The Department of Homeland Security faces a “very tough” challenge to do all the necessary groundwork to meet an April deadline for the launch of a federal Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) allowing wireless carriers to send warning messages to their subscribers, said Denis Gusty of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate during a webinar Wednesday sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act enacted in 2006 mandated the launch of the warning network by that date.

Pandora is on track to hold a bigger share of listening hours “soon” than the largest radio station in each of the majority of U.S. markets, CEO Joe Kennedy said Wednesday. The company passed “an inflection point” in its heft as an ad medium by doubling its national share to 4.3 percent Q3 from a year earlier, he said in a webcast presentation from a Citi investors conference in San Francisco.

The femtocell market will languish unless mobile operators start using the technology to win customers and not just close coverage gaps, said ABI Research Mobile Networks Practice Manager Aditya Kaul in a report published just before the holidays. Although the number of operator contracts is rising sharply, the number of femtocells being shipped is hardly keeping pace, he said. But Femto Forum Chair Simon Saunders told us this week that ABI’s findings amount to “damning with faint praise,” because the jump in contracts shows many providers are edging up into greater femtocell use.

Broadcasters and pay TV must go beyond the Web to recruit staff, an FCC official overseeing equal employment opportunity rules said. It’s still not enough under EEO rules to recruit only online, the Media Bureau’s EEO head, Lewis Pulley, told the first-ever commission event on the regime. Broadcast lawyers said their clients would prefer to use job-search and classifieds websites over daily newspapers, who they see as competing with them for local ads. Pulley noted there’s no requirement for TV and radio stations and multichannel video programming distributors to buy ads in papers.

Few carriage and retransmission consent disputes spilled into 2012. A handful of negotiations between broadcasters and pay-TV distributors remained unresolved early this week, while one high-profile dispute between Time Warner Cable and Madison Square Garden Network continued on the cable programming side. “Virtually every broadcast/pay-TV carriage deal appears to have been negotiated to a successful conclusion, with little fanfare,” an NAB spokesman said, saying the lack of widespread problems proved “that retransmission consent is a free and fair market process that does not need government assistance.”

An auction of 119 FM frequencies may not raise much money for the U.S. Treasury. With radio stations still recovering from the Great Recession and lending for mergers and acquisitions tight, radio broadcasters may not have the financial wherewithal to bid up by much minimum payments for construction permits in FCC Auction 93, experts said. It seems unlikely to raise more money than auctions of a similar number of stations held by the commission last year and in 2009, said lawyers who represent radio stations before the agency. Last year’s auction had net winning bids of $8.54 million (CD April 28 p9), with $5.25 million (CD Sept 8/09 p7) in 2009.

T-Mobile USA might be ready to re-emerge as a competitor now that the deal with AT&T is over: The carrier is seeking low income-only eligible telecommunications carrier status in five states. Even as the deal with AT&T was moving forward, T-Mobile was quietly seeking certification as an ETC in four states. Meanwhile, it’s protesting the FCC’s 2011 Universal Service Fund order’s treatment of carriers designated as ETCs. Its petition for reconsideration or clarification (http://xrl.us/bmnmv4) of the FCC’s USF revamp order was the first major filing by T-Mobile since AT&T’s proposed buy of the company was officially terminated Dec. 19.

A maker of consumer electronics and the NCTA traded filings over whether letting all-digital cable systems encrypt basic programming would save energy. NCTA continued to contend that allowing encryption will be energy efficient, while Hauppauge Computer Works said it won’t help the environment. The filings from the association (http://xrl.us/bmnnob) and the company (http://xrl.us/bmnnof) were posted to docket 11-169 late last week. Earlier comments on a commission rulemaking notice from many cable operators backed allowing such encryption across the board, instead of the current waiver process (CD Nov 30 p11).

As part of their new efforts to sign up mid-sized and larger companies as business customers, major North American cable operators are increasingly rolling out more advanced hosted and managed voice services. They include Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and hosted IP-PBX offerings.

Petitions for reconsideration of the new Universal Service Fund rules came in from every corner of the telecom world. A review of docket 10-90 revealed no frontal challenges to the FCC’s October reforms (CD Oct 28 p1), but, as had occurred in the months-long runup to the reforms, each sector of industry gave a laundry lists of grievances to the FCC.