The time has come for industry to roll up its sleeves and get to work getting FirstNet built, said Sue Swenson, a member of the FirstNet board. This week’s bombings in Boston (CD April 17 p1) “certainly brings home the need for first responder interoperability,” she said Wednesday during a FirstNet summit at the Competitive Carriers Association spring conference.

Putting a civilian agency in charge of coordinating cyberthreat information sharing “was [a] concern [of] many,” said House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., during a floor speech. He said the amendment adds an “appropriate civilian face” to the information sharing framework “so that people can have confidence in the intention of the bill.” At our deadline, the House had not voted on the 13 proposed amendments to the bill, four of which were offered by Republicans, seven by Democrats and two bipartisan amendments. A final vote on the bill itself is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.

The FCC found in a 2011 study that one in six wireless consumers had been the victim of bill shock, Monteith said. “Bill shock can hit consumers hard,” she said. “The commission has reported that two-thirds of complaints show that consumers that have been hit with bill shock have encountered overages in the hundreds of dollars and in some cases even in the thousands of dollars.” Cramming often stands out less on consumers’ bills, Monteith said.

The House Commerce Committee passed HR-1580, aimed at codifying the U.S. policy “to preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet.” Action came on a voice vote Wednesday. The legislation that was reported to the House floor mirrors House and Senate resolutions passed last year opposing the revised International Telecommunication Regulations adopted at the World Conference on International Telecommunications.

Competitive providers are uneasy -- about the future of interconnection in a world where copper is gone; about the monopoly power they believe is still enjoyed by many incumbents; and about AT&T’s proposed wire center trials, which they fear could bring the industry a step closer to massive deregulation. No matter what AT&T and its supporters say to assuage CLECs, to many industry officials the trials are inextricable from their history -- such as an August ex parte FCC filing in which AT&T detailed its ideal path toward deregulation. In interviews with several CLEC officials, a common theme emerged: Confusion about the scope of the trials, and fear of what it could mean for the future of competition.

Broadcasters asked the full 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear their case for a preliminary injunction against online TV service Aereo, in a petition for an en banc hearing filed Monday. In the filing, the plaintiffs, including major broadcasters such as Fox, NBCUniversal and Disney, said the panel made a “major error” in its 2-1 decision April 1 to deny the preliminary injunction to stop Aereo from distributing New York City TV signals to online subscribers without broadcaster consent. They said the court’s majority opinion “upends decades of settled expectations in the broadcasting industry."

The Application Privacy, Protection, and Security (APPS) Act would address “key transparency issues surrounding mobile app use,” said Hogan Lovells attorney Mark Brennan, who argues broadband deployment and mobile privacy issues before the FCC, FTC and other federal agencies. A draft version of the bill, which Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., began circulating in January, would introduce new data privacy protections for app users, including requiring app developers to get users’ permission before obtaining personal data, Brennan said Tuesday during an FCBA event.

The cable industry was adamant in comments posted Tuesday in docket 05-25 that the FCC’s special access data collection regime violates the Paperwork Reduction Act. NCTA and ACA said the FCC’s PRA time estimate was far too low, with an actual burden far disproportionate to any possible benefit. Some small carriers also objected to the burden, saying there’s almost no “practical utility” to collecting the information. But AT&T and several CLECs said the burden was accurately estimated, and justified.

Wireless networks experienced service outages after Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon similar to the kinds of outages seen after last year’s Superstorm Sandy and the June derecho storm, the 2011 Virginia earthquake and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. The FCC isn’t saying so far that it will launch an investigation, as it did after the other disasters. But former and current agency officials said Tuesday the FCC is all but certain to ask more questions. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the FCC needs to better understand what happened after the bombs went off.

California is getting into the crowdsourced mobile broadband testing business, announcing Monday a free app Android users can download to test their connections. CalSPEED, funded by an NTIA grant, will let users take download, upload, latency and jitter measurements of the networks of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. “This marks the first time the public and state officials will have access to such extensive information, generally only known by the companies themselves,” a California Public Utilities Commission spokeswoman said. The app is available at http://bit.ly/13hWph7.