House Republicans aren’t on a “quest” to take back broadband stimulus money already obligated, said Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. He has a draft bill (CD Feb 10 p7) to speed the return of unused and misused money provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. After a hearing on the draft Thursday, Walden told reporters his goal is to set up “safeguards” to ensure that problems with broadband stimulus programs are found and to hasten the return of money to the U.S. Treasury.
Sprint Nextel added almost 1.2 million subscribers Q4, the first quarter it has added postpaid subscribers in more than three years. The company narrowed its loss to $929 million from $980 million a year earlier. Sprint will announce its long-term 4G strategy by midyear and may switch from WiMAX to LTE, CEO Dan Hesse indicated in a conference call Thursday.
IPhone fever appeared fairly low-grade at one of the two largest Verizon Wireless stores in Manhattan early Thursday when doors opened on 34th Street for in-store sales of Apple’s 3G iPhone 4. Verizon had prepared for a much larger crowd, but most of the roughly 18 stanchions perched outside the store for crowd control remained stacked against a post in our 90 minutes at the store. When we arrived about 6:30 a.m., prior to the scheduled opening at 7 a.m., 14 consumers, many sipping hot coffee, stood in line braving 26-degree temperatures. The line was far shorter than we, and apparently Verizon, had anticipated.
FCC action on a longstanding proposal to create Ku-band rules for the aeronautical mobile satellite service is in the works at the International Bureau, said commission officials and industry executives. The rules -- expected to resemble rules for vehicle-mounted earth stations and earth station on vessel in the same band -- would aid the inclusion of satellite broadband devices when airplanes are manufactured, said an industry executive. The FCC put out a rulemaking notice to set rules for the Ku-band service in 2005 but it has received sparse attention from industry, commission records show.
There are “surprising new developments” in the latest global fiber deployment rankings, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council said at its Milan conference Thursday. Turkey made the list for the first time, and the United Arab Emirates popped up fourth in FTTH market penetration, ahead of all European and Americas economies, the council said. Russia is about to overtake the U.S. in fiber connection penetration, it said, but European deployment remains slow and patchy. European Commission Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes blamed regulators, saying their uneven enforcement of next-generation access rules is hampering investment.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- An FTC commissioner made explicit the iron fist of federal legislation beneath the velvet glove of industry self-regulation that the commission left open in a recent privacy report supporting a Do Not Track system for online information. “We will go to Congress to take up this issue” if industry “doesn’t move quickly and sufficiently,” Commissioner Julie Brill said late Wednesday at a Berkeley Center for Law and Technology conference. The December preliminary report left open whether Do Not Track should be required by law.
The FCC is launching a “broadband acceleration initiative,” Chairman Julius Genachowski said Wednesday. An internal task force made up of FCC staff is to develop “concrete recommendations” on which the FCC will seek comments in a notice of inquiry to be released in April, he said. Genachowski said the staff task force is to build on work done so far by the commission’s newly reconstituted Technology Advisory Council, headed by Tom Wheeler, former CTIA and NCTA president.
States aren’t expected to be squeezed out of the Universal Service Fund system anytime soon and they'll actively engage in the FCC’s USF and Intercarrier Compensation proceeding, Tony Clark, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commission, said in an interview. The FCC voted Tuesday to issue a broadly worded rulemaking notice to reshape the USF and ICC system (CD Feb 9 p1). The notice has an entire section on the role of states, an FCC official told us.
A draft House bill on broadband stimulus spending would take away NTIA’s discretion to decide when to take back grants provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The draft bill by Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., also would speed delivery of reclaimed funds to the U.S. Treasury. But committee Democrats asked in a Democratic Commerce Committee staff memo circulated Wednesday among lobbyists why the bill is necessary.
Fox affiliates could end up paying higher fees for network programming or risk losing their affiliations entirely, according to a letter from Fox Affiliate Sales and Marketing President Michael Hopkins sent to station owners last week. The letter came in response to a Jan. 28 letter from affiliate board Chairman Brian Brady who wrote that Fox had rejected several proposals from the board’s negotiating committee and is instead seeking to negotiate directly with each station or group. “The network values the partnership with our affiliates even while we realize that our proposal may not work for every company,” Fox’s Hopkins wrote in his Feb. 4 letter. “If that should be the case, Fox will have to pursue different distribution channels to receive a fair value for our programming and continue to run a successful network. We don’t want that to sound like a threat, but it is a fact."