The FCC Public Safety Bureau extended by an additional six months, until June 30, the “true-up” date for calculating whether Sprint owes the government money as part of the 800 MHz transition. When the FCC approved the 800 MHz rebanding in 2004 it required Nextel, before its merger with Sprint, to pay the total value of the 10 MHz national spectrum license it got as part of deal. At the time, the FCC set the price of the license at $4.8 billion. Subtracting the value of the spectrum Nextel agreed to give up, $2 billion, left $2.8 billion Nextel had to cover by paying for the rebanding. The FCC has been extending the true-up deadline in six-month increments since 2008. While the Broadband Auxiliary Service relocation “is now complete and substantial progress has been made in 800 MHz rebanding, a significant number of 800 MHz licensees have yet to complete the process, and rebanding in the US-Mexico border region has only recently begun,” the bureau said (http://bit.ly/1dPhzaV). While Sprint has contended that enough has been paid out that the government can now conclude no money will be owed, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA) has advised that taking this step would be “premature,” the bureau said. “We conclude that conducting a true-up of Sprint’s rebanding expenditures as of December 31, 2013 would be premature. Accordingly, we provisionally extend the true-up date, as recommended by the TA, until June 30, 2014, and direct the TA to file a report by May 15, 2014, with its recommendation on whether the true-up should be conducted as of June 30, 2014, or be further postponed."

The FCC’s 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee will meet Jan. 27, the FCC said Monday in the Federal Register. The committee is collaborating with NTIA’s Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee Radio Conference Subcommittee on consensus opinions on multiple WRC agenda items, which it will eventually present to the State Department (CD Dec 23 p9). The WRC Advisory Committee’s Jan. 27 meeting will include a presentation of the committee working groups’ preliminary views and draft proposals, the FCC said. The meeting is set to begin at 11 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room. The meeting will also be webcast on the FCC’s website (http://1.usa.gov/1fW5DG2).

The Federal Aviation Administration chose six unmanned aircraft system research and test site operators across the U.S., the agency said Monday (http://1.usa.gov/19xp7CB). The sites will be run by the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, Griffiss International Airport in Rome, N.Y., the North Dakota Department of Commerce, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Virginia Tech.

Iridium asked to modify its space station authorization for its Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit Mobile Satellite Service constellation. Iridium would like the authorization to include the Iridium Next second-generation satellites, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/1ajs049). In a separate application, ViaSat requested FCC consent for the assignment of Intelsat’s authorization “to operate the Ka-band payload on the Galaxy-28 satellite in the 19.7-20.2 GHz and 29.5-30.0 GHz bands” at 89 degrees west, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/19xv7LF).

Streaming TV service Aereo shouldn’t be allowed to file an amicus brief in its competitor FilmOn’s appeal of the nationwide preliminary injunction imposed by the D.C. district court, said broadcasters in a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday. Aereo had filed a motion for leave to file a brief in support of neither party, but Aereo’s proposed brief is just a duplicate of FilmOn’s arguments, broadcasters said. “Aereo is itself a defendant in copyright cases involving the same plaintiffs and issues” said the broadcasters. “Its proposed brief is simply an effort to circumvent Appellants’ page limits.” Aereo “has a direct interest in the legal principles to be determined by this Court in these appeals,” argued Aereo in its motion. The D.C. circuit has a rule against briefs repeating the same facts and arguments, the broadcasters said. It’s not surprising that Aereo’s interests “are indistinguishable from Appellants’ interests,” said the broadcasters. FilmOn will make all the same arguments in its appeal, the broadcasters said, “obviating any need for a duplicative recitation of these same arguments by the identically-situated Aereo."

Several associations for deaf and hard of hearing people supported a request by cvideo relay service providers for a one-year waiver of the daily measurement of speed of answer (SoA) requirement, they told the FCC in a letter Saturday (http://bit.ly/1cij9iY). The rule and associated penalties are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The groups “appreciate the stronger SoA requirements but are concerned that significant rate reductions were imposed in the same order without taking in account the costs for the new SoA requirements,” they said. SoA measurements should be calculated daily, but meeting this requirement in the next year “may not be feasible” in some instances, and could cause providers to incur “significant costs through overstaffing” to meet the requirements, they said. The groups, including Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the National Association of the Deaf, recommended implementation of the new 30-second SoA requirement without penalty as a “testing phase” for one year.

Comcast petitioned to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices for seven communities in Virginia, said a filing posted in FCC docket 12-1 (http://bit.ly/KamafB). The petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The proposed deregulation would affect about 23,000 households, including the communities of Bridgewater, Harrisonburg and Elkton.

Mobile video relay service (VRS) apps offered by major equipment makers still need improvement and often aren’t interoperable, the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University said in a letter filed at the FCC. “We note that mobile interoperability, while greatly improved since our 2012 tests, still is in no way comparable to the level of voice interoperability seen in the mainstream,” wrote Christian Vogler, one of the researchers (http://bit.ly/1btO2AX). “Also, there still exists no single VRS-provided app that can successfully interoperate with every other provider for both outgoing and incoming calls; in fact, the provider that tops the rankings for outgoing calls is different from the one that tops the rankings for incoming calls.” The program tested mobile interoperability and battery life using apps from six VRS providers: Sorenson, ZVRS, Purple, Convo, CAAGVRS and Global VRS. “It is still impossible for a consumer to operate only one ten-digit number and be assured that they can connect with everyone else, no matter whether deaf or hearing,” Vogler wrote. “We further note that interoperability across answering machines still is substantially worse than for live point-to-point calls, and essentially unchanged from 2012.” The group reported that VRS applications don’t drain the mobile devices’ batteries “to a significant extent while idle on Wi-Fi. However, on Android devices there’s still some room for further improvement. It is also not yet clear how much battery drain there would be under a cellular data connection with fluctuating signal strength."

Free Press allegations that sharing agreements in Sinclair’s proposed purchase of Allbritton would give Sinclair financial control of ostensibly separate stations are based on “unsubstantiated estimates,” Sinclair’s lawyer said in a letter to the FCC Media Bureau last week (http://bit.ly/1caQ5xe). Free Press had claimed (CD Dec 9 p5) that some of Sinclair’s sharing arrangements involved the affected stations -- which would be owned by affiliated company Deerfield Media -- paying out nearly their entire annual revenue to Sinclair, which would bring the arrangement into conflict with the FCC’s local ownership rules. However, Free Press’s numbers are based on estimates from 2012. “The application of these unsubstantiated estimates to future performance of the stations is wholly speculative and should be dismissed for that reason alone,” Sinclair said. If operated under the terms proposed in the transaction, the stations involved in the sharing agreements will have “more than adequate revenues” to pay the fees involved with the sharing arrangements and “generate a significant operating profit for the licensee,” said Sinclair. The Media Bureau had also asked Sinclair to show how the companies that will own the stations involved in the sharing arrangements will have a financial incentive to control their own programming. “Every station license, whether or not involved in sharing agreements, has an inherent incentive to control programming” to attract more viewers and increase value to advertisers, Sinclair said. Since the “key costs” of a station involved in a sharing arrangement to receive services are fixed, “operating profits will increase if the revenue increases,” Sinclair said. The Media Bureau has also previously approved sharing arrangements similar to the ones proposed in the Allbritton transaction, and with a similar profit sharing breakdown, Sinclair said. That’s one of the reasons behind Free Press’s challenge of the transaction, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood told us. Such transactions are a workaround for avoiding the commission’s ownership rules, he said. “This is why we want the full commission to take this up,” he said. Sinclair also disputed the Media Bureau’s contention that the company violated reporting rules by not including copies of local marketing agreements in its submission to the commission. Since the agreements cited by the bureau don’t involve stations involved in the Allbritton transaction, Sinclair had no reason to include them in the submission, the broadcaster said. The Department of Justice review of the Sinclair/Allbritton deal has been put on hold pending the FCC and Sinclair resolving the dispute over the sharing arrangements, Sinclair said. “It is vital that there be a prompt resolution of these matters so that antitrust review can be completed,” Sinclair said.

The FCC is seeking comment on several requested exemptions from its closed captioning rules, the commission said in a public notice Thursday (http://bit.ly/JxrFUx). Comments and oppositions are due within 30 days. “Petitioners claim that compliance would be ‘economically burdensome,'” said the PN. The entities requesting exemptions are Curtis Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga.; Gerald Bryant TV in Chicago; First Lutheran Church in Albert Lea, Minn.; Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham; Gray Publishing in Soldotna, Alaska; and First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Ark.