Two House Democrats are soliciting signatures for a letter to FCC Chmn. Powell urging regulations to prevent companies from blocking access to Internet content. House Internet Caucus Co-Chmn. Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. Kind (D- Wis.) circulated a Dear Colleague letter Wed. telling fellow House members that broadband providers might be tempted to control customer access to content to favor content of interest to them: “Imagine a broadband provider blocking or slowing access to Amazon.com and instead directing you quickly to the provider’s affiliated commerce site, or preventing the use of an Internet device on the network.” In the draft letter, Boucher and Kind admit that while there might not be a concrete example of such discrimination, “as a regulatory body, the FCC has the greater responsibility of implementing rules and policies to ensure that those harms never occur in the first instance. The time for the FCC to act by appropriate regulation to prevent that harm is now.” The avenue for such an FCC rulemaking, Boucher and Kind said, would be the agency’s long-standing enforcement of open communications networks, dating back to permitting consumers to attach devices to phone networks not made by the phone company. “In the absence of assurance that principles of open network architectures will be applied to both telephone and cable broadband, concerns have been voiced that network operators will act to limit consumer activity and to limit access to content, not because of a need to manage the network to assure functionality, but because of a desire to favor content affiliated with the broadband provider.” Among those raising such concerns have been Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) Exec. Dir. Jeffrey Chester. Appealing to Hill colleagues, all of whom now carry Blackberry wireless devices, Boucher and Kind said personal digital assistants were a type of device “that will need unfettered access to ‘always-on’ high-speed connections.” Members have until Sept. 12 to sign the letter to Powell.
EchoStar submitted a petition for rulemaking to the FCC Thurs., asking the Commission to redesignate the nongeostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) fixed satellite service (FSS) bands to include GSO FSS operations on a co- primary basis: “[I]t is unlikely that an NGSO FSS system will be deployed to serve the [U.S.] anytime soon. Therefore, the requested lifting of that restriction would increase significantly the chance that the spectrum in question will be put to use in the foreseeable future.” EchoStar proposed allowing GSO birds to use 1.5 GHz of Ka- band spectrum for either uplinks or downlinks, mitigating “the bandwidth constraint that will otherwise hamper the rollout of satellite broadband services that will reach remote rural areas and compete with cable modems and DSL in more urban areas.” Additionally, EchoStar asked the Commission to: (1) Remove the note in the table of allocations designating the downlink band for exclusive NGSO use. (2) Promote “GSO FSS systems from secondary to co- primary status in the 28.6-29.1 GHz band.” (3) Establish sharing standards in the band. (4) Apply existing licensing rules for GSO FSS service to service in these bands, including 2 degree spacing. (5) Extend blanket licensing rules for consumer terminals communicating with GSO satellites to this band. The company said it recently filed applications to operate GSO FSS satellites in the NGSO FSS spectrum -- 28.6-29.1 GHz (Earth to space) and 18.8-19.3 GHz (space to Earth) -- and while it asked for a waiver of “Commission rules to allow the proposed operations pending the conclusion of the requested rulemaking… the applications do not request co-primary operational authority and should be processed separately from this petition pursuant to the first-come, first-served rules.”
Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and his Cabinet unanimously approved Tues. a long-awaited plan designed to encourage telecom companies to safeguard coral reef systems by using designated gaps in the reefs to install and connect cables to information networks in S. America and the Caribbean. The new guidelines were developed by the Fla. Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) following a request by Bush and his Cabinet in Dec. The rule will go into effect 20 days after filing with the Dept. of State.
The FCC need not and should not prescribe industry standards for broadband-over-power-line (BPL) systems relating to bands of operation, injection methods and modulation schemes, because such standards would discourage innovation, the United Power Line Council (UPLC) said. In reply comments to the Commission’s BPL inquiry, the UPLC said it would be premature to adopt industry standards since the technology still was nascent. Many technology companies have expressed interest in collaborating with the FCC in developing a standard, it said, and the UPLC would join those efforts “recognizing that industry-led standards are more likely to achieve the goal of reducing regulatory burdens and promoting consistency and repeatability of test measurements.” It said the Commission should continue to rely on radiated emission as the primary means of preventing interference. Licensees in the bands used by BPL systems uniformly have opposed allowing any operations in those bands or have demanded “notching” (reducing the emission limits), the UPLC said. Although notching was effective, it wasn’t appropriate, it said, because “it inevitably leads to a free- for-all” that would prevent BPL operation on any band or reduce power output to the point that it couldn’t compete with other broadband services in either cost or throughput. It also would set a negative precedent if licensees succeeded in stonewalling BPL systems, which were unintentional radiators. Part 15 rules adequately protect licensees in the bands of BPL operations, it said. The UPLC also cautioned the FCC against taking the “bait” of other broadband providers seeking to delay the deployment of BPL while they consolidate their market. BPL systems have been tested exhaustively in the lab and in field trials and have shown they didn’t cause any interference to colocated telephone or cable TV equipment, it said. NPR said it was concerned that radio frequency (RF) energy introduced by BPL systems could be carried through the electrical wiring to other devices, including millions of clock, table and other radios through which listeners get news, information and cultural services. Besides, it was unclear which spectrum the FCC would allocate for BPL systems, the public broadcaster said, although it had granted experimental BPL applications from 1.7 MHz to 80 MHz. FM radio occupies the 87.9-107.9 MHz spectrum, it said, and depending on the spectrum employed, BPL systems could produce “harmonic distortions and otherwise radiate energy in ways that could impair the reception of FM radio services.” NPR said the American Radio Relay League had contended that BPL posed “a significant threat” to amateur radio operations and broadcasting in the HF and low-VHF region. Cingular Wireless said the FCC, before proceeding further, should be presented with test results assessing the potential increase to the overall noise floor for 800 MHz and 1.9 MHz systems from BPL operations at or above 80 MHz. If the test results demonstrate there’s no threat of harmful interference to incumbent systems, then the Commission could start a rulemaking to focus on specific proposals, it said. Supporting the agency’s efforts to promote competition through the development of an additional broadband platform, AT&T opposed what it called the “disingenuous” claims by Qwest and Verizon that the advent of BPL justifies the immediate deregulation of the Bells’ broadband services. BPL services wouldn’t be ready until 2006 at the earliest, the company said.
The FCC dismissed a petition for rulemaking filed by Lawson Assoc., which had asked that the Commission permit cable and wireless cable systems with fewer than 5,000 subscribers to fulfill their Emergency Alert System (EAS) obligations by employing EAS decoders that would pass through bulletins by switching channels that didn’t carry the bulletins to one that did. The FCC dismissed the petition as premature because its Media Security & Reliability Council (MSRC) was examining issues related to public warning, including EAS. The FCC said that, if appropriate, it would open an inquiry on EAS after it received MSRC’s final recommendations.
DENVER -- FCC Comr. Martin told state regulators here that the underlying premise of the soon-to-be-released Triennial UNE Review order would be that competition came first, then deregulation. Speaking at the NARUC summer meeting, he didn’t provide any details of the order but said it would try to strike a balance between encouraging investment and promoting local competition. He acknowledged the order had taken longer than expected to produce, but said the Commission was working diligently to ensure it had specific guidance and criteria for the states. He said the federal-state partnership on the Triennial Review would be critical to its success.
A bipartisan group of House members echoed cable and ILEC witnesses Mon. in calling for parity in broadband regulation by the FCC. The House Telecom Subcommittee held a hearing late Mon. on broadband regulation, specifically on an FCC rulemaking that would classify DSL broadband as an information service.
As traditional cable issues continued to take a back seat in state legislatures this year, the industry turned its attention to more-peripheral issues -- bills sponsored by DSL providers for regulatory parity, privacy, spam and energy efficiency standards for set-top boxes and DTV converter boxes. It was an “uneventful” legislative year for cable in the states, said NCTA Senior Dir.-State Telecom Rick Cimmerman.
The FCC’s inquiry into technical issues of providing broadband over power lines (BPL) drew largely predictable responses from key players that faced potential competition from the nascent technology and those that had possible interference concerns: (1) Cable was worried about reasonable access and rates for poles owned by utilities. (2) Telephone companies called for uniform regulatory treatment of all broadband providers. (3) Broadcasters urged the Commission to ensure there was no interference for over- the-air broadcast stations signals, including DTV stations. (4) Utilities said existing rules for carrier current systems provided adequate protection against interference.
Top FCC officials said Wed. at the Wireless Communications Assn. (WCA) show in Washington that they expected decisions by early next year on a series of interlocking spectrum issues, including efforts to solve public safety interference at 800 MHz. The outcome of the 800 MHz proceeding has implications for replacement spectrum that Multipoint Distribution Service (MDS) operators seek in the planned reallocation of some MDS spectrum for advanced wireless services.