The FCC proposed to “accommodate requests” for digital FM stations to increase their power level on one of their two sidebands. That would potentially let in-band on-channel radio broadcasters cover more of their analog service area with digital transmissions, without interfering with other stations. “A significant number of FM stations currently are precluded from taking advantage” of the entire tenfold digital power increase to -10 dB allowed by the commission last year (CD Feb 1/10 p7), a Media Bureau public notice said Tuesday: That’s “due to the presence of a nearby station on one but not both of the two” channels that are each one notch away on the dial.

Delays in broadband stimulus projects continued (CD Oct 3 p9). While NTIA expects a $126.3 million West Virginia project to be completed on time, it terminated the $80.6 million project managed by the Louisiana Board of Regents. The funds will be returned to the U.S. Treasury, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who worked with the Board of Regents to secure the funding, said she plans to work with interested parties to complete the project.

Consumer groups are up in arms over a bill to relax requirements on calls to cellphones contained in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The House Communications Subcommittee scheduled a hearing this Friday on HR-3035 to ask whether the TCPA went too far in restrictions on calls to wireless numbers. The subcommittee plans to ask whether the telemarketing rules’ mobile restrictions “are inadvertently preventing Americans who rely on wireless phones from receiving useful information, such as alerting consumers of harmful activity on their bank accounts, data breaches, and other pertinent data affecting them directly,” the Commerce Committee said. But consumer groups said the changes could reduce people’s privacy.

NEW ORLEANS -- Seeking to go down the same road as Cablevision, EchoStar is developing a new network-based DVR for a major customer that’s believed to be Dish Network. EchoStar Chief Product Officer John Paul said it plans to have the new nDVR ready for its first customer by the end of the year. He wouldn’t name the initial customer, but corporate cousin Dish Network has historically received first crack at any new products from the technology spinoff. EchoStar, which previously developed a family of set-top boxes that incorporate Sling Media’s place-shifting technology, also pitches its products to telcos and cable operators.

CableLabs won’t retreat from ongoing work with other industries after the retirement in a year of CEO Paul Liao, who increased such collaboration in his two years there, cable executives said. They said the work with other cable bodies including the Canoe interactive-ad joint venture of six cable operators, the NCTA and Society of Cable Telecom Engineers has expanded as technology and standards play a big role in regulatory and legislative issues. Stepped-up work with groups like the CEA and Digital Living Network Alliance on issues like the transition to IPv6 addresses, Internet Protocol, home gateway devices and integration of cable systems with consumer electronics will continue as well, agreed cable executives we surveyed.

Verizon Executive Vice President Tom Tauke rejected claims that his company was a net beneficiary of the sweeping changes to the Universal Service Fund and the intercarrier compensation regime. “It’s something of a mixed bag,” he said in an interview on “The Communicators” on C-SPAN that was to have been telecast over the weekend. The company’s wireless division will gain from the FCC’s order, but its wireline division will lose, he said. Analysts and telecom observers had suggested that Verizon and AT&T were the biggest winners from last week’s order (CD Oct 28 p1). “But overall, it’s going to be good for the industry, it’s probably good for our company,” he said.

Easier site access, better optimization and handoff technology and more spectrum are critical for universal deployment of small cellsite technologies like femtocell, Wi-Fi and distributed antenna systems (DAS), speakers said during an FCC forum Friday. Small site technology, which was initially used to improve indoor coverage, could play an important role in LTE deployment, they said.

The FCC proposal to post online for the first time TV station public files and expand their required content to cover more types of joint broadcaster agreements would bolster research, communications professors told us Friday. The public files won’t initially automatically be searchable, under a further notice of proposed rulemaking that was approved at Thursday’s FCC meeting (CD Oct 28 p7). The data needs to be available in a standard format, so the electronic files can be searched, and should be machine readable so statistics can be imported into various data programs, the academics said.

Cable operators are “absorbing the [price of the] collapse of the broadcast industry business model,” through retransmission consent fees, Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said during the company’s Q3 earnings teleconference. He was asked whether Cablevision could move its businesses away from relying on increasingly expensive programming contracts. Retransmission consent payments to broadcasters, largely a fact of life since 2008, have caused a large step-up in Cablevision’s programming costs, he said. Over time, the rate of programming cost increases should moderate, he said.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., hosted a discussion with LightSquared, GPS device makers and the FCC, according to ex parte filings (http://xrl.us/bmha3w and http://xrl.us/bmha32) and interviews with participants. Tuesday’s meeting points to a more hands-on approach to the controversy and one of the few public displays of interest on the issue by Walden. While other House committees have called hearings to look at the LightSquared debate over GPS interference, the House and Senate Commerce committees so far have taken a behind-the-scenes approach to the controversy (CD Sept 22 p6).