FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell opposes any move to set aside a contiguous swath of spectrum within the 700 MHz band for unlicensed use, he said Monday in a speech to the Global Forum in Brussels. McDowell said establishing a separate unlicensed allocation in the TV band would work against efforts to make the TV white spaces available as a kind of super Wi-Fi. McDowell has been a strong advocate of making the white spaces available as quickly as possible (CD Jan 28 p2). The FCC approved its original white spaces order three years ago.

Dish Network expects to get FCC approval in “relatively short order” for its acquisitions of TerreStar and DBSD, moving it closer to starting to build out a national wireless network, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said Monday. The FCC comment period ended Nov. 3 and if Dish gets commission approval, it could close on the purchases within 60 days, analysts said. Dish last week agreed to pay $114 million to Sprint to settle a legal battle tied to TerreStar and DBSD, it said Monday in an SEC filing. Sprint claimed it was owed $220 million by TerreStar and DBSD, and the settlement resolves the claims (CD Nov 7 p1), Dish said.

A “negligible” amount of Skype customers expect to be able to make emergency calls from their accounts, the company told the FCC in reply comments on docket 11-117. Skype hired research company Penn Schoen Berland to do an online survey of 1,001 paying Skype customers about their attitude to the service, the company said. It found that “less than 5” percent of Skype customers “indicate they would be likely to use Skype to place an emergency call,” the company said.

An unusual appeal of an FCC Media Bureau order gets a rare hearing Wednesday at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Cablevision and cable programmer Madison Square Garden Holdings appealed last month a pair of bureau orders against the companies and in favor of the two biggest telcos, rather than waiting for the full commission to act. Even rarer, said media lawyers not part of the case, is the New York court’s agreement to hear oral argument on the request for the 2nd Circuit to stay the bureau’s rulings (CD Sept 23 p5). The rulings gave AT&T and Verizon access to HD feeds of two regional sports channels owned by MSG, which used to be part of Cablevision.

Industry is worried that the FCC is apparently trying to put together an order on VoIP outage reporting for the December meeting, telecom lobbyists told us Friday. CTIA, USTelecom, NCTA, the VON Coalition and NTCA, among others, have all exchanged emails in recent days seeking letters and organizing meetings with FCC staff, urging the FCC not to adopt standards for “outage” that industry believes are arbitrary and unnecessary (CD Aug 10 p7).

Dish Network and Sprint Nextel settled a years-long legal battle over the cost of relocating broadcast auxiliary spectrum from the 2 GHz band, the companies said Friday. The confidential settlement should help Dish in its pursuit of FCC approval for the company’s purchase of DBSD and TerreStar, which control a combined 40 MHz of S-band spectrum, said industry executives. Dish is buying the companies out of bankruptcy. Other wireless filers in the proceeding pointed to procedural concerns.

An industry coalition and the Interior Department clashed sharply on what the FCC should do next to curb bird deaths caused by wireless towers. The written comments largely tracked points both sides made during a Sept. 20 FCC workshop (CD Sept 21 p 11). The comments were in response to a draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) released by the commission. The FCC found in that document that communications tower collisions kill millions of birds every year, but the numbers must be weighed against the overall U.S. bird population, estimated at 10 billion birds (CD Aug 30/10 p5).

The U.S. government shortened the length of Wednesday’s emergency alert system nationwide test to 30 seconds from more than three minutes, a public noticed released by the FCC Thursday said. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, shortening the duration of the test will achieve its two goals of testing the system while minimizing the potential disruption and chance for creating concern among the public. That’s something broadcasters and pay-TV providers have been working to remedy, along with the government (CD Oct 28 p12). FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on Friday asked EAS stakeholders for help educating the public about the exercise.

Chances appear very good that a spectrum sale will be part of any legislation recommended by the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, CEA President Gary Shapiro said in an interview on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, scheduled to be broadcast over the weekend. Shapiro was asked repeatedly about recommendations the group made in an Oct. 27 letter to the super committee (http://xrl.us/bmhuym). Shapiro said the likelihood the committee will recommend spectrum auctions is “well over 90 percent.”

Any Networx contractors that can’t start fulfilling client agencies’ requests for IPv6 work risk losing that work to competitors, a Defense Department official told us. “Discussions in various forums are underway to try to resolve this,” Ron Broersma, a member of the Federal IPv6 Task Force, said by email. “However, if I had my way I wouldn’t wait around for every Networx customer to ask for IPv6 service, but would instead use a top-down approach and ask every Carrier to deploy IPv6 service NOW to every Federal customer, since all will need the IPv6 connectivity to achieve the Federal mandates. If the Carriers can’t deliver, then the Agencies have the choice to switch Carriers.” Broersma spoke last week in San Jose, Calif., at the Gogonet Live conference on IPv6 implementation, about agencies’ poor start on meeting a September 2012 adoption deadline (CD Nov 3 p8). He’s the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s network security manager.