Nintendo will continue to sell the current Wii and coming Wii U “side by side for some period of time” after the Wii U’s Nov. 18 launch in the U.S., Nintendo of America (NOA) President Reggie Fils-Aime said at a Thursday briefing for analysts in New York, without specifying the length of time. He didn’t say if a price cut on the current $149.99 Wii is planned.
The Enterprise Wireless Alliance (EWA) called on the FCC to revise its process for collecting regulatory fees. “This process has not been re-evaluated since originally implemented in 1994, almost twenty years ago, but light years away when considering the seismic changes in the regulatory landscape during that twenty-year period,” the group said in a comment filing (http://xrl.us/bnos63). “While a substantial percentage of the Alliance’s members also utilize spectrum regulated under other FCC rules, both licensed and unlicensed, the spectrum authorized under Part 90 typically represents the core of their communications facilities. For this reason, EWA and its members have a keen interest in the FCC’s investigation of its regulatory fee structure generally and, in particular, in the portion of the covered costs presumed to be attributable to the Part 90 Private Land Mobile Radio services."
The FCC will soon launch a rulemaking proceeding on technical and services rules for the 700 MHz band in an effort to get rid of rules that are “out of date” as a result of the February spectrum law, David Furth, deputy chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau, told the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council Thursday. The FCC will also address technical interference issues, he said. The rules will ensure that the proposed FirstNet can “co-exist” with other 700 MHZ licensees without interference problems, he said. Furth said the FCC has seen substantial progress on getting more licensees into compliance with a requirement that public safety and industrial/business land mobile radio systems in certain UHF and VHF frequencies migrate from 25 kHz channel bandwidth to 12.5 kHz or narrower technology by Jan. 1. Some 24 percent of systems have completed the transition, while 43 percent are “in transition” and 33 percent remain “wideband only” based on a review of FCC records, he said. “We certainly hope and expect that many of those licensees will be changing their status by the deadline,” Furth said. He warned that the FCC will pursue enforcement actions against systems that don’t comply with the rules or receive a waiver. More guidance will follow from the FCC over the next month or so, he said. Furth said the FCC is very focused on communications problems following the recent derecho wind storm, particularly 911 outages. “We're looking at this as a really important issue, more broadly, in terms of making sure we can derive lessons from this experience to help to make 911 systems more resilient and the carriers’ networks that deliver 911 calls to those systems more resilient so that we don’t have these types of outage problems in the future,” he said.
There’s no truth to rumors swirling around last week’s IFA show in Berlin that CES has landed Apple as an exhibitor and that Apple CEO Tim Cook will give a keynote, CEA President Gary Shapiro told us. The iLounge Pavilion at CES is “huge, and we love Apple,” Shapiro said of the 300-exhibitor-strong Tech Zone at the Las Vegas Convention Center that will sport exhibits of third-party Apple software and accessories. But as for Apple itself exhibiting and keynoting CES, Shapiro said: “We do hope and even pray that someday we can confirm these rumors. But to my knowledge they are not true for 2013.”
Inmarsat partnered with Cobham Satcom, Paradigm Comm and Skyware Global as part of its upcoming Global Xpress service. The companies “will manufacture commercial land satellite terminals from 0.6 to 2.4 meters ... covering the fixed, transportable, ‘fly-away,’ and ‘manpack’ terminal types,” Inmarsat said in a news release Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnon5z). It said Global Xpress is scheduled to debut in 2014 and will offer “unprecedented” high data-rate bandwidth and global coverage.
There’s no truth to rumors swirling around last week’s IFA show in Berlin that CES has landed Apple as an exhibitor and that Apple CEO Tim Cook will give a keynote, CEA President Gary Shapiro told us. The iLounge Pavilion at CES is “huge, and we love Apple,” Shapiro said of the 300-exhibitor-strong Tech Zone at the Las Vegas Convention Center that will sport exhibits of third-party Apple software and accessories. But as for Apple itself exhibiting and keynoting CES, Shapiro said: “We do hope and even pray that someday we can confirm these rumors. But to my knowledge they are not true for 2013.”
There’s no truth to rumors swirling around last week’s IFA show in Berlin that CES has landed Apple as an exhibitor and that Apple CEO Tim Cook will give a keynote, CEA President Gary Shapiro told us. The iLounge Pavilion at CES is “huge, and we love Apple,” Shapiro said of the 300-exhibitor-strong Tech Zone at the Las Vegas Convention Center that will sport displays of third-party Apple software and accessories. But as for Apple itself exhibiting and keynoting CES, Shapiro said: “We do hope and even pray that someday we can confirm these rumors. But to my knowledge they are not true for 2013.”
Forcing public safety agencies to move off the T-band will have an impact on communications interoperability, according to early results of a poll released Thursday at the quarterly meeting of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council. Public safety got the 700 MHz D-block in the February spectrum law, but in return had to give up the T-band, heavily used in 11 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. In August, NPSTC sent out a questionnaire (http://xrl.us/bnkk2a) to gather information as the group prepares a report (CD Aug 14 p6).
BERLIN -- The chief of TP Vision, the Philips-TPV joint venture that’s now running the Philips TV business in Europe, most of Asia and some South American markets, won’t rule out making a play for the Philips TV business in North America once the Philips licensing agreement with Funai expires at the end of 2015, he told us in an exclusive interview at IFA. “It’s not a question at this stage for me to answer,” Maarten de Vries, TP Vision’s CEO, told us Friday.
The FCC’s forthcoming decision on determining liability when telemarketing calls violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act could have a significant impact on relationships between companies and the telemarketing entities they hire, telecom and antitrust attorneys said. Last month the FTC sued Dish Network for violating telemarketing rules after consumers received telemarketing calls by a third party on behalf of Dish (CD Aug 24 p13). A pending decision from the FCC would affect how liability in this case and another FTC case against Dish is to be determined, they said.