Possible FCC action to raze state and local barriers to wireless deployment “sets the bookends” for national policy, while letting states write more detailed rules through individual small-cells bills, said Wireless Infrastructure Association CEO Jonathan Adelstein in a Wednesday interview at the WIA show in Charlotte. In keynotes, Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mike O’Rielly backed aggressive federal action to win a global race to 5G (see 1805230031 and 1805220034). Local governments are cooperative and the federal government need not intervene, NATOA General Counsel Nancy Werner said Thursday: “We’re ready to go.”
Broadcasters need to move as quickly as possible to transition to ATSC 3.0 or they're in danger of losing their spectrum and market share to other industries, said FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and Spectrum Consortium President John Hane in separate speeches Thursday to the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference. Through 3.0, broadcasters need to maximize the use of their existing spectrum, or it will be given to another industry, Hane said. Under the current technology, broadcasters provide a valuable service but take up too much spectrum to provide it, leading regulators to periodically pursue “progressive reclamation” of it as with the incentive auction, Hane said.
The House passed its version of the FY 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (HR-5515) Thursday 351-66 with several provisions that counter President Donald Trump's bid to reconsider the Department of Commerce's seven-year ban on U.S. companies selling telecom software and equipment to ZTE. The Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, agreed to attach to its version of NDAA the Banking Committee-cleared Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (S-2098) that would limit Trump's ability to alter the Commerce ban, as expected (see 1805220057 and 1805230058). Trump administration officials attempted to quell rising rancor over the controversy via meetings with top Republicans. Commerce announced the ban in April (see 1804170018)
The C-band clearing plan proposed by Intelsat/Intel/SES and Ligado's terrestrial low-power broadband service (TLPS) proposal both involve reallocating satellite spectrum, but the proceedings differ widely on the details, and FCC activity on the former doesn't necessarily mean anything forthcoming on the latter, said spectrum and satellite experts. Both are part of a broader trend of satellite spectrum being repurposed for terrestrial broadband use, with struggling satellite companies often at the forefront of that, said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at New America.
FCC Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel, appearing together at a WifiForward event, agreed the FCC needs to make more spectrum available for Wi-Fi. Both expressed impatience with the slow pace of opening the 5.9 GHz band for sharing with Wi-Fi. O’Rielly said later he doesn’t have a firm timetable for the release of proposed rules for the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band.
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Voice control is passé, found an audience poll at the Parks Associates Connections conference Tuesday. Audience members on a panel on future directions of smart home interfaces in a text poll viewed artificial intelligence (59 percent) as the technology that would have the biggest impact, followed by interoperability (20 percent), voice control (11 percent) and robotics (7 percent). Panelists said the industry's focus is moving beyond smart speakers to AI and to interoperability.
The first congressional hearing on T-Mobile's proposed merger with Sprint was set Wednesday. Earlier that day, a free-market economist found some investor concerns the deal would pass antitrust muster. And an analyst said the deal is different from AT&T/Time Warner. Comcast meanwhile said it's preparing an offer for most of 21st Century Fox assets (see 1805230019).
Since KFPH-CD Channel 35, a Univision-owned Class A station in the Phoenix market, became “the first stick to go up” in the Pearl TV-led ATSC 3.0 model-market project (see 1804080002), “we’re getting a lot of emails from consumers,” Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle, told the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference Monday. In the emails, initiated through the model-market project website that went live during last month’s NAB Show, consumers are “asking when they can buy this new service,” said Schelle.
Amid calls to break up Facebook’s “monopoly,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told us the current tech landscape isn't comparable to that surrounding antitrust activity against Microsoft in the late 1990s, when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. Anticompetitive issues could surface, “but I don’t see any reason for it right now,” he said. The Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen and Content Creators Coalition are among groups demanding Facebook divest Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger (see 1805210051). Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin separately said DOJ should investigate big tech concentration of ownership.
Movie studios and regional sports networks (RSNs) could become antitrust sticking points for a proposed Comcast buy of Fox's nonbroadcast assets, antitrust experts told us. Comcast said Wednesday it's preparing an all-cash offer for the same Fox nonbroadcasting assets that Fox agreed to sell to Disney. It said the structure and terms of its offer, and the regulatory risk provisions, "would be at least as favorable to Fox shareholders as the Disney offer."