A United Arab Emirates-led proposal for a “new” version of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) threw a further wrench into talks Friday at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, even as debate over existing proposals had led to little progress. The UAE said during a plenary meeting that its proposal was borne out of its own frustrations over the lack of progress at the conference toward revising the existing ITRs, which have not been revised since 1988. WCIT began Dec. 3 and runs through this Friday. Discussions during the conference have thus far remained stuck on whether to change the scope of the treaty-level document from applying only to “recognized” operating agencies to applying to all operating agencies. The U.S. opposes any change in scope because it would make the ITRs apply to Internet providers, which would in turn allow the ITRs to stray into Internet governance issues (CD Dec 7 p18).
The federal government suspended construction by one of its largest stimulus grant recipients last week. It ordered the $100.6 million EAGLE-Net Alliance to cease construction immediately, in a letter dated Thursday. The infrastructure grant is part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and is the fifth-largest grant out of more than 200 total awarded in 2010. EAGLE-Net spent $74.3 million as of 2012’s third quarter, with $64.4 million of those funds coming from the federal government, its latest report shows (http://xrl.us/bn5b5h).
The “billion dollar question” facing the pay-TV industry is figuring out how to handle rising content rights fees without pricing services too high for customers, NCTA CEO Michael Powell said on an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators that was set to air Saturday. “The operator has very little choice to either absorb [the costs], which they have been doing to some degree, or pass them on to consumers who are still recovering from a recession,” Powell said when asked about rising sports rights fees.
The House Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee’s next chairman, Lee Terry, R-Neb., said he plans to continue its focus on data security and privacy issues in the coming session of Congress. Terry told us the lack of consumer privacy protections on the Web is a “legitimate issue,” and he plans to hold briefings to discuss the role of Google and other Internet companies in the debate. Having made a name for himself as a strong opponent of FCC net neutrality rules, an advocate for the agency’s reform and supporter of spectrum reallocation, Terry will take over the subcommittee in January.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled an agreement with the four major national carriers to “accelerate” their ability to transmit emergency text messages to 911 call centers. The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) also signed the agreement. Industry and government officials conceded Friday much remains to be done to make widespread text-to-911 a reality.
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- The 4K hard-disk server that Sony is including with its $25,000 84-inch XBR84X900 LED-lit 4K TV is “highly secure,” Mitch Singer, Sony Pictures Entertainment chief digital strategy officer, told the Content Protection Summit. The 4K Ultra HD video player will store 10 feature films from Sony Pictures and also come preloaded with 4K video shorts, Sony had said. The film industry will keep developing higher content protection standards, Singer and other studio executives told the summit.
A group of CLECs criticized AT&T’s petition for the FCC to consider eliminating various legacy rules, arguing it’s meant to “distract” the commission from its true policy challenge: updating the agency’s competition policies to ensure that competitors can obtain ILEC last-mile facilities and interconnection on reasonable rates, terms and conditions. An AT&T executive told us the company’s petition was meant to open a dialogue.
Dish Network is getting a vote on its eagerly awaited waiver order at the next FCC meeting, but it may not include the company’s new proposal, said a commission official and industry analyst. The DBS company last week asked the FCC to back off a proposal in the draft order circulating since around Thanksgiving and not limit the power levels of the all-terrestrial wireless network it wants to build out in the entire uplink band (CD Dec 5 p8). Chairman Julius Genachowski and Wireless Bureau staff don’t seem inclined to change the draft to include that proposal, an agency official told us and an industry analyst wrote clients Thursday. Dish wants to instead not use the lowest 5 MHz of its 2000 to 2020 MHz uplink at all, allowing those 5 MHz to serve as a guard band to the H block that a commission rulemaking notice proposes to auction.
T-Mobile USA will begin offering Apple products on its network in 2013, Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann said Thursday at a webcast conference in Germany. T-Mobile CEO John Legere implied in a separate presentation during the conference that the products T-Mobile offers will include the iPhone, but did not say what other devices it might make available. “When we do announce what we're going to deploy, it will clearly be better and more effective” than recent media reports have suggested, he said. A T-Mobile spokesman said additional information on T-Mobile’s Apple offerings would be available later. An Apple spokesman confirmed that T-Mobile would begin carrying the company’s products next year, but declined to discuss specific models.
If a federal appeals court upholds the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality order, the commission could feel empowered to further expand its regulatory reach, Commissioner Ajit Pai said at a Phoenix Center Symposium Thursday. Pai told us afterwards that he has not had a chance to read Tuesday’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding the FCC’s data roaming rules (CD Dec 5 p1). The same court will also hear the net neutrality challenge filed by Verizon and MetroPCS.