The FCC received more petitions from broadcasters and cable operators seeking to be let out of new Emergency Alert System common alerting protocol (CAP) obligations that were set to take effect Saturday. Some parties told the commission they needed a waiver because of the lack of available broadband service at their operations. Others said they couldn’t afford the equipment and costs associated with maintaining it. Some parties have equipment ordered, but manufacturing backlogs mean they won’t receive the gear until after the deadline. The waivers are in docket 04-296 (http://xrl.us/bndbh7).

The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a case on whether an unscripted broadcast of Janet Jackson’s breast for 9/16 of a second during CBS’s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show is indecent contained some surprises for experienced court watchers. Departing from what the high court usually does when denying a grant of certiorari, not one but two justices issued concurring statements in FCC v. CBS. That came eight days after the court found against the commission on Fifth Amendment grounds for not giving broadcasters sufficient notice they could be penalized for fleeting instances of nudity and swearing in a case involving Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox (CD June 22 p1). Constitutional scholars and First Amendment lawyers said Friday’s rare departure from usually denying cert without comment shows where an additional jurist stands on the issue of the commission’s general ability to regulate nudity and cursing on broadcast TV.

It’s time to better evaluate how broadband stimulus has worked, the government and grant managers say. As federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grants continue to fund expansion of broadband throughout the states, the questions arise -- how effective are these grants? And how are they truly helping people? In the last year there has been “a tremendous shifting in the public-computing arena into collecting data and reporting and thinking about outcomes,” said Samantha Becker, a University of Washington professor responsible for assessing BTOP programs in her state who helps oversee the education of grantees across the country in 2012. BTOP grantees are “trying very hard” to properly evaluate how well their programs are doing, Becker said, describing as a barrier “the huge range in sizes and sophistication” of the grantee programs.

Companies buying special access services are bracing for higher prices in areas where AT&T and Windstream’s pricing flexibility petitions were deemed granted by the FCC this week (CD June 26 p4). To CLECs and businesses that purchase the dedicated high-capacity circuits, the increased prices in price flex markets are an indication that those supposedly competitive areas are not competitive at all. After all, their thinking goes, competition should drive costs down. But ILECs maintain that the dynamic is more complicated than the other side claims.

Industry officials on Thursday urged Senate approval of the Law of the Sea Treaty, saying it is critical to industry, from consumer electronics to telecom. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was among those to testify at a hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation not a party to the treaty, which dates to 1982.

Lawyers for Comcast and Boxee presented a proposal to resolve an impasse that held up work on an FCC order that would let all-digital cable systems encrypt the signal of basic-tier programming. The two-part plan involves an interim and long-term solution that would let devices such as the Boxee Box receive encrypted basic-tier programming, according to an ex parte notice (http://xrl.us/bnc79y).

News Corp.’s decision to pursue a separation of its publishing businesses probably won’t change the way companies and public interest groups are advocating for and against the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership (NBCO) ban, industry and public interest officials we interviewed said. News Corp. announced Thursday that its board had approved a plan to pursue a separation of its publishing businesses from its entertainment assets. Public interest advocates who want the commission to retain the ban said the move represents further evidence that combining broadcast and newspaper assets doesn’t work for businesses.

GENEVA -- Mobile operators and participants in an ITU-T study group on numbering are collecting information on numbering misuse and associated fraud with the aim of better combating the practice, according to a letter by the director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau and a report by the GSM Association (GSMA). The association submitted the report to the study group with the aim of raising awareness of both the problem, and scale, of numbering resource misuse as “a key factor in fraud perpetrated against mobile networks” and their customers, the report said. Numbering misuse and fraud are also being discussed in preparations for the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December. The conference will revise the International Telecommunication Regulations.

The Telecommunications Industry Association got support from the Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) , Motorola Solutions and Land Mobile Communications Council (LMCC) for a petition asking the FCC clarify as OK the continued certification of 25 KHz equipment for use in the T-band. Public safety agencies that use the band, at 470-512 MHz, got a waiver from the FCC so that they didn’t have to overhaul their systems by the Jan. 1 narrowbanding deadline. Unless the commission offers clarity, these agencies won’t be able to replace equipment operating in the T-band, TIA warned. Under February’s spectrum law, the FCC is required to auction the public safety portion of the T-band within nine years, with public-safety licensees having to move to other spectrum within 11 years.

A variety of operational factors cause carriers to buy extra spectrum licenses without deploying the spectrum, Peter Rysavy said in a conference call about his new report on the subject. “It’s a long-term process from identifying spectrum to when it actually becomes deployed,” he said. “Operators, when faced with the opportunity to obtain spectrum whether or not they need it at that time, really have to obtain it simply because there’s no assurance of when it will become available next.” The report (http://xrl.us/bnc7if) was done independently by Rysavy Research.