FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai pushed for creation of an Internet Protocol transition task force to help modernize the commission’s “anachronistic laws” and accelerate the technological changes in the communications industry. “We need to adopt a holistic approach to confronting this challenge instead of addressing issues on a piecemeal basis as they happen to pop up,” Pai said Tuesday at an event on Internet transformation hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Communications Liberty and Innovation Project (CLIP). “The work of the task force will be as daunting as it is necessary, for we simply cannot not import the broken, burdensome economic regulations of the PSTN [public switched telephone network] into an all-IP world."
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) revealed the first two winners of his Illinois Gigabit Communities Challenge Tuesday -- Gigabit Squared and OnLight Aurora. They will help advance fiber deployment in nine South Chicago neighborhoods and in Aurora’s public and private K-12 schools, commercial corridors, higher education and healthcare institutions. The governor promised $6 million in “prize funding” to winning projects earlier this year as part of his Illinois Jobs Now! program, according to the challenge’s website (http://xrl.us/bnuiqd). In its Tuesday announcements, Illinois is calling this money “a seed investment” for its greater broadband goals.
The process for informing and crafting trade negotiations needs to be improved, said panelists at an American University Washington College of Law event on intellectual property, trade and development Tuesday. During a morning panel, David Langdon, senior economist in the Office of the Chief Economist in the Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration, pointed to a report from April (http://1.usa.gov/HxZbYf) that discussed the impact of IP laws on the U.S. economy. The report, which Langdon said was commissioned by the White House, attributes 34.8 percent of the country’s GDP and 40 million jobs in 2010 to “IP-intensive industries.” But, Langdon said, responding to comments from panelists and audience members, the study “does not explicitly call for policy” based on the concept that increased IP protection results in increased employment.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Spectrum availability outside the home will be a challenge for cable operators as they try to sell new customer products for mobile access, CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney told a Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing conference. “It’s a concern,” he said Tuesday. Spectrum availability could impact the industry’s growth in offering mobile content, he said: “Connectivity is vital for our future."
ORLANDO -- Pay-TV customers are likely to see more disruption of programming, as increasingly difficult negotiations among programmers, broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors are expected, MVPD executives said at the Cable Television Association for Marketing show. Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and the National Cable and Television Cooperative (NCTC) executives said programming negotiations -- including those involving broadcasters and independent programmers -- will likely produce more disruptions in programming. Executives also said pay-TV companies are continuing to introduce TV Everywhere (TVE), so subscribers to an MVPD service can get programming online and not just on their TVs connected to set-top boxes.
An Alaska Communications Systems petition for waiver of the Connect America Fund Phase I support rules faced opposition from all who commented. ACS sought a waiver of the rule requiring broadband deployment to one unserved location per each $775 received, a waiver of the definition of “unserved” to exclude those locations served by fixed wireless broadband providers; and a waiver of the definition of “broadband” to count upgrades to existing customers with speeds below 1.5 Mbps. ACS originally accepted about $4.1 million of incremental Phase I support -- the full amount allocated to it by the commission -- but later requested a waiver for $2.5 million of that allocation after a “more detailed analysis” revealed a shaky business case for deployment of broadband where it had intended (CD Sept. 28 p19).
The FCC’s regulation of rural broadband is akin to the taxation of the British government two and a half centuries ago, said Harold Furchtgott-Roth, former FCC commissioner and head of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economics of the Internet. “Today the situation is eerily similar,” he said at a Hudson Institute panel on rural telecommunications Monday. His comparison kicked off a series of scathing critiques among panelists of how FCC policy contributed to the U.S.’s rural broadband divide. “Flat out, it’s a terrible set of rules that they came up with,” Furchtgott-Roth said of the FCC’s USF/intercarrier compensation order of November 2011.
After months of delay, the FCC released an order that will let cable operators fully encrypt their services in all-digital systems. The order, published Friday (http://xrl.us/bnuci7), had been expected as far back as February (CD Jan 26 p6). But a presentation by Boxee, which introduced a device designed to use cable operators’ unencrypted basic tier signals, slowed its approval (CD Feb 8 p4). The order is largely consistent with what an earlier draft proposed, but adopts a series of commitments by the six largest cable operators for accommodating devices like Boxee’s. The commission concluded that a limited number of customers will be affected by the rule change. Communications industry attorneys following the rulemaking said they don’t expect the order to be challenged.
Japan’s No. 3 carrier, SoftBank, is making a $20.1 billion investment in Sprint Nextel in exchange for a 70 percent stake in the No. 3 U.S. carrier, both companies said Monday in a news conference from Tokyo. The deal isn’t expected to lead to a big regulatory fight in the U.S., as did AT&T/T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless’s recently completed buy of spectrum licenses from cable operators, since the Sprint transaction is expected to lead to more competition in the U.S. (CD Oct 12 p1).
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will again bring cybersecurity legislation to the Senate floor when Congress returns in November after the election. The move follows a GOP rallying cry to let Congress handle cybersecurity rather than President Barack Obama issuing a cybersecurity executive order, which is in draft form (CD Oct 3 p13). Bringing cybersecurity to a vote also gives Congress another chance to hash out a compromise on the issue, a Senate aide said. But a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official during George W. Bush’s presidency said Reid’s move may not be a sincere attempt to get a new deal. Obama is right to “examine all means at his disposal” for confronting cyberthreats, Reid said in a news release Saturday.