Openwave sued Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) at the International Trade Commission for allegedly infringing patents related to mobile Internet access, the company said Wednesday. The mobile software developer owns patents for five mobile device inventions that are directly infringed by several Apple and RIM products, the company alleged.
Wisconsin’s local telecom operators continued to attack the University of Wisconsin’s stimulus-funded broadband project, UW-System, with a lawsuit and in an audit process. Local telcos had sought the state legislature’s action last year to block the project, but that effort failed (CD Oct 21/2010 p10).
Positions vacated at the Media Access Project this year that haven’t all been filled keep the group challenged to stay active on a wide array of communications policy issues, current and former staffers said. They agreed it’s a bad time for MAP to be missing a CEO and an associate director. It has a new public relations and fund raising staffer, as of this month, replacing one who left to work for House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. Senior Vice President Andrew Schwartzman said he hopes to fill the other vacancies in 2011.
Congress should specify a date to begin the phase-out of distant signal licenses, while leaving the repeal of local signal licenses until later, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a report to Congress released late Monday. The report (http://xrl.us/bmbx7j) on phasing out Sections 111, 119 and 122 of the Copyright Act, which let pay-TV providers carry broadcast programming without signing deals with every program copyright holder, was required under last year’s Satellite TV Extension and Localism Act (STELA). The FCC Media Bureau also released a report also required under STELA to Congress (http://xrl.us/bmbx69) on so-called ‘orphan counties’ -- those getting broadcast signals as part of designated market area based in another state.
Wireless cell sites in Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island were particularly hard hit when Hurricane Irene swept up the East Coast over the weekend, according to numbers released by the FCC late Monday. It said 210,700 wireline customers didn’t have service by its latest count. Two TV stations and 10 radio stations remained down and a million cable customers had no service. But first responder communications didn’t take the same huge hit they did six years ago as a result of Hurricane Katrina, the FCC said.
The FCC released a draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) to be used in evaluating the environmental impacts of the Antenna Structure Registration (ASR) program. The PEA looks at varying levels of new tower requirements with an eye on reducing bird deaths as a result of collisions with towers. The document estimates that, conservatively, 2,800 towers will be constructed every year in the U.S. over the next 10 years (http://xrl.us/bmbvbz).
SAN FRANCISCO -- Efforts by national governments to move Internet governance to organizations such as the ITU and the U.N., where they hold sway, reflect their growing fear of the power that can be exerted online, said Vice President Markus Kummer of the Internet Society. It also reflects their mistrust of the engineering organizations that have historically set policy, he said. “The Internet has become so important that it was inevitable that governments would wake up to it,” Kummer said at the .Nxt conference last week. Governments remain “not just clueless but dynamically anti-clueful” concerning how cyberspace works, said John Perry Barlow, an Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and board member.
The FCC Wireless Bureau Friday restarted it’s informal 180-day “shot clock” on its review of AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile. As a result, Friday was officially day 83 of the review. AT&T welcomed the development, but merger critics said the quick restart of the clock could also be bad news for AT&T. Analysts cautioned against reading too much into the development.
As the FCC seeks authority from Congress to do incentive spectrum auctions to clear part of the TV band, little consensus seems to exist about how much it will cost to move the remaining TV stations onto new channels and make room for wireless broadband services. On the lower end of estimates, CTIA and CEA projected in February it would cost about $565 million to move the stations, citing NTIA data that the cost of buying and installing a new antenna and transmitter would be $898,000 per station. But NAB has told the FCC it will cost the industry roughly $2.5 billion. And legislation in the Senate would set aside $1 billion for repacking costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Broadcast technical consultants we interviewed also had a range of estimates for the costs, but they were reluctant to extrapolate what the entire cost of repacking could be because so many variables remain. “So much of it depends on what the commission will do,” said consultant Merrill Weiss.
A compromise proposed by booster maker Wilson Electronics and Verizon Wireless, filed at the FCC last month, got mostly good reviews in reply comments on an April rulemaking notice on new technical, operational, and coordination parameters for fixed and mobile signal boosters (http://xrl.us/bk28pb). Most commenters recognized that the agreement will likely be key as the FCC pushes forward with a final rule.