On Feb. 6, the following trade-related bills and resolutions were introduced:
Charter Communications names Charles Fisher, ex-Guggenheim Securities, senior vice president-corporate finance, and Stefan Anninger, ex-Credit Suisse, vice president-investor relations … Joanna Dodd Massey, ex-UPN, named senior vice president-corporate communications & publicity for The Hub Television Network … Univision Communications promotes Trisha Pray to executive vice president-network sales … Data center company Mellanox Technologies promotes Amir Prescher to senior vice president-business development … VeriFone Systems names Marc Rothman, ex-Motorola Mobility, executive vice president-chief financial officer, and promotes Jay Parsons to senior vice president-digital media and taxi operations … Lobbyist registrations: federal IT reseller Carahsoft, Iron Mountain, and VMware, Efrus Federal Advisors, effective Jan 1 … Vormetric, Efrus Federal Advisors, effective Jan 24 … trans-Pacific fiber cable owner PC Landing, K&L Gates, effective Dec. 12.
The FCC International Bureau allowed Iridium to modify its license to provide Aeronautical Mobile Satellite (Route) Service (AMSRS) in the 1618.725-1626.5 MHz band. Grant of the application serves the public interest by providing enhanced options “for safety communications with aircraft in areas in which such communications are currently unavailable or limited,” the bureau said in a memorandum opinion and order (http://xrl.us/boestt). The license is subject to several conditions, including limiting AMSRS operations outside the U.S. to the oceanic regions, Antarctic land mass and adjacent waters “and the remote areas of those territories for which it has successfully completed the agreement seeking process” pursuant to ITU radio regulations, it said. Iridium also is required to give priority to AMSRS and 911 safety messages, “by real-time preemption if necessary, over all Iridium message traffic that isn’t considered safety-related pursuant to a recognized safety service,” it said.
State regulators tackled the significance of the FCC’s access recovery charge (ARC) early on at its winter committee meetings in Washington. Panelists struggled to make sense of the charge, which has spurred heated filings between the D.C. Public Service Commission and Verizon and is a concern that’s come up in other states, as FCC filings have shown. A panel of telco and state regulators met Saturday afternoon to discuss the contested charge, introduced to make up for revenue telcos lost in reduced access rates when the FCC issued its November 2011 USF order.
The FCC’s next steps on narrowbanding will come only after the commission has a chance to plow though the large number of applications for waivers filed by public safety and other licensees, a spokesman said Friday. He acknowledged that a small number of waiver applications came in after the deadline.
Nintendo slashed its Wii U hardware shipment forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 4 million, vs. the 5.5 million estimate that it gave in October (CED Oct 25 p9), the company said Wednesday. It also cut its fiscal year sales forecast to 670 billion yen from 810 billion yen “to reflect a lower-than-expected sales outlook based on the sales performance in the year-end sales season and afterward,” it said in an earnings news release.
The FCC Friday released model rules for broadband and wireless facility siting aimed at state and local governments. “This provision will accelerate deployment and delivery of high-speed mobile broadband to communities across the nation,” the FCC said in a news release (http://xrl.us/bocbtp). “This action will create greater certainty and predictability for providers that today invest more than $25 billion per year in mobile infrastructure, one of the largest U.S. sectors for private investment.” The commission also launched a proceeding looking at how to expedite the use of temporary cell towers, cells on wheels (COWs) and cells on light trucks (COLTs), to expand cell capacity during big events like the Presidential Inauguration or the Super Bowl.
Sprint Nextel asked the FCC to issue a declaratory ruling saying it won’t owe an anti-windfall payment to the federal government as a result of the 800 MHz rebanding. When the commission approved its landmark 800 MHz rebanding order in 2004, it required Nextel, then an independent company, to pay the full value of the 10 MHz national spectrum license it got as part of the rebanding agreement. Other carriers pushed for the provision as a matter of fairness. The FCC set the value of the license at $4.8 billion and the value of spectrum that Nextel would contribute as part of the rebanding at $2 billion. That left $2.8 billion in costs for Nextel to cover. The FCC has repeatedly put off the day of reckoning for Sprint to tally up its rebanding costs as the process took much longer than projected. Sprint has “substantially completed reconfiguring the 800 MHz Land Mobile Radio Band in the United States,” the carrier said in a petition filed at the FCC Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bob2gw). “Over 99 percent of all non-border U.S. and U.S.-Canada border area public safety incumbents have executed Frequency Reconfiguration Agreements with Sprint to retune their systems and over 80 percent of them are operating on their new channel assignments in the reconfigured 800 MHz band.” Sprint has already spent more than $3.1 billion, the carrier said. “When added to the Commission-determined $2 billion value of the 800 MHz spectrum Sprint contributed to make 800 MHz Reconfiguration possible, Sprint’s expenses and contributions far exceed the Commission determined $4.8 billion value of the 1.9 GHz ‘G Block’ ‘replacement’ spectrum the Commission assigned to Sprint in exchange for its financial and spectrum contributions to carrying out the Reconfiguration Plan."
Nintendo will expand its Miiverse social network for the Wii U to smartphones this spring, President Satoru Iwata said Wednesday in a Nintendo Direct webcast. As of now, gamers can only use the social network on the home console. Initially, the Miiverse smartphone browsing experience will be browser-based, but Nintendo will “create a dedicated Miiverse app in the future,” it said.
Belkin introduced an HDBaseT HDMI AV extender at the Building Industry Consulting Service International conference in Tampa this week. The Belkin solution provides high-quality AV connectivity over long distances using Cat 5e wire, the company said. While HDBaseT developer Valens Semiconductor has sought a landing for the technology in the residential custom AV market, so far it’s the commercial display world that has made the most space for HDBaseT, which can pass through HD video, multiple streams of uncompressed audio, control data, ethernet and power over a single Cat 5e cable. Last summer at Infocomm, Panasonic and Projectiondesign (CED June 18 p1) launched projectors with HDBaseT connectors for education and commercial markets, and Crestron, Gefen and Atlona are among the companies that have shown HDBaseT-compatible products for CEDIA installers. Belkin chose HDBaseT for its long-distance solution for education, government, conference centers and signage applications “because it packs superior performance into a small, plug-and-play solution that requires a fraction of the resources to set up, move and manage,” said Sydney Wen, product development manager for Belkin. Questions to Belkin about plans for a product for the residential market -- and whether its extender passes through power, ethernet and control signals -- weren’t answered by our deadline.