The FCC’s Media Bureau is happy to have the ball back in its court in the media ownership rule review, with this Tuesday’s deadline for reply comments, bureau Chief Bill Lake said. Suggestions from some in the industry that the commission will push the rulemaking back past the general election are wrong, he said. “That is not our intent,” he said. “We want to move ahead and get this proceeding completed."
Verizon Wireless will launch its LTE network in 27 new markets and expand in 44 markets April 19, covering more than two-thirds of the U.S. population, it said. The carrier’s LTE network will be available in more than 400 markets by year-end, it said. In real-world, fully loaded network environments, 4G LTE users should experience average data rates of 5 to 12 Mbps on the downlink and 2 to 5 Mbps on the uplink, Verizon said. When customers travel outside of 4G LTE coverage areas, devices automatically connect to Verizon Wireless’s 3G network, where available.
New York City has made no real progress to date on the buildout of an early network for first responders in the 700 MHz band, the city said in a quarterly report to the FCC. “New York City officials continue to evaluate alternative funding sources,” the report said (http://xrl.us/bm37u8). “New York City has not purchased or deployed any equipment at this time related to the 700 MHz Broadband Wireless Pubic Safety Network. No site development has occurred during the reporting period.” The city received a waiver in 2010 to make early use of the spectrum, prior to launch of a proposed national network.
A New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Howard Stern Show distributor One Twelve and Stern’s agent, who claimed that Sirius XM failed to pay them program licensing compensation. The plaintiffs claimed that subscribers acquired through the merger between Sirius and XM were “Sirius subscribers” and should be calculated in the “Performance Based Compensation” that Sirius agreed to pay the show before the merger took place, said Judge Barbara Kapnick in her opinion. With the XM subscribers included, One Twelve would be owed an additional $330 million and Stern’s agent Don Buchwald would have received an additional $30 million, the opinion said: This interpretation “cannot be supported by a reading of the agreement as a whole.” It’s clear that the only subscribers considered part of the total number of Sirius subscribers used to calculate the compensation “were those individuals who subscribed to the Sirius radio system,” she said. Kapnick ruled that the only subscribers to Sirius at the time One Twelve and Sirius entered into the agreement “were those who subscribed to the Sirius satellite radio service.”
Arbitron said it introduced a software-based meter for measuring mobile device media use. The meter will give marketers, content owners, app developers and carriers access to information about how customers use their devices for social media, e-commerce and other apps. It will measure their Web-browsing habits and exposure to advertising, Arbitron said. It began recruiting in November 2011 for a panel of about 6,000 smartphone and tablet users from which it will extrapolate usage data, the company said. The Arbitron mobile trends panels service will report on the reach, frequency and consumer engagement on “all key functions and activities of their mobile devices,” whether it’s online or not, it said. Arbitron also released some preliminary findings from Q1 usage: The top five apps are Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, Pandora, and Yahoo Mail; app usage is growing faster than Web browsing; average data traffic over Wi-Fi and cellular on iPhones is about 223 MB per user per month, while the average among Android, BlackBerry and Symbian phone users is 59 MB a month; social media apps account for 11 percent of all smartphone usage and Facebook accounted for 210 minutes of the average user’s smartphone time in a month. Twitter accounted for 107 minutes of an average user’s time in a month.
The size of a proposed fine against T-Mobile for falling short of meeting FCC hearing-aid compatibility rules (CD April 17 p8), approaching $1 million, appears meant to send a clear message, Fletcher Heald lawyer Donald Evans said on the firm’s CommLaw blog. “Although the FCC points out that T-Mobile had revenues of over $21 billion in the years in question, a fine this size might be enough to get someone’s attention,” he wrote (http://xrl.us/bm37s8). Evans said the commission used a new calculation method for arriving at the size of the fine. Previously, the FCC relied on a “highest handset shortfall formula,” under which a carrier was assessed a $15,000 fine “for each handset it was short in the month of the year in which it fell the furthest short,” he said. T-Mobile would have faced only a $165,000 fine under the previous approach. “Under the new policy, you can be fined for being short a handset in every month of the year,” Evans noted. “The shortfalls each month are added together to calculate the total. Accordingly, since T-Mobile was apparently short seven handsets in November and December of 2009 and 45 handsets through August of 2010, its base penalty was $780,000 (i.e., 52 handsets short x $15K per handset short). The FCC then adjusted that amount upward by $39,000 to take into account T-Mobile’s size, but mitigated that increase to reflect the fact that it had cooperated in the investigation.”
The Senate Finance Committee should take up bills to rein in taxes on wireless and digital goods, CTIA and top cellphone carrier executives said. They urged passage of S-543 and S-971 in a letter Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm37of) to committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. S-543 would set a five-year moratorium on new wireless taxes by state and local governments. “The disparity between the taxes on wireless services and other goods and services imposes an unfair and regressive burden on lower income Americans who disproportionately rely on wireless service for both telephony and Internet access,” CTIA and the carriers said. S-971 aims to establish a framework governing digital transactions. “Only Congress is able to establish a framework providing much needed certainty for consumers, providers, and the state and local governments seeking to tax digital commerce being conducted in today’s borderless broadband economy,” the wireless groups said. Neither bill has received a hearing in the Senate. Last year, the House passed companion legislation (HR-1002) to the wireless tax bill and held a hearing on the digital goods companion (HR-1860) in the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts.
Hispanics continue to have “distinct patterns” of media usage “due to language, culture, and ownership dynamics,” Nielsen said Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm37q2). It said members of the demographic that has more than 52 million people and will represent the majority of U.S. population growth in the next five years spend 168 percent more time than non-Hispanic whites watching video online, for a total of six hours and 29 minutes a month on average. Hispanics also devoted 120 percent more time on average monthly to watching video on cellphones, at four hours and 20 minutes. “Real-time TV viewing still ranks high with the Latino market,” the industry research firm said: “Hispanics are less likely to use a DVR than the average household, with only 31 percent of Hispanic households owning a DVR versus 41 percent of the general market,” and “Hispanic DVR households are two to three times more likely to timeshift English than Spanish language programming.” Nielsen’s report didn’t list survey details, and a spokeswoman couldn’t provide them by our deadline.
More than a dozen technology groups urged House leaders in a letter sent Tuesday to “protect and promote, not stifle innovation” in the congressional push to increase national cybersecurity. “The House has an opportunity to take a positive, nonregulatory step forward on cybersecurity -- as regulations would divert businesses’ focus from security to compliance -- by removing legal roadblocks that prevent the private sector and government from sharing cyber threat information while protecting personal privacy,” said the letter written to Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Specifically the groups urged lawmakers to: improve private/public information sharing of cyberthreat information; enhance national cybersecurity research and development; reform the Federal Information Security Management Act; increase cybersecurity education and public awareness; and support greater public/private collaboration on cybersecurity issues. The groups also warned lawmakers not to “complicate or duplicate existing security-related industry standards with government-specific standards and bureaucracies.” The letter was signed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Software Alliance, CTIA, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Internet Security Alliance, NCTA, the Software and Information Industry Association, TechAmerica, TechNet, Telecommunications Industry Association, and USTelecom, among others.
Cebridge faces a possible $8,000 FCC fine for not preventing “excessive signal leakage” in its Honey Grove, Texas, cable system, said an Enforcement Bureau notice of apparent liability Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm37pi).