A program aimed at repurposing satellite components while in orbit can further collaboration between the government and the commercial satellite industry, industry and government officials said. Currently in its first phase, the Phoenix program is headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA contracted with companies to research, develop and implement ways to take portions of decommissioned satellites and repurpose them. “Private industry is doing the bulk of the technology development under Phase 1 of the Phoenix effort, and thus is helping provide innovations to ultimately lower the cost of re-use and re-purposing components on retired assets in space,” David Barnhart, Phoenix program manager, said in an e-mail.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Those at the PCIA show were enthusiastic about recent growth of LTE technology, and the wireless infrastructure advances needed to support it including distributed antenna systems (DAS) and small cell towers, they said. Evercore analyst Jonathan Schildkraut wrote investors that enthusiasm in the industry appeared at “record highs” and forecast continued growth.

Legacy regulations developed to contend with monopoly copper providers have no place in today’s world of next-generation networks and “intermodal competition” among cable, carriers and telcos, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said. He said the commission could help the U.S. regain its leadership in the information, communications and telecom sector by doing three things: Act more quickly, get more spectrum into the commercial market and remove barriers to infrastructure investment. Companies have told Pai they are “sitting on billions of dollars on their balance sheets, in part because of regulatory uncertainty,” he said on C-SPAN. Those companies will be more hesitant to invest in fiber deployment or Internet infrastructure until the rules are “certain and predictable,” Pai said: The FCC’s regulatory framework should “give them the incentive to take those risks."

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the FCC has made significant progress on addressing the spectrum “crunch” during his watch as chairman. His comments came in remarks Thursday at the University Of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. There has not been a major spectrum auction since Genachowski became chairman and none have been formally scheduled, but he told the Wharton students that auctions are on the way. Genachowski includes in his calculations spectrum that won’t be cleared out right away but must be shared with federal government users, regarded by many as a tough task. (See related story, this issue.)

Industry, working with government, should focus on specific bands and specific solutions, rather than trying to develop broader rules for sharing, or high-level sharing principles, said NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia at the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee meeting Thursday. Nebbia said sharing in one band alone, 1755-1850 MHz, has shown the unique problems that emerge. CSMAC is working through the hundreds of issues that arise over the sharing of spectrum at 1755 MHz and in the 1695-1710 MHz band.

The public broadcasting community pushed back against statements made in the Presidential debate by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney very publicly re-confirming his plans to zero out PBS funding if elected. Romney reiterated this plan Wednesday during the first debate of the 2012 election cycle. The comment during the debate, moderated by PBS NewsHour Executive Editor Jim Lehrer, echoed the former Massachusetts governor’s statements made in August (CD Aug 27 p5). PBS receives its subsidy through the $444 million appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The FCC’s notice of proposed rulemaking on the incentive spectrum auction has raised even more questions among broadcasters, some of whom worry their concerns may be getting less attention at the agency than those of the wireless industry, broadcast industry officials said. Though attorneys and executives we spoke to this week said they were still parsing the item, the release of the NRPM has done little to quell broadcaster questions about how the reverse auction and repacking of the TV band will proceed. “We have more question than we had before,” said Mark Aitken, who is on the board of the Advanced TV Broadcasting Alliance and is vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair.

The Justice Department hopes standard-setting organizations promulgate policies limiting the ambiguity of some standard-essential patents (SEPs), as thinking on SEPs and related issues increasingly overlaps with antitrust law in the minds of some regulators, jurists and companies. Attention revolves around the role of patents licensed on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) or reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms, speakers said at an event at the Silicon Flatirons Center. Speakers from the FTC, Justice Department and high-technology and other companies involved in patent licensing said the intersection of antitrust and patent law has been a fruitful area recently. DOJ business review letters on patents are an example, speakers said.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said he’s “skeptical” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would support the administration’s proposed cybersecurity executive order. “My sense tells me that it will probably go back to the traditional regulatory mode,” said Ridge Thursday at a cybersecurity event hosted by the U.S. Chamber. Ridge, who is now chairman of the Chamber’s national security task force, said he plans to lobby Congress for legislative fixes if President Barack Obama introduces an order.

Banks, telcos, ISPs and national and local governments held an EU-wide cyberattack exercise Thursday to see how they would respond to sustained attacks on the computer systems and public websites of major European financial institutions and markets. The organizations faced more than 1,200 separate cyberincidents, including more than 30,000 emails, during a simulated distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) campaign, the European Commission said. It’s Europe’s largest-ever cybersecurity test and follows a more-limited 2010 exercise, it said. At the same time, the EU’s top foreign affairs and security official urged participants at a Budapest, Hungary, conference to agree on global cyberspace behavioral norms.