House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said he hopes the FCC’s open Internet order falls when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rules on the FCC’s authority to impose the regulations, he said at the NARUC conference Tuesday. If they do, Walden said he will block any legislative efforts to reinstate the rules. “Let me be clear, not on my watch,” he said.
"There is significant room for improvement” in how wireless carriers are able to keep their systems up and running during and after disasters like Superstorm Sandy, Jack Schnirman, city manager of Long Beach, N.Y., told FCC officials Tuesday during a full day of FCC hearings on Sandy held in New York and New Jersey. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the first and last speaker of the morning, said the kind of communications outages seen in the aftermath of Sandy were “simply unacceptable.”
NARUC telecom committee commissioners voted Tuesday to ask the FCC to safeguard against the possibility of unacceptable spectrum interference. The question of such possible interference from a company called Progeny dominated NARUC the last several days as the association weighed a resolution pushing for more testing. Progeny CEO Gary Parsons defended the public safety service, poised to launch in about 40 markets and promising to deliver better technology for locating 911 callers, down to within about 25 meters and to the floor of the building the caller is on, Parsons told regulators.
Internet policy makers are girding themselves for future fights with those in the international community who seek to impose new restrictions and regulations on the Internet. While lawmakers Tuesday commended the work of U.S. delegates to oppose new international regulations at the recent World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), they said at a joint Congressional hearing on the topic they must redouble efforts to combat further restrictions on the Web.
The FCC released the source code of and sought comments on an update to its broadcast TV interference analysis software that it will use to repack the TV band following the incentive spectrum auction. Broadcasters had been asking for the software, and can now begin kicking the tires on it. The program, called TVStudy, and the data needed to run it are at http://xrl.us/boezm9. The new software is an update to OET-69, the system the FCC used in the DTV transition, a public notice released Monday said (http://xrl.us/boezm9).
Sirius XM’s recent telematics agreement with Nissan and its Internet protocol-based personal radio project give the satellite radio operator a foothold in the automotive industry’s push to make Internet connectivity broadly available in vehicles, Sirius XM executives said Tuesday on the company’s earnings call.
Questions about telecom reliability and public safety dominated the first days of the winter NARUC meeting in Washington. Two resolutions addressed public safety concerns -- one proposed more emergency coordination, and another dealt with the possibility of spectrum interference and its possible dangers to public safety entities. Panelists discussed safety implications of technology transitions and the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
Witnesses will urge lawmakers to increase their efforts to encourage a multistakeholder model of Internet governance, according to testimony published ahead of Tuesday’s joint hearing with three House subcommittees to examine the events that occurred at the December World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). The joint hearing will be in Room 2123 Rayburn hosted by the House subcommittees on: Communications and Technology; Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade; and Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. Invited to testify are: FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell; former Ambassador David Gross; Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager-public policy at the Internet Society; Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge and Bitange Ndemo, the permanent secretary in the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications.
Pressure is growing on FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to say something, anything, about his plans for the future, now that the second term of the Obama administration is underway. Last week, Genachowski was peppered with questions in the news conference after the commission meeting, but said nothing about his departure plans (CD Feb 1 p11). Also on the rise is pressure on the administration to appoint the first-ever woman to chair the FCC, one of the most high-profile of the independent federal commissions, following the departure of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
What’s it like to win the Super Bowl? “Fucking awesome!” according to Joe Flacco, just before the Baltimore Ravens quarterback was named game MVP. He let those words loose while giving teammate and offensive lineman Marshal Yanda a celebratory slap on the shoulder pads in front of CBS’s cameras and microphones following the game Sunday night. The words carried through CBS’s network and out over the air of its owned and affiliated TV stations, where the FCC’s rules against indecency apply.