NCTA continued to urge the FCC to make...
NCTA continued to urge the FCC to make the unlicensed national information infrastructure sub-band at 5 GHz usable by Wi-Fi. As Americans rapidly increase their use of Wi-Fi, existing unlicensed spectrum resources are becoming increasingly congested, NCTA said in an…
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ex parte filing in dockets 09-182 and 10-71 (http://bit.ly/1rAcUCB). “If we do not designate additional unlicensed frequencies suitable for Wi-Fi soon, this problem will become acute.” NCTA also said it supports a rule to prohibit non-commonly owned broadcast stations in the same local market from jointly negotiating for retransmission consent. It urged the FCC to narrowly define the circumstances “in which two ‘commonly owned’ broadcast stations may be exempt from the prohibition on joint negotiations.” The association takes no position on whether the FCC should attribute joint sales agreements for purposes of calculating ownership caps, though it said there are significant differences between broadcast JSAs and multichannel video programming distributor interconnects. Such interconnects took heat from NAB (CD March 19 p21), as broadcasters oppose a draft order set for an FCC vote Monday that would attribute some TV JSAs. Without MVPD interconnects, “advertisers that seek to reach an entire local market efficiently would be limited to purchasing advertising on a broadcast station,” said NAB. When MVPDs in a local market pool their local advertising inventory, “they introduce a new competitive alternative to the broadcast purchase that would not exist without the joint activity,” it said. The filing recounted a meeting with Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and her staff.