Jimm Phillips

There’s a “very urgent” need to address cybersecurity issues, “but it is also a long-term problem,” said White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel during an event Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We didn’t get here overnight, and we're not going to get ourselves out of this situation overnight either,” he said. President Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity Feb. 12, which he said would help “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy.” The order, among other things, directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to lead an effort in conjunction with other federal agencies and industry stakeholders to develop a Cybersecurity Framework of voluntary best practices and other standards that could be used to strengthen the cybersecurity defenses of critical infrastructure (CD Feb 14 p1).

President Barack Obama touted his executive order on cybersecurity during his State of the Union speech Tuesday as a step to “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy,” and urged Congress to pass legislation to further the order’s goals. Enemies of the U.S. are “seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems,” he said. “We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."

Spectrum sharing will be necessary to meet the Obama administration’s goal of finding 500 MHz for commercial broadband service, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling Monday at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The old method of clearing spectrum of federal users and then making it available for the exclusive use of commercial providers is not sustainable,” he told the Silicon Flatirons event. “We have moved the systems that are easy to move, and to continue this method of spectrum reallocation simply costs too much and takes too long. And just as important is the fact that the opportunities to find spectrum to which we can move the federal operations are dwindling rapidly."

Policymakers need to ensure the U.S. maintains its “preeminent position” as the driver of telecom technology innovation by maintaining it as a friendly environment for capital investment, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said Sunday during an event at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “What keeps me awake at night is, five years from now, is that still the case?” he said at the Silicon Flatirons event. “Five years from now, are Chinese companies going to be driving the standards, are top Chinese companies going to be driving the technological innovation in this industry? … I think we as a country do not want that."

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the FTC support the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO) efforts to “provide more complete information regarding patent ownership to the public,” the agencies said in a joint filing that PTO released last week (http://xrl.us/bofojr). The filing was one of several submitted in response to PTO’s request for input on its proposal to change its rules on collecting and publishing real-party-in-interest (RPI) patent ownership information. PTO held a roundtable discussion on the proposal last month, at which Google, Hewlett-Packard and IBM expressed support for improved RPI collection (CD Jan 14 p8). PTO had proposed two versions of the rules -- “Broad” and “Limited” -- that would define RPI in different ways. Justice and the FTC said they support “an RPI definition that, at a minimum, includes the [ultimate parent entities] either by including all UPE in the ‘Broad’ definition, or by adopting the ‘Limited’ definition."

Sprint Nextel lost a net 337,000 subscribers across its networks during Q4, with growth on its CDMA and LTE networks only partially outweighing a heavy subscriber exodus from the soon-to-be-shuttered iDEN network used by its Nextel service subscribers. The carrier’s Sprint networks added 401,000 postpaid and 525,000 prepaid subscribers, while its Nextel network lost a net 1.02 million subscribers. Sprint said it also lost a net 243,000 wholesale subscribers. Sprint added a net 605,000 subscribers for the entire year, down from a net 5.1 million added in 2011. Exits by Nextel subscribers will continue to accelerate as the service nears its targeted shutdown in the middle of the year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said Thursday during a conference call with investors. Sprint said it expects it will see a diminishing percentage of exiting Nextel subscribers choose to join the remaining networks; about 51 percent of Nextel subscribers who terminated their service during Q4 chose to join other Sprint services (http://xrl.us/boff9q).

Cisco forecast major increases in mobile data traffic through 2017. Faster than previously projected increases in 4G adoption and Wi-Fi offloading bear watching, experts told us. Mobile data traffic will reach 134 exabytes per year -- 11.2 exabytes per month -- by the end of 2017, Cisco said Tuesday in a report. That would be 134 times the total Internet Protocol traffic generated in 2000. It would also be a gain from 2012, when consumers’ global mobile data traffic rose by 70 percent, Cisco said. Traffic reached 885 petabytes per month by the end of 2012 -- up from 520 petabytes per month at the end of 2011, said the maker of equipment for telecom firms to handle data. The monthly mobile data traffic in 2012 was nearly 12 times the total monthly Internet traffic generated in 2000 -- 75 petabytes per month, Cisco said. Global traffic will continue to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66 percent through 2017, Cisco said. North America will see growth slightly below the global average -- at a 56 percent CAGR -- to 2 exabytes per month in 2017, Cisco said (http://xrl.us/bigzmr).

Preparation for Superstorm Sandy’s landfall was key to New York-area broadcasters’ efforts to disseminate news and information to the public, said executives from Clear Channel Media and WABC during the FCC’s second hearing Tuesday on the storm’s communications impact. Others testified how Google and Twitter helped to fill the void left by outages in the area’s wireless and wireline communications networks.

The U.S. is experiencing an “historically high” patent grant rate after decades of increases, but the government’s patent system needs improvement, said the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program Friday in a new report. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 247,713 patents during 2011, a “record high” that follows steady increases in patent grant rates that extend back to 1985, Brookings said (http://xrl.us/bod6n4).

Vringo subsidiary I/P Engine filed a patent suit against Microsoft, claiming Microsoft violated two patents on search relevance filtering technology -- the patents I/P Engine used to successfully sue Google and others last year. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, alleges repeated violations of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,314,420 and 6,775,664. Vringo acquired the patents when it merged with I/P Engine; Lycos previously owned them (http://xrl.us/bodwup). A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is “unable to ... comment at this time."