Adam Bender

The House hopes to pass a communications accessibility bill before adjourning next month, said a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The House and Senate are working to resolve differences between their bills, HR-3101 and S-3304, the Pelosi spokesman said. The House could pass a modified version of the Senate bill as early as this week, a telecom lobbyist said.

A Senate deal on net neutrality is being discussed by Senate Communications Subcommittee leaders, subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., told us Tuesday. But a Senate aide said the staffs of Kerry and Ranking Member John Ensign, R-Nev., failed to reach agreement in discussions over the August recess. The House Commerce Committee is still in talks over its own net neutrality bill, said Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

The House likely will vote Thursday on the Small Business Jobs Act, a House staffer said. The president may sign it into law as early as next week, the staffer said Monday. The Senate has approved the bill, which contains language removing wireless devices from IRS’s listed property rules (CD Sept 20 p8).

Auctioning the D-block is “right technically, it’s right as public policy, [and] it’s even right politics,” said T-Mobile Vice President Tom Sugrue at a press conference Monday. But most major public safety groups oppose an auction and want Congress to give them the D-block spectrum. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has a bill to give public safety the D-block and scheduled a hearing for Thursday morning. “This is a long process and there’s always ups and downs,” but the 4G Coalition plans to keep fighting and convince policymakers to auction the spectrum, Sugrue said. While the Senate is moving to D-block reallocation, a bipartisan group of House members seemed to agree with the auction approach at a hearing earlier this year, Sugrue said. “This week’s hearing may go a little differently, but we'll see.” House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was working on a draft bill authorizing an auction, still seems interested but appears to be waiting to see “how the process plays out” before introducing the bill, Sugrue told us afterward. There may be some desire in Congress to do a comprehensive spectrum bill next year, and public safety could get wrapped into that, he added. A lack of funding has held back a national public safety network, said T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham. “It has nothing to do with spectrum.” Auctioning the D-block will bring “competition and choice” to public safety and consumers, she said. The FCC should move forward on its rulemaking to determine how the network will operate and what the licensing scheme will be, she said. On most days, public safety would have sufficient capacity for its network using its existing 10 MHz allocation of 700 MHz spectrum, and in emergencies they could share capacity on the LTE networks of major carriers, said Ken Zdunek, chief technology officer of Roberson and Associates, a consulting firm that prepared a recent technical white paper for T-Mobile. The LTE standard would make it easy for consumers and public safety to “peacefully coexist,” said the consulting firm’s president and former Motorola CTO Dennis Roberson. Leveraging commercial networks would offer great network resiliency because commercial towers are built closely together and because public safety could fall back on multiple networks, Zdunek said. T-Mobile, meanwhile, explained how it ran a scan of spectrum use by the government in eight cities whose results it filed with the commission (CD Aug 26 p6). The scan used spectrum analyzers on T-Mobile towers with clear lines of sight to known federal facilities, T-Mobile said in a call with Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julie Knapp, according to an ex parte filing. “A resolution bandwidth of 30 kHz was used for the scan of the spectrum between 1755-1800 MHz, with particular attention paid to the spectrum between 1755-1780 MHz,” the carrier said. “The equipment was calibrated for the noise floor before each scan and utilized both omni-directional and directional antennas pointed towards the federal facilities.”

The House must quickly introduce net neutrality legislation if it’s to have a shot of passing this year, industry observers said Monday. The House Commerce Committee is putting the finishing touches on a bill that would give the FCC authority for two years to enforce its four open-Internet principles but not the additional two principles on nondiscrimination and transparency proposed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Hill and industry officials said. “We are working hard on legislation to protect the open Internet and are actively working to develop a bipartisan consensus,” said a committee spokeswoman.

Citing “an agreement” on net neutrality, House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., urged a subcommittee hearing. “As far as I am concerned, given the realities of Washington, D.C., there is an agreement,” Stearns told us in a written statement Friday. “In fact, there should be a hearing on this agreement.” The deal could see edits “later on,” and “some disagreements may remain,” but Stearns believes “the main principles have been agreed upon.” The pact is based on negotiations that “have been going on for over a year,” he said. Stearns and Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., had been meeting with industry stakeholders involved in talks that were being held at the FCC. The commission shut down its own talks last month. Boucher didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The telephone and cable industries “endorse” Universal Service Fund legislation by Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., USTelecom and NCTA executives said in written testimony for a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Thursday morning. HR-5828 “balances many competing interests to modernize universal service and to bring robust broadband to areas of rural America where today’s business case would not support such deployment,” said USTelecom President Walter McCormick.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., urged Congress to quicken the pace on bipartisan spectrum and public safety network bills. Congress’ sense of urgency about building a public safety network must be raised if it’s to pass any legislation, he told an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation conference Tuesday. Meanwhile, Warner’s spectrum relocation bill is held up by questions about paying for the bill and the roles of agencies, he said.

The poor economy has made more people eligible for discount telephone service under Universal Service Fund low-income programs, but awareness is low, said FCC Consumer Bureau Chief Joel Gurin at a lunchtime Capitol Hill briefing Monday. Gurin and other officials at the event urged Congress to spread the word about the program to constituents. The event was intended to kick off National Lifeline Awareness Week. The Lifeline and Link-Up programs “are being used now by only about a third of eligible Americans,” but enrollment did increase somewhat after last year’s Lifeline Week campaign, said Gurin. The FCC is reviewing comments on ways to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the assistance programs, including on a proposal to use a centralized database for online certification and verification, he said. The commission is also looking at ways to address consumer complaints about accessing the low-income services, and expanding the program to support broadband, he said. It’s “unacceptable” that “millions of people remain disconnected to the outside world,” said National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners President David Coen. Members of Congress can help raise awareness by issuing press releases and calling attention to the program in newsletters and other constituent communications, said Charlie Acquard, executive director of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates. Also, lawmakers should educate caseworkers about the low-income programs and ask carriers about ways to improve Lifeline and Link-Up when the companies’ lobbyists come in for meetings, Acquard said. The name “Lifeline” is “not hyperbole,” said Mark Andersen, social services director of We Are Family in Washington, D.C. “Your telephone is your lifeline.” Senior citizens that Andersen works with on average collect $800 monthly and, after other bills, have little left over for phone service, he said. In 2009, the low-income programs accounted for about $1 billion of the $7.3 billion USF, said Irene Flannery, deputy chief of the FCC Wireline Bureau’s Telecommunications Access Policy Division.

The House Judiciary Competition Policy Subcommittee plans a hearing 10 a.m. Thursday on competition in the digital market, a House staffer said Friday. A topic of the session in Room 2141 Rayburn Office Building will be “whether Apple was intentionally making it difficult for developers to create applications across a variety of operating systems, thus trying to choke off competition from Android phones and BlackBerry devices, among others,” Subcommittee Chairman Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said in a written statement last week. He applauded Apple’s announcement that the company will remove its restrictions on developers making apps for the iPhone, iPad and iTunes store. Apple said it’s “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.” That will add flexibility for developers while preserving security, the company said. Apple said it also plans to publish the review guidelines for its app store, so the process is more transparent to developers.