The Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. patent number 10,000,000 Tuesday to a Raytheon invention for a frequency-modulated laser detection and ranging system with possible applications in autonomous vehicles, medical imaging devices and national defense, said the agency. “Given the rapid pace of change, we know that it will not take another 228 years to achieve the next 10-million-patent milestone,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, referring to the first U.S. patent issued July 1790 to Samuel Hopkins for a process of making potash for fertilizer. When inventor Joseph Marron, a Raytheon engineer, applied for the patent three years ago, little could he predict he would land the milestone number in 2018, he said in a company statement. "It's equivalent to a guy who buys a lottery ticket every month," he said. "Eventually, it hits."

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told the Senate Broadband Caucus Tuesday his travels across rural America have brought home to him how important broadband is to swaths of the country that haven't been connected. Carr recalled his visit to a Lincoln, Nebraska-based startup called Quantified Ag, which built a “Fitbit” for cattle. Early results show “the technology is helping to improve outcomes for the herd, saving time and money, and reducing the use of antibiotics and other treatments,” he said. Carr promised the FCC would continue its focus on closing the digital divide. “We need to keep cutting the regulatory red tape that needlessly drives up the costs of deploying broadband infrastructure,” he said. “We need to keep freeing up spectrum for next-generation uses. And we need to continue supporting rural broadband providers through programs like our Connect America Fund.” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said farmers need to be connected. “I can imagine a time in American agriculture where someone sits in an office … and basically plants a quarter-section of land in a day, operating their tractor from not the tractor but through automation,” she said. “None of that is possible if we don’t have the backbone of connectivity.”

Though much of the focus of Amazon’s drone development has been on the Amazon Prime Air initiative and its ultimate promise of delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes or less, Amazon Technologies landed a U.S. patent Tuesday that uses drones for the more efficient movement of inventory within the four walls of the warehouse. The patent (10,000,284) describes a “collaborative unmanned aerial vehicle for an inventory system” and was based on a June 2015 application. Modern inventory systems “face significant challenges in responding to requests for inventory items,” and those challenges become “non-trivial” with the growth of those systems, especially when stock needs to be split between ground floors and upper “mezzanine levels within a large structure,” it says. “Suppose that” Alice, an inventory management “agent,” needs to fill an order for items “on both the first floor and on the mezzanine,” it says. “To accomplish the formerly laborious task of obtaining all of these items, Alice can place a request for the items with an inventory system,” which can quickly “dispatch autonomous ground drive units on both the first floor and on the mezzanine to collect the items,” it says. “At the mezzanine, the items can be collected at a staging point and consolidated into a container for transport.” The staging point may double as a “docking station” for a drone, which can “subsequently lift the container and transport the items to a staging point at the first floor, where all of the items for the order can be consolidated and provided to Alice for shipping,” it says. Amazon didn’t comment Tuesday on the invention's commercial implications.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told the Senate Broadband Caucus Tuesday his travels across rural America have brought home to him how important broadband is to swaths of the country that haven't been connected. Carr recalled his visit to a Lincoln, Nebraska-based startup called Quantified Ag, which built a “Fitbit” for cattle. Early results show “the technology is helping to improve outcomes for the herd, saving time and money, and reducing the use of antibiotics and other treatments,” he said. Carr promised the FCC would continue its focus on closing the digital divide. “We need to keep cutting the regulatory red tape that needlessly drives up the costs of deploying broadband infrastructure,” he said. “We need to keep freeing up spectrum for next-generation uses. And we need to continue supporting rural broadband providers through programs like our Connect America Fund.” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said farmers need to be connected. “I can imagine a time in American agriculture where someone sits in an office … and basically plants a quarter-section of land in a day, operating their tractor from not the tractor but through automation,” she said. “None of that is possible if we don’t have the backbone of connectivity.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is going to Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington state this week on a new road trip to "highlight" how broadband expansion can close the digital divide and create opportunity, said an advisory Monday. He "will visit Tribal lands, a telehealth facility, an emergency communications center, a mining company, a potato farm, local Internet service providers, as well as meet with elected officials, local broadcasters, business leaders, and first responders."

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is going to Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington state this week on a new road trip to "highlight" how broadband expansion can close the digital divide and create opportunity, said an advisory Monday. He "will visit Tribal lands, a telehealth facility, an emergency communications center, a mining company, a potato farm, local Internet service providers, as well as meet with elected officials, local broadcasters, business leaders, and first responders."

The upcoming Tribal Mobility Fund Phase II auction should be weighted to provide money for the most remote and difficult to serve tribal lands, Smith Bagley Inc. told the FCC. SBI reported on meetings between Chairman Kevin Frawley and FCC staff. The carrier “presented demographic data from the U.S. Census and the Commission’s Connect2Health initiative demonstrating that the Tribal lands where SBI serves, as well as a number of others in the Lower 48, remain at a severe disadvantage compared to many other Tribal lands, and the rest of the nation.” It "would be a significant setback for the Commission’s ongoing efforts to promote telephone and broadband penetration on Tribal lands if the Tribal Mobility Fund II auction disbursed all of its funds to areas with better demographics and lower costs to serve, to the exclusion of the nation’s most challenging Tribal lands,” the carrier said, posted Friday in docket 10-90.

The House Appropriations Committee approved an FY 2019 budget bill Wednesday 28-20 without changes to proposed funding for the FCC and FTC. The Financial Services appropriations bill includes a combined $335 million for the FCC and its Office of Inspector General and $311 million for the FTC. It still includes text of the House-passed Email Privacy Act (HR-387) after the committee voted down a proposed amendment from Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, that would have stripped out the section that included the privacy language. HR-387's Senate companion (S-1654) remains at an impasse because of opposition from Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas (see 1806110044). HR-387 lead sponsor Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., objected to Kaptur's amendment since it would remove the best chance for the Senate to pass the Email Privacy Act. The Financial Services appropriations bill also retains language from the Amateur Radio Parity Act (HR-555/S-1534), which would direct the FCC to extend its rule on reasonable accommodation of amateur service communications to include private land use restrictions (see 1707130039 and 1805240040).

The House Appropriations Committee approved an FY 2019 budget bill Wednesday 28-20 without changes to proposed funding for the FCC and FTC. The Financial Services appropriations bill includes a combined $335 million for the FCC and its Office of Inspector General and $311 million for the FTC. It still includes text of the House-passed Email Privacy Act (HR-387) after the committee voted down a proposed amendment from Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, that would have stripped out the section that included the privacy language. HR-387's Senate companion (S-1654) remains at an impasse because of opposition from Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas (see 1806110044). HR-387 lead sponsor Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., objected to Kaptur's amendment since it would remove the best chance for the Senate to pass the Email Privacy Act. The Financial Services appropriations bill also retains language from the Amateur Radio Parity Act (HR-555/S-1534), which would direct the FCC to extend its rule on reasonable accommodation of amateur service communications to include private land use restrictions (see 1707130039 and 1805240040).

The House Appropriations Committee was marking up the FY 2019 Financial Services appropriations bill early Wednesday evening. It includes funding for the FCC and FTC. The House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee-cleared version of the budget bill allocated a combined $335 million to the FCC and its Office of Inspector General and $311 million to the FTC. The bill also includes the text of the Amateur Radio Parity Act (HR-555/S-1534), which would direct the FCC to extend its rule on reasonable accommodation of amateur service communications to include private land use restrictions (see 1707130039 and 1805240040).