LAS VEGAS -- T-Mobile USA “lost its way” as AT&T’s attempts to buy it last year fell through, said Jim Alling, T-Mobile chief operating officer, during a keynote at the Competitive Carriers Association convention Tuesday. Alling, who was interim CEO until last week, was the highest profile speaker from T-Mobile at the conference. T-Mobile joined CCA in March and the Las Vegas meeting was its first major meeting as a member of the group, which just changed its name from the Rural Cellular Association.

The FCC Media Bureau should push back by at least 18 months a Dec. 1 deadline to begin using standard home-networking outputs on cable boxes, Verizon said in response to a petition by TiVo to be temporarily let out of those rules. TiVo’s petition “generally underscores the need for broader relief across providers and equipment,” Verizon said. Verizon said it plans to introduce a new device -- the Verizon Media Server (VMS) -- that will let customers use third-party devices to access and control its FiOS service.

Dish Network plans to sell a fixed and mobile broadband service across the country, executives said Tuesday at the company’s Washington office. Satellite is the best way to deliver video to the U.S., said Jeff Blum, Dish deputy general counsel. “Consumers want more than a fixed linear video experience,” he said. “They want fixed and mobile voice, video and data.” The service is an effort to offer more data capacity and decrease latency, he said. Dish separately sought to keep its current uplink mobile satellite service spectrum as-is, when it gets a waiver to provide satellite broadband terrestrially (CD Sept 25 p1). Sprint Nextel wants a shift to protect the H block of spectrum that may be auctioned.

FirstNet may begin implementing the proposed nationwide 700 MHz national public safety broadband network (NPSBN) as soon as 2013, the FirstNet board said at its inaugural meeting Tuesday. All 15 members praised the $7 billion initiative and talked about next steps. But multiple organizations and a new report underscore FirstNet’s challenges of funding, scheduling and exclusion, and they questioned the manner in which the federal government has handled several suspended stimulus grants.

Broadband’s a civil right to Jesse Jackson, Sr., as are prison payphone rates, he said Tuesday in an annual ethics in telecom lecture. He cited many concerns voiced a day before by FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on what prisoners and the people they call must pay. “Access to broadband at home and school is not a magic bullet” to solve a gap in education between minorities and other Americans, Jackson said. It’s “a civil rights issue” because “the technology is being positioned as a primary driver of economic opportunity” and social change, he said at the Washington event.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said he would immediately work to free up more spectrum for wireless carriers, remove unnecessary telecom regulations and ensure that the FCC is not “preemptively” regulating the industry, if he were to become chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. He told us in an interview last week that the future of telecom policy depends entirely on which party wins the Senate majority this November. “I hope I have a chance to be chairman and move some positive legislation instead of just trying to stop bad stuff,” he said.

The FCC plans to consider two orders this year designed to encourage mHealth technologies, Chairman Julius Genachowski said Monday at an event hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. One will streamline the FCC’s experimental licensing rules to encourage the creation of wireless health device “test beds” to permit easier testing of mHealth technologies, he said. The other will “comprehensively reform and modernize” the Rural Health Care Program to permit networks of hospital and health care facilities to jointly apply for RHC funds to boost broadband capacity and enable electronic health records. The commission will also recruit a permanent Health Care Director to be a central point of contact to external groups on all health-related issues, he said.

LAS VEGAS -- T-Mobile is taking a long, hard look at how it could make sharing work in the 1755-1850 MHz band, T-Mobile Senior Vice President Tom Sugrue said on a Competitive Carrier Association convention panel Monday. Carriers as a whole have pressed the government to make the band available on a licensed basis. T-Mobile received special temporary authority from the FCC to test sharing with federal users and Sugrue said the carrier believes sharing could work, at least in the short term.

FCC staff targeting to finish work this year on an order letting Dish Network start a terrestrial wireless broadband network (CD Sept 12 p6) aim to protect a block of frequencies directly below part of the company’s network that a February spectrum law allows the commission to auction. So said agency and industry officials of a forthcoming waiver that would let Dish use spectrum it’s now allowed only to use with a network received by devices getting satellite signals. The lower end of the spectrum Dish needs a waiver to use terrestrially sits next to the H block that the agency must auction unless it finds the block would cause harmful interference to PCS spectrum. Wireless Bureau staff are considering whether to require Dish face what would amount in some eyes to a windfall penalty, because the DBS operator bought the spectrum in bankruptcy for far less than its value as a broadband network, so as to ameliorate interference concerns, agency and industry officials told us.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) server and its backup were down for more than 24 hours over the weekend, according industry executives and several messages to an Emergency Alert System (EAS) listserv discussion group. Broadcasters’ EAS equipment connects to the IPAWS servers for Common Alerting Protocol alerts (CAP) through the Internet. Saturday morning, station EAS equipment began sending out messages that they could not communicate with the server, and the problem was not resolved until about 2:30 p.m. ET Sunday, said Richard Rudman, a core member of the Broadcast Warning Working Group.