Verizon Wireless is starting tests -- in cooperation with the Defense Department -- at five undisclosed military installations aimed at gathering baseline information on sharing of government spectrum with commercial users, a Verizon official said Wednesday at the Americas Spectrum Management Conference. Verizon in May pledged to spend $5 million on sharing tests. Meanwhile, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said the FCC is moving forward on various orders promoting sharing, though many questions remain.

Former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s uncertain if the 113th Congress, which convenes in January, could pass comprehensive reform of the 1996 Telecom Act, during a Bloomberg event Wednesday. Passing a comprehensive telecom reform bill through regular order hinges on how many Senate seats Republicans pick up in November, and at the moment neither party is projected to attain a super-majority of 60 seats. “Even if the Republicans take over the [Senate] majority, we anticipate they won’t have the numbers … so you will have to have some agreement with some portion of Democrats to get it through regular order,” said Martin, now an attorney at Patton Boggs.

ESPN has no visible roadmap for beaming live sports in native 4K, except possibly to use 4K technology for special viewing enhancements on its regular HD programming, executives at the network told Consumer Electronics Daily.

The FCC is meeting with stakeholders to decide what to do with the unallocated Connect America Fund Phase I money, according to industry officials and ex parte filings. Carriers accepted only $115 million of the original $300 million, leaving about $185 million still available (CD July 26 p3). The commission is teeing up several questions for a potential rulemaking about how to use that money, industry officials said. The notice, circulating on the eighth floor, proposes adding the unused money into another Phase I round of funding that could dole out $485 million for broadband buildout, an agency official said. As an alternative the notice also contemplates rolling the unused money into Phase II, the official said.

The final shape of the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association’s (ETNO) proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) remains unclear as the deadline to submit proposed revisions to the ITRs looms. ETNO is reportedly considering withdrawing its controversial “sender-party-pays” proposal, which the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) rejected Monday in a draft report (CD Oct 23 p13). CEPT rejected the proposal because it fell outside of the scope of the ITRs and dealt with specific commerce and technology issues (CD Oct 22 p7).

The FCC would propose all owners of attributable broadcast interests must give a Social Security number when the radio and TV stations report every other year who owns stakes above 5 percent in them, agency officials said of a draft rulemaking notice. They said the Media Bureau further rulemaking notice proposes to end an exemption that let a special-use FCC Registration Number be obtained by any investor listed on the Form 323s. Such special-use FRNs let an entity not give a Social Security number. Broadcasters raised privacy concerns when the commission in 2009 (CD April 9 p6/09) required all radio and TV stations except for low-power FMs to file 323s. Their lawyers said now that they'd oppose ending the exemption.

CLECs subjected Qwest to “unjust” and “discriminatory” rates, an executive of the telco’s parent told a Florida Public Service Commission hearing Tuesday. Tw telecom and BullsEye Telecom did that for “many years,” said CenturyLink Wholesale Staff Director William Easton. AT&T faced similar circumstances as Qwest, despite AT&T receiving cheaper rates than Qwest, he said: The two telcos should get the same rates.

The FCC and Mexico have approved different 700 MHz band plans and the result could be interference along the U.S.-Mexico border, officials from the countries said Tuesday at the Americas Spectrum Management Conference. But officials from both countries also downplayed the risks, as long as negotiations continue. The U.S. build-out is based on a unique North American plan, also being followed by Canada and Nicaragua, while Mexico recently opted to adopt the Asia Pacific plan (APT).

"People ought to have more choice about what happens to their information” online, and companies should be altering behavior to reflect those concerns, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said during a Ford Foundation panel Tuesday. Consumers are worried about their privacy, and “if the industry doesn’t get its act together and give consumers more choice … they are going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” he said. The FTC is going to “try to influence the rules of the road going forward,” he said, but it will “use our stick when we need to."

Cable operators preparing to test and deploy the industry’s Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) next-generation access architecture face a number of unresolved operational, organizational and training issues, said leading cable engineers. They advised operators to tackle these issues before installing new CCAP equipment in central headends. They recommended that other cable operators follow Comcast’s recent example (CD Sept 18 p8) in running operational trials before actually testing and deploying CCAP gear, designed to combine the functions of the now-separate cable modem termination system (CMTS) and edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) devices in one super-dense, more efficient, less costly platform.