Wireless companies are “doing an extraordinary job” of maximizing spectrum efficiency but are reaching the upper limits of their capacity, a CTIA-funded research paper said (CD May 5 p14). “By every relevant measure, the U.S. wireless industry uses this spectrum extremely efficiently, not only approaching the theoretical limits of what physics allows, but with what is practically achievable with respect to deployment,” study author Peter Rysavy said in his report, filed Thursday by CTIA in dockets 09-51, 10-235 and 10-237. Wireless companies have had to “bankroll new network technologies every three or four years, on average,” but have multiplied their networks’ capacity by a factor of 4,708 since 1985, Rysavy wrote: “Unfortunately, the continual advances in spectral efficiency the industry has been able to achieve will not be able to persist forever due to fundamental constraints of physics expressed in the Shannon Bound,” the “theoretical limit on the bps/Hz that can be achieved relative to noise.”

The Supreme Court has ruled different ways in First Amendment cases, depending partly on what issue is at stake, so court observers said at an FCBA panel on Thursday that they can’t generalize across all cases. In the five years under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has accepted 19 free-speech cases that don’t have to do with religion, said First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere of Davis Wright. Of the 14 cases where the court has ruled, it decided in favor of free speech in six of them and eight times against it, he said. Roberts’ tenure hasn’t been “entirely promising,” but recent cases give free-speech proponents more to cheer about, said Corn-Revere, who moderated a panel on the First Amendment and the high court.

Cablevision is developing new TV Everywhere products and looking at leveraging its New York-area Wi-Fi network to deliver some video to subscribers’ electronic devices, Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said during the company’s Q1 earnings teleconference Thursday. For now, the company’s iPad application delivers the company’s channel lineup to subscribers using it in the home. Expanding that outside the home would require additional content licenses from Cablevision’s programmers, he said. One area that represents kind of a middle ground between the open Internet and Cablevision subscribers’ home network is the Wi-Fi network the cable operator is building around New York. “The Wi-Fi network is an Internet service, but it’s controlled by us and for the benefit of our customers, so it creates another space for us to exploit,” he said.

President Barack Obama didn’t encourage the FCC to act on net neutrality, Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a hearing Thursday of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Internet. Genachowski and Commissioner Robert McDowell clashed over whether antitrust laws would have been enough to keep the Internet open. Internet Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he continues to explore legislation updating antitrust laws to reduce costs for those with net neutrality complaints.

As the federal government looks to develop a disaster information system, the service must be adapted to the way the public communicates through social media and on the mobile platform, witnesses said Thursday during testimony at the Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery and Intergovernmental Affairs. While some emergency organizations and technology companies have implemented social media and other technologies into their recovery-related operations, open and interoperable standards across government systems can make the process more effective, they said.

Local TV news isn’t irrelevant, amid an onslaught of news and opinion from websites and social media run by both professionals and amateurs, the head of the FCC’s Future of Media project said. Among the myths Steve Waldman has found as he’s putting together the study is that “traditional” local TV “is going to become irrelevant,” he said. “We're getting into the homestretch of getting this report out the door,” so “I'm getting a little bit cautious about scooping myself,” he told an FCBA continuing education event.

DirecTV has starting working on contingency plans for Q3, when it typically markets its NFL Sunday Ticket, to deal with the possible NFL lockout, the company said Thursday during its Q1 earnings call. It’s too early to say exactly how a lockout would affect DirecTV’s earnings, it said. The labor dispute between NFL players and owners threatens to take away DirecTV’s popular NFL Sunday Ticket as a subscription marketing tool, though there are many scenarios over how the fight will play out, said CEO Mike White. Although about a quarter of the company’s Q3 gross-adds took the NFL Sunday Ticket in 2010, observers shouldn’t say that number of subscribers will automatically be gone if the NFL doesn’t play its season, he said. DirecTV is working on other promotions to help deal with the impact of a lost season, he said.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is a “strict liability statute,” leaving a company responsible for calls dialed by others to market the original company’s goods, said California, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio in comments with the FCC. Those states, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department brought suit against Dish Network for TCPA violations. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Cincinnati, asked that the FCC, rather than the courts, make the first decision about whether Dish is liable for improper telemarketing calls made by contractors working for it (CD Jan 3 p5). A lower court dismissed the original claims, but the decision was appealed. The appeals court said the FCC has primary jurisdiction because the likely penalties were below the $75,000 minimum for federal courts to have jurisdiction, because the FCC has the expertise to handle it, and because an FCC decision would apply nationwide. The comments are in docket 11-50.

Time Warner isn’t interested in spinning off HBO, Chairman Jeffrey Bewkes said Wednesday during the company’s Q1 earnings teleconference. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield had laid out a case for why the company should let HBO stand on its own. He said spinning it off could reduce Time Warner’s leverage and give HBO and Warner Brothers Studios the freedom to experiment with new business models, such as bypassing pay-TV operators.

The FCC is moving forward on drafting an order on a Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation revamp and is working on accelerating the process, said Carol Mattey, deputy chief of the Wireline Bureau, during a D.C. Bar panel Wednesday. Industry panelists urged immediate action on VoIP and a more targeted USF.