Matt Daneman

Critics of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable are continuing to lobby the FCC, seeking conditions or full blockage. The docket had been relatively quiet until the FCC paused the 180-day shot clock earlier this month, one cable industry lawyer told us. The shot clock resumed Wednesday and stood at 118 days Friday.

With air travelers increasingly demanding high-speed Internet while aloft, satellite companies’ in-flight connectivity businesses are growing. "There's not enough bandwidth for all the markets we're going after," said Don Buchman, vice president of ViaSat's commercial mobility business. Air-to-ground (ATG) connectivity could start regaining some lost market share depending on how quickly the FCC moves on a Qualcomm petition for establishing an in-flight air-to-ground mobile broadband spectrum in the 14-14.5 GHz band on a secondary basis, satellite industry consultant Tim Farrar said. "It's really a critical time to see how that balance will shape up over the next five to 10 years."

A broader definition of multichannel video programming distribution to include some types of over-the-top video could be a boon for OTT operators looking to add local broadcast content to their offerings, or is a solution in search of a nonexistent problem, panelists said Tuesday at an FCBA panel. Such a reclassification is "putting a thumb on the scale way before it's necessary or appropriate," said 21st Century Fox Associate General Counsel Jared Sher. Minus the protections that come with MVPD categorization, some OTT providers "are going to be left 'under the bottom,'" said Jonathan Allen of Rini O'Neil.

Now needing additional downlink spectrum for its terrestrial broadband network, LightSquared is asking the FCC for reallocation and auction of a slice of spectrum used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and for conditions on its spectrum license that would let LightSquared share it. By giving up 10 MHz of spectrum as part of an agreement with GPS companies, the LightSquared LTE network "cannot be deployed without access to alternative downlink spectrum" compatible with the company's L-band uplink bands, meaning the FCC needs to reallocate the 1675-1680 MHz band for commercial sharing, it said in a filing to be posted Thursday in docket 12-340.

LightSquared's settlements with three GPS companies could carry considerable weight with the FCC as LightSquared seeks modification of its Ancillary Terrestrial Components (ATC) license to allow its proposed L-band terrestrial broadband service, people familiar with the company tell us. "Typically, when industry can work these kinds of issues out, that's well received" by the agency, company President Doug Smith said Friday.

Despite reluctance in much of the rest of the world, the U.S. plans to plow ahead on making spectrum available for 5G "in a timely manner," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Thursday. That the World Radiocommunication Conference-15 said it would look at bands above 6 GHz for 5G but not the 28 GHz band (see 1510230050) -- which had been an FCC priority -- "will not slow the activity in this country," Wheeler said as the commissioners heard a report on WRC-15, which wrapped up last month. Minus 28 GHz, the bands identified by WRC-19 and the bands part of the FCC spectrum frontiers NPRM have significant overlap, said International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre. Spectrum frontiers likely will be complete by WRC-19, she said. Identifying global allocations of spectrum is increasingly difficult, De La Torre said. Regional allocations "might be more realistic," she said: WRC footnotes denoting the policy of one or a small collection of nations are increasingly common.

The Supreme Court's ruling for DirecTV on binding arbitration language in customers' service agreements has little applicability in the real world, "but the consequences are profound" since it marks a landmark reversal of a state court decision on arbitration, on the grounds a state court misapplied state contract law, said Harvey Rosenfield, a founder of Consumer Watchdog. As a result, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) now seems to supersede everything, including parties' contract terms, legal experts tell us. "What the majority did here was dangerous and leads to a very slippery slope. In effect, the majority just federalized a big area of contract law, which has traditionally been a subject of state regulation and oversight," said Imre Szalai, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and co-author of an amicus brief in the case.

Any 5G deployment will need low- and mid-band spectrum allocations plus high band to enable such applications as IoT, and sizably different infrastructure from 4G, with many more small cell sites, said CTIA Chief Technology Officer Tom Sawanobori Wednesday at an FCBA telecom and wireless committees event. Unlike the traditional spectrum evolution where a technology came first, followed by technical requirements and regulations, 5G represents "a slightly different equation," said Michael Ha, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Policy and Rules Division deputy chief. The increasing demand for bandwidth for data transmission and the relative lack of unassigned spectrum is pushing the move into the millimeter wave bandwidths to support 5G, Ha said. The spectrum frontiers rulemaking (see 1510230050) is looking at bands above 24 GHz for 5G, and the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference identified some bands for 5G -- though 28 GHz, a subject of the FCC proceeding, wasn't included in the WRC work, Ha said. While numerous incumbent satellite operations already use that spectrum, Ha said, sharing is inevitable: "We know it's not going to be exclusive use." The satellite industry wants to be part of 5G -- such as in potential applications like driverless vehicles -- but also wants assurances and safeguards against harmful interference, said Satellite Industry Association President Tom Stroup. "We certainly are advocates of sharing, where it works." 4G has become ubiquitous in the U.S., with roughly 98.5 percent of the nation covered and traffic on the 4G network expected to sextuple over the next five years, Sawanobori said. Such applications as Voice over LTE are expected to become commonplace as soon as more products offer "high-definition voice," he said. 5G, by contrast, probably won't be deployed ubiquitously across the U.S. due to different business models, Sawanobori said.

LTE-U Forum backers and 3GPP allies continue to duke it out before the FCC. CTIA fired back Thursday at complaints that efforts to ensure coexistence between LTE-unlicensed and Wi-Fi are being partially hijacked. Those calls "for a formal standards review upends the permissionless innovation that is the hallmark of unlicensed spectrum policy," CTIA said in a submission in docket 15-105.

Defining 5G characteristics and carving out spectrum for it "clearly will be a major goal" for the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference, said Decker Anstrom, U.S. ambassador to WRC-15. The WRC also will take a U.S.-favored approach of identifying 11 specific bands between 24 and 86 GHz that would be looked at, Anstrom said on a call with reporters Monday. "We learned from WRC-15, leaving this open ended for a variety of bands to be looked at was not a helpful process," he said. "We wanted to be clear about the bands that would be studied."