FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed universal service order would raise speed standards to 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up, prune the so-called “right of first refusal” for incumbents, cut down the $2.2 billion set-aside for price cap carriers and reduce the transition time for rate-of-return carriers from 10 years to five, telecom and FCC officials told us Wednesday.

LightSquared Executive Vice President Jeff Carlisle found himself in the hot seat once again Wednesday, before a hearing of the House Small Business Committee. Several members conceded that LightSquared poses a dilemma for the committee. Many small businesses in rural America are desperate for broadband, but at the same time many also rely on precision GPS receivers as part of doing business.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is “not optimistic” Democratic senators will support Republicans’ Congressional Review Act effort to kill FCC net neutrality rules, the ranking member of the Communications Subcommittee said Wednesday. Until the election, DeMint hopes to “minimize the damage” of the Democratic-controlled Senate and executive branch, he said. In other speeches also at a Free State Foundation event, Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., also railed against regulation. Stearns supported the FCC effort to revamp the Universal Service Fund, but said Congress should take the next steps of revamping USF contribution rules and updating the 1996 Telecom Act.

The CEOs of Sprint Nextel and AT&T Mobility hardly mentioned AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile in keynotes to the CTIA conference, which started Tuesday in San Diego. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, current CTIA chairman, talked about the industry’s environmental record and the campaign against distracted driving. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega spoke about his company’s Innovation Pipeline and the importance of wireless to IT.

The American Cable Association made a pitch Tuesday to reduce the first refusal rights in the pending universal service reform order. Association officials and members said they were heading into ex parte meetings with FCC staff this week, but were put off by Chairman Julius Genachowski’s remarks announcing the order (CD Oct 7 p1). “Thursday, we heard the speech and in there it’s clear that the chairman anticipates providing some level of right of first refusal,” ACA President Matthew Polka said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “We feel confident about our concerns about where the commission is heading.”

Retransmission consent costs will keep rising in coming years, agreed broadcast and cable industry officials and an analyst who tracks those prices. On opposite sides of whether the FCC should change retrans rules, the industry officials said neither the commission nor legislators seem poised to step in. The number of recent retrans disputes in terms of multichannel video programming distributor subscribers blacked out from getting a TV station on their MVPD has been small and the duration of outages has been short, said the broadcast lawyer and the analyst. The cable executive said the sheer number of disputes has been high, even if they've been in smaller markets.

Lawmakers are planning to introduce an unspecified number of new cybersecurity bills “in the next couple of days,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, at a cybersecurity panel hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies Tuesday. These bills will build upon the recent recommendations by the House Republican cybersecurity task force, which is led by Thornberry and overseen by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio (CD Oct 6 p13). Thornberry said the focus on U.S. cybersecurity is “directly related” to job creation and preservation “because everyday somebody reaches into some business’ computer and sucks out intellectual property, they are sucking out jobs from the U.S. economy.”

TV sets and video game consoles that allow their users to make phone calls, video calls and send text messages aren’t yet categorically exempt from new federal accessibility rules, but their manufacturers can seek waivers from those rules on a case-by-case basis, said an FCC order implementing parts of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) released late Friday. CEA and the Entertainment Software Association had sought broader class-waivers from the accessibility rules (CD July 21 p11). They aren’t in the order released Friday, but the commission said it will consider waivers for classes of devices as they come in.

Arris agreed to buy BigBand Networks for about $53 million, after factoring out the cash BigBand has on its balance sheet, the companies said Tuesday. The inventor and leading vendor of the cable industry’s switched digital video technology, BigBand has Verizon and AT&T as large customers, executives of the combining companies said on a conference call with analysts. They said that broader customer base was part of what enticed Arris into the transaction. More than 30 percent of BigBand’s sales come from phone companies, while broadband equipment vendor Arris sells almost entirely to the cable industry, the companies said.

The FCC should focus on “covert consolidation” in its ongoing quadrennial review of media ownership rules, several nonprofit panelists said Tuesday. They called deals where two or more TV stations in a market join forces, without combining all assets as in a typical merger or acquisition, a critical issue for industry M&A foes. Municipal and public, educational and governmental channel officials also spoke at the Alliance for Community Media event on how PEG channels can educate members of Congress on many telecom issues.