Cbeyond, Integra Telecom and Socket Telecom have urged the FCC to impose conditions on CenturyLink’s planned purchase of Qwest to require the combined company to guarantee wholesale service quality, provide CLECs with conditioned copper loops and prevent the company from increasing special access rates or canceling special access agreements. The comments filed Thursday replied to a Sept. 29 letter from CenturyLink saying that a settlement with Sprint, Paetec, Mediacom, Cox and 360Networks in Iowa provides a model for relations with CLECs.

TOKYO -- With Japanese government approval almost certain, NTT DoCoMo will begin its next-generation digital mobile broadcasting service in 2011 starting in Tokyo and Osaka, spokeswoman Naoko Minobe told us Friday during a tour of the company’s showroom.

A dozen broadcasters sought to jump start an auction of translators they hope can be used for service on either radio band, without waiting for new requests for low-power FM (LPFM) stations that could use the same spectrum. A counterproposal to one made last month from an LPFM group and a broadcaster among those with the most applications pending in the 2003 filing window for Auction 83 was filed by small commercial broadcasters frustrated at the pace of FCC action. The earlier proposal by the Prometheus Radio Project, representing LPFM stations, and Educational Media Foundation, with several hundred translator supplications, has been getting consideration from career FCC staffers and commissioners’ offices aware that many industry stakeholders hadn’t signed onto that plan (CD Oct 4 p8). Prometheus officials said they welcomed debate about their proposal.

NTIA could be faced with no money for oversight of its broadband stimulus program unless Congress acts in the lame-duck session starting in November. The agency, which administers the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), wants Congress to sort out the issue in the lame duck, an NTIA official said. One option under consideration is an appropriations process called “reprogramming,” wherein NTIA would repurpose existing funding from other programs that it runs, the official said.

Broad use of Internet technology by young people requires industry and government efforts to establish online trust by parents and kids, privacy advocates from inside and outside the government said Friday. The FCC and the FTC unveiled tools to educate families about online safety, and the FTC plans to release a review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) next month.

HOLLYWOOD -- The effort by NAB and RIAA to mandate wireless devices be manufactured with an FM radio chip is a transparent “poison pill” intended to derail radio performance royalties, said CEA Senior Vice President Michael Petricone at the Digital Music West conference. CEA originally took no official position on the issue of radio royalties until the electronics industry was involved through the back door, he said.

Small carriers and their associations, pressing the FCC to impose interoperability mandates on devices that will make use of 700 MHz spectrum, said they're making headway at the commission and at the White House. Smaller carriers said that, based on their discussions with equipment makers, handsets could prove expensive and difficult to find without this requirement. A few view this as their top issue now before the FCC.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Improved video quality and local content provided by TV stations broadcasting mobile signals could help boost the audience for mobile video and increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on mobile devices, said broadcast executives pushing the technology. An average mobile video viewer watches now VoD or streaming video content for 30 minutes a day, said Sam Matheny, general manager of Capitol Broadcasting’s News Over Wireless. “If you're able to put this HD quality, no buffering signal on our handset, we really think we're going to be able to dramatically increase that."

Comcast and the Tennis Channel each have incentives to settle their cable program carriage dispute, which is slated to go before an FCC judge this month if they don’t enter arbitration or mediation (CD Oct 6 p9), industry lawyers and executives not involved in the case told us Thursday. Some of them said Comcast’s plan to buy control of NBC Universal is one reason for the cable operator to settle with the Tennis Channel, to avoid having the programming dispute become part of or muddy FCC consideration of the deal. That the deal is pending before the FCC may have been a reason the Media Bureau this week set Tennis Channel v. Comcast, which the programmer filed in January, for hearing by an administrative law judge, speculated agency and industry officials.

The past year’s net neutrality debate has featured “tortured semantics” from those who seek to subject the delivery of broadband to rules that the rest of the Internet doesn’t face, FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker said. She mentioned net neutrality in a dinner speech to the Media Institute in Washington. As with net neutrality, Baker said the government should keep to the sidelines for over-the-top Web content watched on TVs, as companies develop new features for such entertainment. Government and industry should be more active in combating online piracy, she said. At the awards dinner, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch lamented the state of U.S. public schools and supported higher-quality technology for them.