Charter Communications is opposing the part of FCC's set-top box proposal that would require cable modems be broken out on customers' bills and their cost unsubsidized. Saying it would be "more than happy" to note on customers’ bills that its modems are free, Charter in a blog post Wednesday said it "doesn’t stand to reason that customers will benefit from forcing companies to start charging for modems they currently give away." Compared with much of the set-top proceeding, cable modems are "a sleeper issue, but it offers a road map to undermining the retail market [for set-tops] and kill[ing] off the set-top box retail market before it ever gets off the ground," Andrew Schwartzman, outside counsel for Zoom Telephonics, told us Wednesday. Zoom repeatedly pushed the FCC for cable modem conditions on Charter's buys of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks (see 1511270051, 1511240028 and 1511040045) and has backed the FCC on the cable modem portion of the set-top proposal.
Comcast plans to roll out a wireless offering in early or mid-2017, based on its Verizon mobile virtual network operator (see 1605170057) and integrating Comcast's Wi-Fi hot spots, CEO Brian Roberts said Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference. The company in July promoted Greg Butz from Comcast Cable executive vice president-sales and marketing operations to president, Comcast Mobile, Roberts said. He said Butz and a team of about 150 have been readying the wireless offering. Roberts didn't say if the company would broadly roll out the offering next year or beta test it, saying it would be "an in-footprint strategy."
Despite Ligado assurances its terrestrial low-power service plans, with proper protection zones, won't cause interference to National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration downlinks sharing the same spectrum, NOAA said interference problems it has from Ligado operations (see 1608120033) demonstrate otherwise. "Nothing Ligado has done or shown ... has changed our view," said NOAA Chief Information Officer Zach Goldstein told us. On whether sharing is possible at all in the 1675-1680 MHz band, he said, “We don't know. We don't have a technical solution as we stand here today -- that doesn't mean we can't develop one.”
With the FCC set-top box proceeding an existential threat in the eyes of some pay-TV operators (see 1609190048), lobbying on the independent and diverse programming rulemaking on that also is on the Sept. 29 commissioner meeting preliminary agenda has been and will likely remain relatively quiet this week, multiple cable industry officials and insiders said. If an order comes out of the NPRM, they said, there undoubtedly will far more intense lobbying by multichannel video programming distributors and programmers.
DirecTV and MasTec Advanced Technologies, one of its contractors, were out of bounds firing a group of employees who griped to a Florida TV news station about pay policies, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday, upholding a 2011 National Labor Relations Board ruling. DirecTV and MasTec said the workers' comments weren't protected concerted activity because of malicious untruths and flagrant disloyalty. Judges Judith Rogers and Sri Srinivasan -- who wrote the majority opinion (in Pacer) -- said the court's interest isn't where that line between protected and unprotected activity sits but on the correctness of NLRB's finding that the workers' appeal is on the protected side of that line. Judge Janice Brown dissented. The pay policy required MasTec installers to hook up DirecTV set-top boxes to customer phone lines, with MasTec setting up financial incentives and punishments for hook-up quotas, the D.C. Circuit ruling said. MasTec fired nearly all technicians who were part of a TV news broadcast about the policy, the court said. An NLRB administrative law judge said going public is protected activity, but their statements were so disloyal and disparaging that they weren't protected. The full NLRB disagreed that the comments to the TV news crew reached that level. Judges' decision Friday said MasTec workers' on-air comments "were neither so disloyal and incommensurate with their labor grievances nor so maliciously untrue as to fall outside" of National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protections. They also dismissed DirecTV arguments that because the direct broadcast satellite company is the fired workers' employer's customer, the workers had no protected rights to criticize it, ruling DirecTV clearly committed an unfair labor practice in causing MasTec to do the firings. In her dissent, Brown said the workers crossed the line from labor dispute to public disparagement aimed at eroding the companies' reputations. "This is not a close case," Brown said, pointing to the workers' telling the station that MasTec was requiring them to lie to customers when it had not done so, and was trying to have them scare customers into accepting the service: "By soberly repeating that joke to a public audience without its context and as though it were a serious instruction, these technicians left the NLRA and its protections behind." DirecTV in a statement said it agreed with the dissent and is "considering [its] options.” MasTec didn't comment.
Congress has discussed making the Department of Transportation the lead agency on regulating and overseeing any nontraditional space missions, taking no action yet, said George Nield, Federal Aviation Administration associate administrator-commercial space transportation. The FAA, as part of DOT, "would be happy to play sort of lead role -- not take over everything but be the front door," Nield said, saying the private sector "would love to have one-stop shopping." Nield said Friday that House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee member Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., has been leading the push. Bridenstine's office didn't comment.
NBCUniversal's retransmission and reverse compensation fees -- zero five years ago -- should hit $800 million this year, CEO Steve Burke said at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch investor conference Wednesday. He also said the unit of Comcast is "catching up" with other major broadcasters in retrans and reverse compensation revenue, but "I wouldn't anticipate us zooming past anyone else." CBS has said it's on track to take in more than $1 billion in retrans and reverse compensation revenue this year (see 1607290022). Burke said NBCU signed some large retrans deals last year and has a couple left this year.
Microsoft is claiming "a profound negative impact" on video game consoles like its Xbox 360S from Globalstar's proposed broadband terrestrial low-power service (TLPS). Those assertions could mire the proceeding before the FCC for months, satellite industry consultant Tim Farrar told us Wednesday. "Things were coming to a head one way or another -- either to move forward or say nothing will happen this year -- and this likely ensures the latter." Nintendo also raised red flags about possible TLPS interference (see 1607060042). Globalstar rebutted Microsoft's concerns.
Auto industry objections to a push for an emergency stay on launch of dedicated short-range communication systems (DSRC) aimed at curbing traffic accidents lack relevancy and swerve around the petition's core argument -- how commercial applications in the 5.9 GHz band negatively affects road safety, consumer privacy, cybersecurity and public interest groups said in reply comments posted Friday in RM-11771. Instead, those opponents to the petition "offer nothing more ... than the same tone-deaf talking points and avoiding the substantive issues at hand," the public interest groups said. The only opponents to the petition are licensees with commercial interests, and many critics don't address the specific privacy and cybersecurity concerns raised in the petition, while consumer and auto safety groups all back it, the public interest groups said. The filers were Public Knowledge, Open Technology Institute at New America, Access Humboldt, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Consumer Watchdog. Numerous auto industry groups and allies have pushed for denial of the OTI/PK request (see 1608250051). General Motors in a filing Thursday said the petition is based on "myths grossly exaggerating the security risks posed by DSRC and mischaracterizing the [FCC's] reasoned and long-established rules for the DSRC service." In its reply comments, GM said there are no heightened cybersecurity risks from any backward compatibility mandate in DSRC service rules, and Section 95.1509 of FCC rules -- governing DSRC technical standards -- doesn't preclude future security improvements. It challenged claims that commercial DSRC applications pose a cybersecurity and privacy risk, pointing to IEEE security standards for applications using wireless access in a vehicular environment. Such DSRC applications might include parking management and payment or fuel management, and in each case, consumers will have a choice of whether to share information on an application-by-application basis, GM said, saying its 2017 Cadillac CTS, with DSRC vehicle-to-vehicle communications, won't include any commercial DSRC applications: "There is no need for regulatory action to address a non-existent problem, much less a precipitous 'emergency stay.'"
Prohibiting “unconditional” most-favored-nation (MFN) provisions and types of “unreasonable” alternative distribution method (ADM) provisions would be the focus of the independent and diverse programming rulemaking notice on the FCC's September meeting agenda, but the proposal also will invite comments on program bundling, an FCC official told us. Chairman Tom Wheeler's announcement Thursday that he was proposing for consideration rules limiting ADM and MFN use (see 1609080083) left some buoyed. That ADMs and MFNs also were singled out as conditions in regulatory approval of Charter Communications' buying Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks (see 1604250039) "signals ... the importance of these," Public Knowledge Policy Fellow John Gasparini told us Friday.