AT&T wants Congress to consider turning the Spectrum Relocation Fund into a general fund, it said in comments to the House Communications Subcommittee. “Under current law, these funds will eventually disappear from the SRF,” the carrier said, suggesting a change wherein the auction fund revenue that remains be “available for agencies to explore whether other spectrum bands could be made available for commercial use.” Both AT&T and Verizon advocated for spectrum auctions free of limits and other tweaks to congressional spectrum law.
The FCC wants as many carriers as possible to take part in the upcoming major auctions, FCC acting Wireless Bureau Chief Roger Sherman said Wednesday at the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) spring conference in San Antonio. Sherman made clear that the FCC is giving strong consideration to spectrum aggregation limits for the TV incentive auction, which have been opposed by Verizon and AT&T.
The FCC defended its request for about $36 million more in funding for FY 2015 compared to current funding. The White House unveiled its proposed 2015 budget in early March and recommended Congress approve $375.38 million for the FCC (http://fcc.us/1hNuRs2). The House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee scrutinized the proposed budget during a hearing Tuesday, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Ajit Pai testified on behalf of the agency.
Harris Broadcast is now Imagine Communications and GatesAir. Imagine, a media software company, will be headquartered in Dallas, and radio and TV transmission company GatesAir will be based in Cincinnati, Imagine said in a press release (http://bit.ly/PJnAk0). By optimizing the highest quality video stream for delivery over the variety of bandwidth that users consume, Imagine’s TV Everywhere solutions “will enable all networks to dynamically adapt to the amount of available bandwidth,” it said. GatesAir is prepared to “guide broadcasters in effectively navigating major technology evolutions,” like digital conversion and the upcoming spectrum auctions, Imagine said.
Verizon sharply criticized a Sprint proposal for a weighted spectrum screen for the FCC to use in weighing deals that include the acquisition of spectrum. “On the eve of the FCC adopting rules that will govern two spectrum auctions, Sprint has proposed a new, allegedly ‘easy to implement,’ spectrum screen that continues to ignore the biggest defect in the Commission’s application of the spectrum screen: the exclusion of 138 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum,” Verizon said in a filing (http://bit.ly/1lvSMx4). “Sprint proposes to apply complicated calculations to various spectrum bands on an urban, suburban, and rural basis to create a ‘weighted’ spectrum screen that, unsurprisingly, decreases the weight of Sprint’s 147 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings to 11.1 MHz, at most.” Sprint made its proposal last month (http://bit.ly/1ep8aXt). “Sprint’s proposal would weight spectrum based on the cost to deploy and operate using that band, recognizing the reality that low-band spectrum is typically significantly more cost-effective to deploy than higher-frequency spectrum,” Sprint said at the time. The FCC is expected to take up spectrum aggregation rules at its May meeting (CD March 10 p1).
An order to make TV-station joint sales agreements (JSAs) attributable for calculating ownership caps and to prohibit joint negotiation in retransmission consent agreements will go on circulation Monday, the FCC said. Also on circulation then will be an FNPRM seeking comment on shared services agreements (SSAs) and FCC ownership policies that kicks off the 2014 quadrennial review of media ownership, the commission also said Thursday. The FNPRM proposes retaining the current dual-network rule and the local radio rule, tentatively concludes that cross-ownership rules for newspapers and TV stations should remain, and asks whether to eliminate rules against newspaper/radio and the radio/TV combinations rule “in favor of reliance on the local radio and local television rules,” a senior commission official told reporters Thursday. Broadcasters criticized the draft order, while pay-TV interests seeking changes to retrans rules cheered it.
The White House included provisions on school and rural broadband, spectrum license fees, the FCC’s USF and more in its proposed $3.9 trillion 2015 budget, partially revealed Tuesday in a 218-page document and requiring the approval of Congress (http://1.usa.gov/1c5yFWg). It would include a $56 billion Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative, which promises funding toward various goals in this sphere. The administration will roll out its budget in two phases, the first of which started Tuesday, and then post some other parts a week later. Congressional Republicans have already complained of the broader details.
The FCC H-block auction closed Thursday after 167 rounds and 24 bidding days, with total bids of $1.564 billion across the 176 Economic Area licenses. The FCC won’t provide results for a few days, but most analysts have long seen the most likely outcome as Dish Network buying almost all of the licenses (CD Feb 24 p12, Jan 28 p4). The money raised will pay part of the $7 billion startup cost of FirstNet, to be paid out of auction proceeds, industry observers said.
Auctions work best and raise the most when restrictions aren’t placed on who can bid, said the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy in a white paper released Tuesday. “Even when all firms enjoy foreclosure value, and even in settings where some firms serve far more retail customers than other firms, unfettered auctions can maximize economic welfare,” the paper said (http://bit.ly/1cMbPB6). “When competitors perceive the same marginal value of spectrum, unfettered auctions can be relied upon to (i.e., they always) generate the welfare-maximizing allocation of inputs.” Spectrum auctions work because “in contrast to bureaucratic allocation methods, well-designed auctions typically ensure that the input is allocated to the users who value that input most highly,” the center said. The center is supported in part by AT&T and the Verizon Foundation. The two major carriers strongly oppose spectrum aggregation limits in the upcoming TV incentive and AWS-3 auctions.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler knows the TV incentive auction won’t be easy, but the FCC is determined to get the rules of the road right, he told the GSMA Mobile World Congress. “Let there be no mistake about the degree of difficulty of this undertaking,” Wheeler said, according to prepared remarks released Monday (http://fcc.us/1hlG1nS). “We are attempting something never done before. But as with our original spectrum auctions twenty years ago, the risks are well worth taking. The Incentive Auction presents a two-part challenge of making the right fact-based policy decisions in an open and transparent manner and building user-friendly back-end systems and ensuring that they are exhaustively tested and ready to work from the start. We know the world is watching, and we will get this right.” Spectrum remains a priority for the commission, Wheeler said. “We are committed to bringing more spectrum capacity to market and fast.”