The New Jersey office trying to stop Comcast from being let out of local basic rate regulation told the FCC the cable operator’s petitions for special relief violate the commission’s order approving AWS license transfers from SpectrumCo to Verizon Wireless. The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel asked the FCC to dismiss Comcast petitions for a finding that the cable operator is subject to effective competition in 10 New Jersey franchise areas because it relied on competitively sensitive data provided by Verizon to make its case. The FCC’s order approving the Verizon Wireless-SpectrumCo deal “precludes the sharing and use of competitively sensitive data between Verizon and Comcast,” the state said (http://bit.ly/VJtX37). A spokeswoman for Comcast declined to comment.

Allowing subscriber testing of whether an emergency text message to 911 results in the required bounce-back message saying the service isn’t available could cause big problems for 911 call centers, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials told the FCC. The National Emergency Number Association made similar arguments. In December, the FCC approved a further notice of proposed rulemaking posing questions on how the commission can best ensure all wireless subscribers will one day be able to send emergency text messages to public safety answering points (CD Dec 13 p12). Replies were due Friday.

Sprint Nextel lost a net 337,000 subscribers across its networks during Q4, with growth on its CDMA and LTE networks only partially outweighing a heavy subscriber exodus from the soon-to-be-shuttered iDEN network used by its Nextel service subscribers. The carrier’s Sprint networks added 401,000 postpaid and 525,000 prepaid subscribers, while its Nextel network lost a net 1.02 million subscribers. Sprint said it also lost a net 243,000 wholesale subscribers. Sprint added a net 605,000 subscribers for the entire year, down from a net 5.1 million added in 2011. Exits by Nextel subscribers will continue to accelerate as the service nears its targeted shutdown in the middle of the year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said Thursday during a conference call with investors. Sprint said it expects it will see a diminishing percentage of exiting Nextel subscribers choose to join the remaining networks; about 51 percent of Nextel subscribers who terminated their service during Q4 chose to join other Sprint services (http://xrl.us/boff9q).

AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Grain Spectrum said in a filing at the FCC that a series of spectrum deals unveiled last month (CD Jan 28 p9) are in the public interest and should be approved by the commission. The transaction was criticized by the Competitive Carriers Association and public interest groups when it was announced. The Competitive Carriers Association said it “raises serious spectrum aggregation concerns.”

The federal government’s broadband initiatives must continue, said FCC commissioners Thursday at the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Services. But such programs need more accountability and a sharper focus, they said. Panelists emphasized the importance of digital literacy, and telco executives promoted a message of grassroots outreach in encouraging broadband adoption. “We are going to approach adoption with a little more nuance than we have in the past,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the conference’s new federal chair, told the summit. The FCC will be looking at “how to quantify how much can be saved when services migrate online and how citizens and consumers can help by sharing in those savings,” she said, describing an intention to look at the accountability of sustainable broadband programs to find out which are “truly sustainable” and strengthen the successes.

Time Warner Cable responded to Google’s gripes that the operator is withholding a regional sports network (RSN) in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where the Internet company sells a nascent video and super-fast broadband product. The dispute points up bigger issues over program access in an Internet Protocol context, said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and an Internet lawyer not part of the spat over access to Time Warner Cable’s Metro Sports Kansas City RSN. Time Warner Cable’s new response to the Internet company’s criticisms made in recent months in FCC filings -- and most recently in a program access proceeding -- was the operator’s first rebuttal, a cable industry lawyer said.

The FCC is taking aim at dead air, fake ringing sounds and poor audio quality, in a series of proposed rules intended to deal with call completion problems that have plagued customers of rural telcos. One year after issuing a declaratory ruling to “remind” carriers of their obligation to connect calls to rural areas (CD Feb 7/11 p10), a notice of proposed rulemaking released Thursday imposes what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called “meaningful new burdens” on some carriers. As expected (CD Jan 25 p1), the notice proposes reporting and data retention requirements to help the commission figure out where exactly the call completion problems are taking place.

The FCC should carefully test whether wireless operations in the AWS H-block will cause interference in the 1930-1995 MHz band, but should auction the spectrum for carrier use if at all possible, CTIA said in comments to the FCC. The FCC approved proposed rules “setting the stage for an auction of the H Block in 2013” in an electronic vote before its December meeting (http://xrl.us/boffzj). Comments on the notice of proposed rulemaking were due Wednesday. Last February’s spectrum law instructed the FCC to auction the 1915-1920 and 1995-2000 MHz bands, the upper and lower H-blocks, respectively, unless the agency determined that doing so would cause interference to other 1.9 GHz licensees.

Liberty Global’s proposed $23 billion acquisition of Virgin Media could provide an opening for TiVo to expand its reach across Europe, Brean Capital said in a research note. While TiVo has 1.3 million customers, with an installed base of about 35 percent of Virgin’s U.K. cable customers, its DVR service could gain a foothold in Europe, where Liberty Global launched Horizon TV with its Dutch cable operator UPC Netherlands. UPC customers can stream 80 live TV channels for a dedicated website and access 3,500 TV shows.

The ongoing “Internet transformation” of video means the FCC should get from Congress the same authority to forbear from regulations as the agency now has for telecom issues, Commissioner Ajit Pai said. The 20-year-old Cable Act “is deterring progress, to the detriment of consumers,” he said Thursday at a luncheon of cable and telecom lawyers, lobbyists and executives also attended by commissioners Robert McDowell and Jessica Rosenworcel. Pai opposed, in a speech to the Media Institute event, a draft order’s making attributable for some TV station sharing agreements to the broadcaster contributing the resources, and said in a later interview that Democratic and Republican FCC members continue talking about ways to change the draft. Deadlock remains on the item, even as consideration of changes occurs, another agency official told us this week.