The FCC approved further tweaks to location accuracy rules for wireless carriers, and also asked still more questions about the future of 911. Most significantly, the commission moved the industry another step toward a requirement that all carriers -- GSM and CMRS -- evaluate how well they do meeting location accuracy rules using handset-based testing. The agency approved a report and order, a second further notice of proposed rulemaking and an NPRM by a 4-0 vote Tuesday. None of the documents were posted by the FCC by our deadline.
FCC commissioners approved a “cramming” notice of proposed rulemaking 4-0 Tuesday. FCC officials confirmed that the notice asks questions about both wireless and wireline billing abuses (CD April 5 p1). As part of the NPRM, the FCC is pondering going so far as to require consumer bills to be sent by carriers in a particular format and using a specific font. Cramming is the practice of billing customers -- often on behalf of third parties -- for products or services they either didn’t order or don’t want.
Pending program carriage rules seem unlikely to be rewritten by career FCC staffers at the behest of Chairman Julius Genachowski after a court ruling in a media ownership case tossing out a regulation because adequate public notice wasn’t given about the potential for that rule, agency officials said Tuesday. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2-1 decision last week in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC does have import for program carriage, the NCTA has said. Cable operators have contended previously that adequate notice wasn’t provided in a 2007 rulemaking.
The Wireless Communications Association asked the FCC to approve its petition seeking higher out-of-band-emission limits for mobile digital stations in the 2.5 GHz band to allow for the use of the wider channel bandwidths (http://xrl.us/bkzsuy). The WCA petition for rulemaking was supported by equipment makers and the Telecommunications Industry Association, who agreed the change could lead to more use of Educational Broadband Service (EBS) and Broadband Radio Service (BRS) spectrum.
The FCC is in the “home stretch” of its Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime overhaul, Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday. Speaking after the commission’s monthly meeting, Genachowski said he didn’t “think it’s news” that the relevant orders won’t be ready in August, given his aides have said the same (CD June 16 p2). Genachowski said he’s confident that orders are coming soon. “The staff is working very hard,” he said at a news conference. “The stakeholders are working very hard.” It’s “very important” that USF is retooled for Internet service “in a way that tackles inefficiency” and “waste,” as well as closes “the rural-urban divide” and meets U.S. broadband goals, Genachowski said.
The FCC should reject calls to regulate the “thriving” online video distribution marketplace and leave online video distributors (OVDs) free from rules, Comcast said. The marketplace is working fine but its existence doesn’t give “the Commission any authority to apply, or indeed any factual support for applying, outdated regulations to either OVDs themselves or to MVPDs that interact with OVDs” it said. Public Knowledge and DirecTV have both raised the issue in comments with the agency.
The FCC should enact narrower rules on keeping a lid on the volume of TV ads than what it proposed, all types of multichannel video programming distributors and TV stations said. They said the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act is more limited in scope than an FCC rulemaking notice on last year’s legislation. The notice said “we also interpret the statutory language ’the transmission of commercial advertisements’ to apply to all such transmissions by stations/MVPDs.” Instead, the act is meant to apply only to ads originated by broadcasters and providers of cable, DBS and telco-TV, those entities said in comments posted Monday in docket 11-93. Even before the rulemaking was released in May, the commission was lobbied by industry to adopt that interpretation (CD May 26 p7).
Wireless carriers have plenty of incentives to protect their own networks, without additional government rules, CTIA said in a filing at the commission in docket 11-60 (CD July 11 p7). Industry comments due last week, but posted by the FCC Monday, largely agreed that the FCC need not step in and should not impose overly prescriptive rules for making networks more robust and able to survive disaster.
The FCC Enforcement Bureau sided with an independent cable programmer and went against Comcast in the first program carriage case to be heard by an administrative law judge under Chairman Julius Genachowski. Chief FCC ALJ Richard Sippel should recommend that commissioners fine Comcast $375,000 and require it to carry the network as extensively as sports channels the cable operator owns, the bureau said. Sippel should find Comcast discriminated on the basis of affiliation, hurting the indie channel’s ability to compete, said the recommended decision. It was distributed privately by the bureau late Friday, unavailable Monday in docket 10-204 but sent to us by an agency official.
The FCC and the Administration should press forward on their “diligent efforts” to evaluate all commercial and federal government spectrum that could be reallocated for wireless broadband, CEA said in a filing responding to an FCC public notice asking for technical input on the best approaches to encourage the growth of terrestrial mobile broadband services in the 2 GHz range. But wireless carriers said in individual filings that the FCC must proceed with care as it determines how to get 2 GHz spectrum into play for wireless broadband.