The state of Washington may change how it taxes telecom. Legislators introduced House Bill 1971 Feb. 27 and held a House Finance Committee hearing last week. Sponsored by one Democrat and one Republican, the bill would remove some tax exemptions from the law and draw millions of dollars more in taxes, as well as create a five-year state USF. The bill’s central purpose is tax parity, said House Finance Committee Chairman Reuven Carlyle (D), a bill sponsor, at the hearing. The state’s tax policies “are behind the age and the era,” he said. “We're also trying to recognize that issues like bundling ... really call us to try to get a much simpler, more consistent approach to taxation that is a better reflection of what’s happening in the marketplace."

The commercial satellite industry must figure out how to overcome challenges, including launch service options, government budget constraints and expanding services in emerging markets, said executives Tuesday at Satellite 2013 in Washington. The real challenge for satellite is to become part of the telecom ecosystem and to be meaningful from a communications perspective, said Romain Bausch, SES CEO. Launch services must improve overall and some opportunities need to become more available, said executives from Intelsat and Eutelsat.

Public safety agencies in at least five of 11 metro areas that use the T-band for communications don’t have anyplace to go if they clear the band, as directed by the February 2012 spectrum law, said a report released Tuesday by the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council. The report from NPSTC’s T-band task group estimated the overall cost of moving from the T-band could be more than $6 billion. While the spectrum act would pay for relocation through the sale of the spectrum, NPSTC questioned whether auction proceeds would cover the costs of moving the systems.

The federal FirstNet board picked a general manager Monday, almost four months after it received 27 applications from interested individuals. But the board did not release a name, and won’t until background checks are complete, a process expected to take as long as three weeks. Meanwhile, in another public safety development, eighth-floor FCC officials said they held almost no ex parte meetings with industry or public safety officials prior the vote scheduled for Wednesday on an NPRM on improving 911 liability and the resilience of communications networks in light of the lessons learned from last year’s derecho wind storm.

Whether wireless can be an effective substitute for fiber was a key question industry representatives struggled with Monday at the inaugural meeting of the Technology Transitions Policy Task Force. The main objective of Monday’s workshop was to establish a “factual baseline” for understanding three main transitions, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski: the evolution of network protocols from TDM to IP, replacement of copper networks with fiber, and the shift from wireline to wireless service. More than a third of households have already cut the voice cord and gone totally wireless, several panelists said. But some said that, as a replacement for wired broadband, wireless leaves much to be desired.

Congress should take its time in considering the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) and other cybersecurity legislation that may involve information sharing, said Ryan Radia, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) associate director-technology studies, at a joint CEI-TechFreedom event Monday. Both groups were part of a free market-oriented coalition that opposed CISPA when it was being considered last year (WID April 24/12 p5). The bill passed the House then but did not get a vote in the Senate amid strong White House opposition. There has been pressure for Congress to move quickly on legislation to augment President Barack Obama’s recent cybersecurity executive order, but a slower process won’t make the situation “much worse off” than it is already, Radia said. “This is the time to do something, but let’s do something right. This is going to be on the books for a long time, and a problematic law … will create bad precedent.” Radia and other experts said they were concerned about the implications of information sharing provisions in the current version of CISPA.

Changing 911 technologies call for a change in behavior and federal advocacy, speakers told the National Number Emergency Association Monday. Public safety officials from around the country are gathering in Washington for the association’s 911 Goes to Washington meeting, which continues Tuesday. “We become a part of the government procedure,” said NENA Second Vice President Christy Williams of the 911 directors’ visits to Capitol Hill offices this week. She noted that more than 31 states and territories were represented at this year’s meeting. Speakers discussed the best ways to approach federal government officials as well as the challenge of text-to-911 and potential spectrum interference. (See separate report in this issue.)

The nature of 911 is changing, the members of the National Emergency Number Association were told at its 911 Goes to Washington meeting. Multiple new technologies are transforming how regulators and industry are seeing the service, and Monday sessions focused on text-to-911 initiatives, the broader move to an Internet Protocol-based next-generation 911 and the move within the wireless industry of tracking callers’ locations, all of which call for a reassessment of current codes, laws and practices, particularly at the state level.

There may be room for compromise on how much spectrum is available for unlicensed use after the FCC auction of frequencies of TV stations that participate in exchange for a slice of the proceeds, said NAB’s auction pointman. Further fleshing out his stance against the voluntary incentive auction occurring next year (CD Jan 28 p1), NAB Executive Vice President-Strategic Planning Rick Kaplan told executives and regulatory staffers that he thinks there’s a “sweet spot” for how much is licensed versus unlicensed. The commission shouldn’t make guard bands or the gap between carriers’ licensed frequencies used for uplink versus downlink operations “one megahertz larger than they need to be for interference purposes,” Kaplan said at a Media Institute lunch. Some high-technology companies want larger guard bands than do carriers, and the issue of how big they're to be may be controversial when the FCC prepares to adopt an order on auction rules (CD Jan 29 p1).

The opposition to Globalstar’s petition to get authority to create a terrestrial low-power service (TLPS) is expected, considering the efforts of a company to change how spectrum is used, some satellite analysts and a lawyer said. Globalstar’s petition for a rulemaking has raised some concern among Iridium, Microsoft and others (CD Jan 31 p7).