met with considerable criticism because the Commission provided only five days notice and conducted no community outreach to encourage attendance by the public,” wrote Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Jay Inslee. “We urge you not to repeat these past mistakes and invite the full Commission to attend a Seattle hearing on this issue in early April or early May of this year.” The agency has held “a series of public workshops” including ones in California, Florida and South Carolina before a 2011 notice of inquiry in the quadrennial review was issued, Genachowski replied April 5 to the Feb. 9 letter from the lawmakers, who sit on their respective bodies’ Commerce committees. The correspondence was posted Tuesday to docket 12-2 (http://xrl.us/bm448w).
Two low-power TV stations lost interference protection. They're the first to lose Class A status since a spectrum law took effect in late February letting the FCC hold a voluntary incentive auction of TV channels that excludes regular low-power stations, which can be moved without compensation unlike Class A’s and full powers. Owen Broadcasting, licensee of WKAG Hopkinsville, Ky., and Minerva Lopez, who has KHCC Corpus Christi, Texas, didn’t respond to Media Bureau requests last year for information on missing paperwork, nor to show-cause orders this year saying they faced the loss of Class A status, the bureau said in orders Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bm445x, http://xrl.us/bm4453). Those stations’ licenses have been modified accordingly. Other Class A’s that got show-cause orders are responding to them (CD April 2 p3).
The FCC sought comment on parts of an advisory committee’s report on getting to viewers emergency information and on the capabilities of devices to get video descriptions of action scenes lacking audio captions. The Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee gave the agency on April 9 a second report about the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010. “How should these portions of the VPAAC Second Report inform our forthcoming rulemakings?” the Media and Consumer & Governmental Affairs bureaus asked in a public notice (http://xrl.us/bm443v). “The Commission is reviewing the VPAAC Second Report, which will inform certain upcoming rulemakings pursuant to the” legislation, the notice said. Comments are due in docket 12-107 on May 24, replies June 8. An earlier VPAAC report guided the commission’s order requiring broadcast and subscription video to be captioned when it goes online (CD Jan 17 p3).
ViaSat’s Ka-band satellite system was selected for Saudi Arabia’s national satellite data network. The contract is worth about $70 million and includes gateways, network operation facilities “and end user terminals to implement the services using high-capacity Ka-band capacity hosted on the Arabsat-5C satellite,” the company said. It said Arabsat and ViaSat partnered to develop Arabsat-5C “to add a 10-spot beam, high-capacity Ka-band payload."
The SES Astra Satellite System will launch two Bavarian TV free-to-air channels. The channels will use former analog capacity beginning April 30 “when broadcasters in Germany will switch off the analogue satellite signals,” SES said. The satellite system allows the channels to extend their programming from local, part-time programming to full-time programming, it said.