New Orleans is mulling how it may legally deploy municipal fiber under competitive restrictions, said city Chief Information Officer Kimberly LaGrue Monday at NATOA’s virtual conference. State rules prevent cities from creating fiber broadband networks, LaGrue said: “We’re looking for legal opinions.” To ease potential ISP concerns, the city plans to make “some offers" for "partnerships that they could live with,” she said. “We don’t want to offer service to residents.” Municipal fiber is key to equitably distributing internet “as a utility to our residents,” said the CIO. The project recently got city council OK; the locality next will design fiber rings and seek bond funding, she said. Dublin, Ohio, has a fiber network for government, public safety and businesses, but the city isn’t selling to residents, said CIO Doug McCullough, although “eventually, we are going to have to become a service provider if we want to see broadband as a utility.” Boston Broadband and Cable Director Mike Lynch said broadband “should have been a utility back in 1996,” but “25 years later, we can’t put the cork back in the bottle.” That creates a “dilemma” for local governments seeking to address digital equity, he said. “I don’t think we can go back and make it a utility. On the other hand, we have to find the dollars to make it available.” Boston’s Wicked Free Wi-Fi uses the city’s network that’s “supposed to be for municipal use only,” so the municipality is careful to limit hot spots to parks, government buildings and business districts, Lynch said. “We do not try to make it available in home. We are not seeking to compete with broadband providers who gave us this fiber under the caveat that we would not compete with them.” NATOA plans to return its conference to Denver in 2022, this year’s original location before it went virtual due to COVID-19, Executive Director Tonya Rideout said. “What about 2021?” Rideout asked. “Well, the truth is we don’t know.” Depending on the pandemic and restoration of members’ travel and training budgets, next year’s conference could be virtual, in-person or a hybrid, she said.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is “committed to working with Congress to secure the necessary authority and funding to enhance remote learning services and broadband connectivity in various cities and towns affected by” COVID-19, he said in a letter to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., released Monday. Pai responded to a letter Warner sent in April urging the FCC to increase wireless power limits and decrease the size of the 75-kilometer exclusion zones where unlicensed access to the 5850-5895 MHz band is prohibited (see 2004160064). Pai wants Congress to allocate at least $430 million more for the FCC’s COVID-19 telehealth program in the next pandemic aid bill, and additional money for other connectivity (see 2008240054). Congress provided related funding in March.
The FCC intends to “finalize new rules … later this year” to allow TV white spaces devices to operate with higher power in less-congested areas, Chairman Ajit Pai told House Communications Subcommittee Vice Chair Doris Matsui, D-Calif., and 13 other lawmakers in letters released Monday. Microsoft and others urged the FCC to act on TVWS, though there was opposition (see 2006030023). Matsui and the other lawmakers supported the NPRM in their June letter to Pai. “Our proposals will expand broadband availability for more rural Americans,” Pai said. “I also agree with your assessment that the current [COVID-19] pandemic has put our need for spectrum in sharp relief.” The spectrum that TVWS devices operate in “allows for the delivery of services over relatively longer distances and is better suited to deal with variations of terrain,” Pai said. “This makes it more attractive for providing broadband in rural and remote areas. The devices operate on an unlicensed basis, reducing barriers to entry.”
The FCC won’t freeze radio regulatory fees or change the way it calculates them, and will continue phasing in fees for satellite providers, said an order and Further NPRM on FY 2020 regulatory assessments released Monday. Direct full-time equivalent employee allocations “best reflect the benefits provided to the payor,” the order said. The item, unanimously approved by the full FCC, includes measures intended to provide relief during the COVID-19 pandemic but doesn’t go as far as some broadcast commenters had requested. The agency can’t waive 2020 fees or late payments, or suspend fee increases over the current lack of advertising, the order said. Instead, the order streamlines the process of seeking hardship reductions or waivers, lowers the interest rate for installment payments of regulatory fees, and allows “red light” licensees to seek such relief. The agency will issue public notices with greater detail. The order adopts the population-based fees for TV broadcasters proposed in an earlier NPRM. “The population-based metric better conforms with the actual service authorized here -- broadcasting television to the American people,” the order said. “We disagree with the radio broadcasters that we should ignore our long-standing methodology in order to freeze regulatory fees for (and thus benefit) radio broadcasters at the expense of other regulatees,” said the order. “Because the Commission is statutorily obligated to recover the amount of its appropriation through regulatory fees, these fees are a zero-sum situation.” The agency also collect regulatory fees from most non-U.S. licensed space stations that have U.S. market access, the order said. Assessing the same regulatory amount on those stations as on U.S. licensed space stations “will better reflect the benefits received by these operators through the Commission’s adjudicatory, enforcement, regulatory, and international coordination activities,” the order said. The FNPRM seeks comment on methods for calculating fees for non-geostationary orbit satellites.
Despite mounting event cancellations, including that of CES 2021 (see 2007280034), IFA is taking a stab at the world’s first in-person tech show to be held during the pandemic era when it hosts a three-day physical and virtual hybrid event beginning Thursday. IFA 2020 Special Edition as it's called won’t look anything like a typical IFA at the Messe Berlin fairgrounds. The physical portion will limit daily attendance to 4,000 and will keep consumers away (see 2005190035). It’s also three days long compared with the usual six. Promoters claimed more than 250,000 trade and consumer visitors flocked to IFA 2019.
Some 78% of U.S. households have a subscription VOD service from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and/or Hulu, up from 69% in 2018, reported Leichtman Research Group Friday. About 55% of U.S. households have more than one SVOD service, an increase from 43% in 2018, it said. Forty percent of adults stream an SVOD service daily. The most active streamers are ages 18-44, with 63% of daily SVOD viewing. Some 30% of respondents said their Netflix subscription is shared with others outside their household, 23% for Hulu and 20% for Amazon Prime. Fifty-five percent of adults watch video on non-TV devices daily, including mobile phones, home computers and tablets; 44% watch video on a mobile phone daily, it said. The pandemic spurred an increase in SVOD and direct-to-consumer streaming video services, said principal Bruce Leichtman.
Mexico’s General Directorate of Standards granted UL authority through a special “designation” to do safety and energy efficiency testing globally for electronics products and equipment imported into that country, said the company Friday. Included are safety tests for audio, video and information technology products and uninterruptible power systems, plus energy efficiency tests for major appliances, it said. With the ability now to test at UL or UL-approved labs outside Mexico, UL “can help reduce time and cost to market for product access to the Mexican marketplace,” it said. Navigating the regulatory landscape of global markets is a “complex and challenging task,” said UL, and COVID-19 “has added another layer of complexity.” The designation means companies can test their products closer to their factories “and mitigate delays due to the pandemic," it said.
The Land Mobile Communications Council sought “expedited FCC action” to address alleged harmful interference from newly authorized DTV stations to Part 90 private land mobile radio (PLMR) systems. “This interference has rendered affected PLMR facilities entirely unusable in certain markets, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue as customers of commercial systems are forced to search for alternative communication options and incurred expenses as licensees have sought remedial action by the broadcasters and/or acquired other spectrum to which their operations could be moved,” said a Friday filing by the group. “The interference with what had been reliable communications endangers the safety of employees, disrupts operations at affected facilities, and poses a major threat to public safety in certain instances,” the council said: “The urgency of the problems demand FCC action to enforce those regulations and policies as promptly as possible and to avoid the creation of similar problems in the future.” The filing cites incidents in major markets from New York to Los Angeles, mostly focused on co-channel interference in the T-band, which is considered the most difficult problem to solve. Enterprise Wireless Alliance President Mark Crosby said in a statement. “Some EWA members are so frustrated that they wonder if the reaction of a few TV stations might be ‘There is nothing we can do; the environment is the root cause; we didn’t want to move in the first place; or, maybe the PLMR incumbents will go away in time and leave us alone,’” he said: “These are unacceptable responses as the PLMR industry is as vital to the well-being of this country as are broadcasters, even if not as well known. The LMCC seeks only a fair hearing and the FCC’s active support towards a resolution.” Fletcher Heald’s Peter Tannenwald told us he has been in the thick of one of the fights for a low-power station. “It is very difficult to determine what the actual facts are, partly because the land mobile people seem to want to be at war, in the sense that they want complete victory more than a compromise resolution, and partly because field observation that you really need to pin down the problem is nearly impossible during the pandemic,” Tannenwald said: “The FCC doesn’t make things any easier, because it talks to both sides ex parte, through different bureaus. Then the Wireless and Media bureaus talk, and we don’t know what goes on between them.” NAB is reviewing the filing, a spokesperson said.
Law enforcement is grappling with an increase in child exploitation as online activity surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, police and child advocates said in interviews. Law enforcement officials cited cyber tip increases across the country. Advocates want more investigatory resources, national legislation and for Big Tech to be held accountable.
Customers of cloud services company NetApp are “adapting to the new normal” under COVID-19, said CEO George Kurian on a fiscal Q1 investor call Wednesday. “Companies are moving beyond the initial response to the pandemic of operationalizing work from home,” and are now seeking to speed “digital transformations to drive competitive advantage by delivering services and products remotely,” he said. The acceleration means more enterprises are managing their information tech “environments both on-premises and in the cloud,” he said.