ViaSat will reignite a battle for high-speed broadband subscribers with the launch of the ViaSat-1 Ka-band satellite next week, pitting it against Hughes Communications as well as DSL and cable providers, industry executives said Thursday at the Content & Communications World show in New York.

The deployment of stimulus-funded broadband networks and international events like Japan’s earthquake are tightening the fiber cable market, causing some delays in fiber delivery, officials and companies said. But many stimulus projects are moving forward. Some are even ahead of schedule.

Price cap carriers would be given $300 million for broadband deployment in unserved areas in the first year of universal service and intercarrier compensation reform under a proposed order being circulated at the FCC, telecom officials told us Thursday. The money would come on top of the legacy universal service support the price cap companies are already receiving, the officials said. Having received the money, the price cap companies will have to meet minimum standards for broadband deployment within two years, they said.

FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan asked AT&T for more documents on whether AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile would mean a net gain of jobs in the U.S. Kaplan said in a letter dated Thursday, that the bureau asked the question in a May 27 information request. “AT&T to date has produced almost nothing in response,” Kaplan wrote (http://xrl.us/bmf3ot).

Cablevision discriminated against the Game Show Network by moving it off a basic tier of the cable operator in February, GSN said in a program carriage complaint filed with the FCC Wednesday night. It alleged the cable operator gave wider carriage to its own networks, which weren’t moved to the sports programming package like GSN was. The complaint portrayed those networks that were owned at the time by Cablevision -- We TV and Wedding Central -- as similar to GSN. Cablevision rejected that comparison.

Most GPS interference problems can be solved quickly using low-cost fixes for GPS receivers, LightSquared officials said Thursday during a press briefing. Meanwhile, other LightSquared officials said at a financial conference the company’s financial future, as well as its contract with Sprint Nextel, remain viable.

The very small aperture terminal (VSAT) industry remains uncertain of the necessity for carrier ID as a means to mitigate frequency interference, said David Hartshorn, secretary general of the Global VSAT Forum. Hartshorn and others are leading the effort to deal with interference and said the issue represents a growing problem for the satellite industry. Hartshorn spoke about the interference issue in a panel at SATCON in New York and discussed the VSAT concerns with Communications Daily afterwards. Other sections of the satellite industry, including broadcasters and data, have made real progress in dealing with the issue, he said.

The FCC will put an end to Form 355, under a draft order set to be voted on at the Oct. 27 meeting (CD Oct 7 p13), commission officials said. The document is a quarterly programming report the agency approved in 2007 but which TV stations were never required to complete. The Office of Management and Budget under both the administrations of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama didn’t approve the form under the Paperwork Reduction Act, industry officials noted.

The role and interest of the U.S. government in in-orbit servicing of satellites remains a major question as Vivisat and MDA move toward beginning operations, company executives said Wednesday on a SATCON conference panel in New York on extending the life of satellites. While the commercial market is huge, MDA can’t compete with the U.S. government or a government-funded program, said Steve Oldham, president of space infrastructure servicing at MDA. That would put “us out of business,” he said. “We don’t have the size or power” to compete with the government, he said.

Emergency alert system participants are increasingly focusing outreach on consumers before next month’s first nationwide test, industry officials told us. They said the FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency are shifting educational efforts from being just focused on letting radio and TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors know about the Nov. 9 test, to working on public education. The FCC has produced public service announcements about the exercise (http://xrl.us/bmfyvk), and FEMA is working on them, industry participants said. They said both agencies have been holding conference calls and meetings with the broadcasting and MVPD industries and local emergency management agencies.