The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology gave T-Mobile USA “special temporary authority” to launch tests of spectrum sharing with federal government users in the 1755-1780 MHz and 2155-2180 MHz bands. The move by OET could generate some of the first real-world data on how well sharing would work, industry executives said. The Obama administration has been increasingly focused on sharing as an alternative to clearing spectrum for commercial use (CD July 23 p1).
CTIA and carriers won a victory at the Federal Election Commission, which handed down an advisory order saying carriers are not responsible for enforcing election laws when they lease smart codes used to make contributions to a political campaign. Jan Baran, an election law expert at Wiley Rein who represented CTIA on the issue, called it a “good decision” that allows carriers to move forward on working with campaigns to process electronic contributions.
Several Virginia 911 directors met with Verizon officials Wednesday for a long closed-door meeting at the Alexandria Police Facility in northern Virginia. They discussed Verizon’s 911 failures during the June 29 derecho storm and reviewed a Verizon report on the outages at four 911 centers in northern Virginia as a result of two busted generators (CD Aug 15 p1). The telco remained contrite about the failure as the 911 directors emphasized the depth of the problem, participants told us just outside of the gathering and during interviews Tuesday.
AT&T’s expected buildout of its 4G LTE network may spark another wave of data usage growth -- and the carrier stands to benefit from that investment, said Chief Financial Officer John Stephens. “We expect that when the LTE buildout is complete for us next year, and devices catch up with our buildout, that we're going to see another step up,” he said at an Oppenheimer investor conference in Boston Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnkue5): “Will it grow at the same rate it’s grown in the past five years? Possibly.” Overall mobile data consumption in the U.S. will reach 2 exabytes this year, said Chetan Sharma Consulting, a wireless consulting firm (http://xrl.us/bnkt4z).
Content owners and pay-TV distributors suggested some changes to a proposed rule from the U.S. Copyright Office that would allow rights holders to audit the compulsory license fees they receive from distributors. The office initiated the rulemaking in June after content owners petitioned in January for action on an element of the 2010 satellite-TV reauthorization bill that called for establishing such audit procedures. All the parties generally supported the proposed rules. Distributors sought to limit the audit system from being provided retroactively or expanded, and content owners sought to impose payment deadlines and expand their access to confidential material.
Disputes about retransmission and carriage agreements have drawn the attention of lawmakers, said media executives whose opinions vary on which way Congress might lean. At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last month on updating the 1992 Cable Act, lawmakers said constituents have complained to them about recent blackouts due to retrans negotiation disputes between programmers and cable and satellite-TV distributors (CD July 25 p5). Disputes resulted in blackouts in cities in Wyoming, West Virginia, Illinois and other states. They were followed by high-profile disputes between Viacom and DirecTV (CD July 12 p10) over cable channels like Nickelodeon and Time Warner Cable and Hearst Television, which affected 15 TV stations (CD July 11 p18).
Cell site data is entitled to the same protection as GPS data and also cannot be used by the government to track someone without a warrant without violating the 4th Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Center for Democracy & Technology said in an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The June 29 “derecho” storm cut off 911 calls to four Mid-Atlantic public safety answering points and did more damage as a whole than Hurricane Irene, said a report by Verizon. It’s set for delivery at a closed-door meeting of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) Wednesday. With the FCC poised to look again at whether it should impose backup power rules, Verizon went out of its way to clarify that its backup power facilities worked with only two exceptions, even though the carrier lost power at 100 locations. The derecho-related problems are the subject of an ongoing FCC investigation. The council first voted to investigate July 11 and said “the elected leadership of our region expects far better than this” (http://xrl.us/bnkpi8).
Partisan ire with the Senate cybersecurity impasse boiled over Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats bashed each other for failing to increase the nation’s cybersecurity posture. Republican sponsors of the SECURE IT Act (S-2151) blamed Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the White House for the Senate’s failure to pass cybersecurity legislation before the August recess. Reid, and a spokeswoman for Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., continued to lay the blame on GOP intransigence.
In the last two years, he has perhaps submitted more comments to the FCC than any other party. He has chimed in on dozens of dockets, from media ownership to USF. He has no law degree or experience in working in the telecom industry. So far this month, he has submitted more than 300 comments.