CHICAGO -- The NCTA’s Michael Powell wants fewer regulations as the cable industry puts its energy toward dealing with technological changes, he said in his first public speech as CEO of the association. There should be a high threshold for new rules and old ones ought to be reviewed with an eye toward doing away with some, Powell said at Tuesday’s opening of the Cable Show. The industry doesn’t need regulatory challenges as it grapples with how to serve and keep existing subscribers who want content online and want to see it on mobile devices.
BRUSSELS -- Europe got it right by coordinating wireless standards for 3G, but 10 years later has lost its dominance because of a lack of spectrum, U.S. Ambassador to the EU William Kennard said Tuesday at the annual European spectrum management conference. Europe’s information and communications technology market is about the same size as the U.S.’s, but with 200 million more people, it’s underperforming, he said. He floated the idea of pan-European spectrum auctions but said political pressures must be surmounted before that can happen. Others questioned whether Europe-wide auctions are the answer.
The FCC International Bureau’s long lead time on what is supposed to be a yearly satellite competition report isn’t a source of much concern around the industry, satellite executives said. Some executives said the large gap of time since the last report, which was adopted Oct. 14, 2008, may reflect an industry confidence in the market’s competitiveness and a lack of competitive concern on Capitol Hill. Others said the gap has left some in the industry wondering if the report is working as a means for monitoring competition in the market.
Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps have dug in and are fighting for expanded notice requirements in a pending interim Lifeline order, FCC 8th floor officials told us. Chairman Julius Genachowski’s staff has been circulating an interim order since late May hoping to address duplicate Lifeline claims (CD June 9 p14). The order would automatically cancel extra payments and assign recipients to a single eligible telecommunications carrier. Under the proposed order, customers who are receiving more than one Lifeline subsidy will be assigned a carrier based by lot, with eligible carriers in a given area literally divvying up customers, FCC and industry officials said.
Small carriers opposed to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger asked the FCC to also look at AT&T’s proposed acquisition of 44 other 700 MHz licenses in combination with the T-Mobile buy. Sprint Nextel, MetroPCS, Cincinnati Bell Wireless, NTELOS, the Rural Cellular Association and the Rural Telecommunications Group, which made the request, earlier asked the FCC to consolidate its review of AT&T/T-Mobile and AT&T’s buy of 700 MHz licenses from Qualcomm (CD April 28 p1).
Bloomberg asked the FCC to require Comcast to carry its Bloomberg TV network on a channel adjacent to a “neighborhood” of news programming on its cable systems serving its 35 largest markets. The complaint filed Monday is the first program carriage complaint against Comcast since it bought control of NBCUniversal. Its outcome may reveal both how Comcast and the FCC approach conditions imposed by the FCC on that transaction, industry and public interest attorneys said. “If Comcast is dragging its feet on a condition this clear, we can only imagine how they will live up to conditions that are potentially less clear, said Greg Babyak, head of government affairs for Bloomberg. “We think this is very much a test of how serious Comcast is about obeying the terms of the order,” he said in an interview.
Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., plans Tuesday to reintroduce her broadband adoption legislation to create a USF Lifeline program subsidizing high-speed service for low-income Americans, a Matsui spokeswoman said. Matsui is a member of the House Communications Subcommittee. This year’s bill is largely the same as HR-3646 from the 111th Congress, but adds a provision to prevent duplication of subsidies. The bill may have to overcome concerns about government spending and balancing support to urban and rural areas.
The disparate lobbying on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reform has continued even as industry-wide consensus building talks press on. Last week, executives from mid-sized carriers CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream joined an analyst from CostQuest on a conference call with commission staff to lobby on Universal Service Fund reform, CenturyLink said in an ex parte notice released Monday in docket 10-90. The telco executives urged “immediate adoption of reforms that would redistribute ongoing support within price cap carriers’ areas based on cost conditions in individual wire centers, rather than costs averaged across study areas or entire states,” the ex parte said. “We also explained how a regression analysis could enable prompt identification of the relative costs to serve price cap carriers’ individual wire centers,” the ex parte said. CostQuest has recently been retained to help industry come up with cost models as companies and trade associations try to come up with an industry endorsed universal service reform package (CD June 6 p1).
The FCC will spend “increasing energy” on broadband adoption programs, commission Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus told an FCBA luncheon in Washington Friday. Adoption is Chairman Julius Genachowski’s top priority after spectrum and Universal Service Fund reform, Lazarus said. “I can guarantee you we will be working with everyone in this room,” Lazarus said. The commission is not clear on which “levers” it will use to increase broadband adoption, but one possibility is through merger conditions, as with the Comcast-NBCU deal. A former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Lazarus said he thought broadband adoption was the “civil rights issue for its time.”
AT&T and T-Mobile made their case for why the FCC should approve their proposed merger in a 229-page “joint opposition” to the dozens of petitions filed by merger opponents last month (CD June 2 p4). Support for the merger is wide and deep and the deal is critical to getting AT&T the spectrum it needs going forward as demand for wireless continues to accelerate, AT&T argues. The filing invokes the name of the primary opponent of the merger, Sprint Nextel, more than 370 times, compared to, for example, only 35 times for Free Press and 17 for Public Knowledge.