HOUSTON -- APCO played a major role in restoring emergency communications in Haiti following January’s massive earthquake, President Richard Mirgon said Tuesday at the group’s annual conference. A major side effect of the earthquake was the destruction of Haiti’s land mobile radio system, with its transmitter in the presidential palace. An estimated 10,000 emergency calls were made and not answered after disaster struck, Mirgon said.

Revamping the Universal Service Fund should be an FCC priority, said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. In a letter Tuesday to the commissioners, he asked the agency to “proceed with urgency” to fix problems in rural communications infrastructure exposed by the recent mining disaster in his home state. Rockefeller didn’t mention comprehensive USF legislation introduced July 22 by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb. (CD July 26 p3).

Program access disputes are now drawing industry attention, not FCC action, commission and industry officials said. They said some pay-TV companies are discussing carriage deals to avert further complaints to the FCC, and the commission is awaiting filings from defendants in filed cases. Cablevision and spun-off subsidiary Madison Square Garden, the subject of complaints by AT&T and Verizon, continue trading filings with the telcos on procedures for the FCC to handle the cases (CD Aug 2 p9) and don’t seem near a settlement, said communications lawyers monitoring the disputes and not involved in them. They said Comcast could reach carriage deals with direct broadcast satellite providers for its Philadelphia sports channels and so could Cox Communications for a San Diego network.

FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett opened remarks to the APCO conference Monday by recognizing a simple fact about the 700 MHz D-block. “We have a disagreement,” he said. “We are committed to a public debate, public dialogue on the network."

More needs to be done to spur competition in the U.S. wireless market, rural groups and Free Press said as the FCC embarks on preparation of its next annual report on wireless competition. AT&T and Verizon attacked the FCC’s latest competition report, reiterating their stance that the market is competitive, as did CTIA. Comments on the report were due Friday.

Career FCC staffers are giving renewed attention to a long-dormant program-carriage case that the Media Bureau decided in the channel’s favor and proposed that the full commission uphold, agency officials said. Bureau officials appear to be revisiting an order on Mid-Atlantic Sports Network v. Time Warner Cable that went on circulation the last business day Kevin Martin was FCC chairman, an agency official said. Representatives of MASN and Time Warner Cable likely will come to the commission to meet with staffers and perhaps FCC members in the coming weeks to discuss the case, agency officials said.

The U.S. lacks a coherent international cybersecurity strategy and needs more leadership from Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt to coordinate agencies, said a GAO report released Monday. The lack of leadership is hampering the establishment of U.S.-related standards for cybersecurity, said the report, which pointed to several problems. The federal government hasn’t documented its goals for international cyberspace governance, it said. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review was supposed to produce near-term international goals but doesn’t set specific activities or timing to accomplish them. Without a comprehensive strategy from the White House, “Congress and the American public will be ill-equipped to assess how, if at all, federal efforts to address the global aspects of cyberspace ultimately support U.S. national security, economic, and other interests,” the report said.

Accord is slightly closer on how wireline ISPs should handle all Internet content and manage real-time communications and streaming services that don’t work properly with latency, officials on both sides of the issue said Monday. A meeting Saturday involving FCC Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus (CD July 30 p1) didn’t produce breakthroughs, they said. The meeting did show that supporters and opponents of net neutrality still have more common ground on the wireline issues of content nondiscrimination and managed services than on wireless, said commission and industry officials.

Motorola, TIA, CTIA and other industry players asked the FCC to maintain the de minimis rule in some form for larger manufacturers when it revises its hearing aid compatibility rules (HAC), in a vote scheduled for Thursday’s commission meeting. One of the results of the order is that Apple’s popular iPhone could become hearing aid-compatible.

Career FCC staffers are updating an overdue report to Congress on hurdles minorities, small businesses and women face in the media and telecom industries which Chairman Julius Genachowski will soon seek a vote on, agency officials said. The triennial report, due last Dec. 31, is mandated by Section 257 the Telecom Act to cover the past three years of work the commission has done to improve such constituents’ access to the industries and describe barriers that are faced, agency and industry officials said. Advocates for minorities said they'll closely scrutinize the document when it’s publicized to get a sense of what steps Genachowski is taking to reduce barriers to entry.