The FCC should waste no time in reinvigorating its diversity committee, especially since an appeals court recently sent back to the agency rules on the subject, Commissioner Robert McDowell said Thursday. Last month’s remand of a diversity order and media ownership rules from 2008 by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia shows why it’s timely for the Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age to become active once again, McDowell said. And “I think we have had some needless delays there of months or of a year” in getting the 3rd Circuit’s ruling, because the commission had sought to put Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC on hold, he told a Minority Media and Telecom Council conference. He had opposed that stay.

A closely watched FCC filing on reforming the Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband, which is backed by Comcast and others selling landline phone connections, will be ready as soon as next week. Verizon’s top executive in Washington predicted at a Minority Media and Telecom Council conference Thursday that the filing will be made next week and may be joined by the cable operator. Talks among many USF stakeholders led by USTelecom have been ongoing for some time, with the expectation of finishing the work this month or early next. Regardless of how wide support is for the USTelecom plan, the agency needs to soon approve an order on USF, Commissioner Robert McDowell told the conference. The USTelecom-led “framework” reached its conclusion in late June and has won favor with mid-sized telcos Windstream, CenturyLink and Frontier (CD July 6 p6).

The FCC asked whether it should again delay mandated compliance with FEMA’s Common Alerting Protocol for EAS (CD May 27 p4), and the answer from most parties was yes. Cable operators, phone companies and broadcasters all told the FCC to push back its Sept. 30 deadline by at least 6 months and some sought an extra year. But EAS equipment maker Sage Alerting Systems said the deadline shouldn’t be pushed back and that most of the broadcast industry is ready. “Another extension will simply delay orders until near the end of the new limit, much as the extension in November 2010 halted orders for a few months,” it said. The FCC should keep the deadline for making sure EAS participants have the equipment in place to receive CAP alerts, but give them another 90 days after FEMA starts distributing emergency messages to “actually begin receiving messages” from FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System servers, it said. That way they can learn how to use the equipment, it said.

AT&T, which reported Q2 profit of $3.6 billion, is confident its plan to buy T-Mobile will get receive regulatory approval in Q2 next year, executives said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. The looming departure of Justice Department’s antitrust chief Christine Varney and opposition by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., will have no material impact on the timing of the outcome, General Counsel Wayne Watts said.

Sprint Nextel’s fight with AT&T and T-Mobile over the GSM carriers’ proposed combination led to increased spending on lobbying for all three carriers in Q2, according to quarterly lobbying reports released this week. The fight over the extent to which LightSquared’s planned terrestrial system will disrupt GPS signals also continued to be a boon to the lobbying industry. Google, Facebook and other Internet companies continued to expand their Washington presence, while major telecom associations maintained spending consistent with 2010 levels.

The $6.5 billion in deficit reduction estimated by the Congressional Budget Office for Senate spectrum legislation (S-911) failed to win over at least two of four Commerce Committee Republicans who voted against the measure in markup. However, a recent statement by Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., may imply that Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, is reconsidering her opposition. Meanwhile, lobbyists are debating the accuracy of the CBO estimate Wednesday that S-911 would reduce net direct spending by $6.5 billion from 2012 to 2021 (CD July 21 p1).

Toyota urged the FCC to change the limits for radiated emissions in the 76-77 GHz band to allow more use of “stop and go” adaptive cruise control (ACC) and rear pre-collision (RPCS) systems in the cars it manufactures for sale in the U.S. (http://xrl.us/bk2qij). In a May 25 rulemaking notice, the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology sought comment on whether the commission should modify its rules for the band with an eye on improved collision avoidance and driver safety (http://xrl.us/bk2qje).

Transition from Internet Protocol version 4 to IPv6 on mobile networks is lagging because operators don’t see any immediate benefits in the new addressing technology, WirelessE2E LLC founder Murat Bilgic told us. The shift involves major “back-office,” business objective and technological upgrades in the face of customer apathy, he said. Mobile IPv6 could offer services better to consumers if operators made the effort, said WiChorus Technical Fellow Charles Perkins, a co-inventor of the technology.

Four Missouri Republicans joined rural telcos’ campaign to ward off what they see as the worst of the pending Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms. Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Sam Graves, Jo Ann Emerson and Vicky Hartzler said a letter dated Tuesday and released the next day. “We believe that in order to achieve the goals of this [1996 Telecom] Act, changes to the USF and ICC system must be made carefully and in a way that would enable carriers serving rural areas to sustain and improve upon affordable broadband where it already exists, to encourage deployment to unserved customers and not to harm rural customers who already have broadband service,” the letter said.

Verizon President Lowell McAdam expects approval of AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile by the FCC and Department of Justice, he said Wednesday. “If I was betting I would say that the merger will probably go through,” he said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. “It’s a merger that I think AT&T had to do because we have a failed spectrum policy in this country. There’s plenty of spectrum out there. It’s in the wrong peoples’ hands. [AT&T] needed to get spectrum. T-Mobile had spectrum. To me, the only question was why did it take this long to do it.”