NexGen Global Technologies has a solution for texting to 911, but was unable to exhibit it an Emergency Access Advisory Committee exhibition this week “under advice from legal counsel (due to our technology waiting to be protected under U.S. Patent laws),” the company said in a filing at the FCC. The solution “is web based and easily accessible via a basic web browser,” the filing said (http://xrl.us/bmzttx). “NexGen technology does not require any hardware or software to be installed onsite and no changes need to be made to the existing infrastructure in order for 9-1-1 Communications Centers to use our technology. It is also estimated that a national roll out of the NexGen solution can be handled remotely and within a compressed time frame."
The FCC should change the rules for its $100 million Remote Areas Fund to allow municipal, community and local broadband providers to apply, the commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee said in a filing at the agency. The fund is set aside for alternative technology platforms, including satellite and unlicensed wireless. “Further, the CAC supports the position that there is a need for an interconnection obligation for fund recipients,” the committee said (http://xrl.us/bmztsw). “The CAC further encourages the Commission to ensure that these municipal, community and local broadband providers ensure that their broadband services address the needs of and are accessible to people with disabilities.”
T-Mobile USA has reportedly hired TAP Advisors to help sell its wireless towers in order to raise capital for parent Deutsche Telekom. Analysts had expected a T-Mobile tower deal with one of the major tower operators like American Tower, Crown Castle or SBA Communications. Other major telcos including AT&T and Sprint Nextel have sold their towers in recent years.
Philadelphia’s Ordinance violates the FCC’s Over-the-Air Reception Devices (OTARD) rules, some members of the Satellite Broadcasting & Communications Association said during a meeting with FCC officials. Representatives from SBCA, DISH and DirecTV met with Media Bureau staff. The satellite companies discussed concerns regarding Philadelphia’s dish removal requirement, “which were set forth in SBCA’s petition and the parties’ respective reply comments,” DirecTV said in an ex parte filing in docket 12-1 (http://xrl.us/bmztsq). The filing pertains to a petition for declaratory ruling around applying OTARD rules to Philadelphia’s installation code.
The FCC Media Bureau issued a notice of apparent liability for forfeiture in the amount of $13,000 to Indiana Wesleyan University. IWU’s failure to file the Children’s Television Programming Reports for its broadcast station WIWU-CD and place such reports in the station’s public inspection file “constitutes an apparent willful and repeated violation,” the bureau said in the notice (http://xrl.us/bmztjs). IWU acknowledged that it didn’t satisfy the requirement for all four quarters in 2009 and 2010, the notice said.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ record sale price of $2.15 billion this week means cable and DBS customers will likely pay more to see their baseball games on pay TV, the American Cable Association said. Nationally “the fundamental problem is that programmers refuse to give pay-TV operators the flexibility to provide customers with absolutely zero interest in sports -- who are, after all, the majority of viewers -- the right to bypass expensive sports channels that are driving up their pay-TV bills,” ACA President Matt Polka said Thursday (http://xrl.us/bmztak). Should News Corp. start a national U.S. sports channel, that would increase programmer competition to buy rights to games, which “will drive up the costs of these rights” and so pay-TV bills, Polka said.
Constraints in the rules for price cap carriers may have the unintended consequence of indefinitely delaying broadband capital expenditures in unserved and underserved areas, the Telecommunications Industry Association said in a letter to the FCC (http://xrl.us/bmzs8i). The commission should reconsider its “one location per $775” Phase I deployment requirement, and replace it with more targeted performance obligations, wrote TIA President Grant Seiffert. “As the actual cost of deployment to still-unserved areas is likely to be well above $775 per location in most cases, this seems likely to undercut the Commission’s broadband deployment objectives,” TIA said.
Many limits on multichannel video programming distributors carrying games blacked out on broadcast TV because they aren’t sold out would remain if the FCC junked the sports blackout rule, said the Sports Fan Coalition (CD March 16 p14). It’s gotten MVPD backing and has sought a rulemaking to end the rule. Section 111 of the Copyright Act makes importing the signal of an out-of-market TV station “cost-prohibitive” for a cable operator, the coalition wrote in a document it gave an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. DBS companies in most cases wouldn’t be able to import distant signals in such circumstances, said a copy of Wednesday’s handout in docket 12-3 (http://xrl.us/bmzs5u). It said the network non-duplication rule that covers any game broadcast on a network would apply to all MVPDs.
The FTC should spur an interagency working group (IWG) to “quickly and efficiently” finish a report on food marketed to children, more than a dozen organizations told commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “It is time for the IWG to issue a final set of specific nutrition principles and marketing definitions, based on the comments received from their proposed principles last year,” the American Academy of Pediatrics, Children Now, Common Sense Media, Consumer Action, United Church of Christ and others wrote Thursday. “The proposed voluntary marketing definitions are also superior, in many ways, to those currently employed by the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI). We strongly discourage the IWG from making the CFBAI guidelines the standard.” It’s “increasingly clear” media and TV particularly “play an important role” in the study of the cause of obesity, the letter said: “Advertising of junk food and fast food increases children’s requests” for them. An FTC spokeswoman said the agency has received the letter and declined further comment.
Correction: Carolyn Brandon, whose employer is Georgetown University, told an American Consumer Institute event that it would be frightening if the FCC’s oversight of new technologies were to “get the regulation wrong” (CD March 28 p9).