LightSquared said it will provide satellite phone service for healthcare providers in American Indian and Alaska Native communities through a partnership with the Indian Health Service. Participants may gain access to LightSquared’s wireless network once it’s built, depending on the program’s needs, a company spokesman said. LightSquared said it will donate up to 2,000 phones and provide free service through 2020.

The FCC seems unlikely to soon change retransmission consent rules as it considers a request for rulemaking by many multichannel video programming distributors, unless a contractual dispute between a TV station and an MVPD leads to an outage for subscribers, an analyst and an FCC aide suggested Wednesday. No executives at a USTelecom event on retransmission predicted quick commission action on the petition by 14 cable, satellite, telco-TV and nonprofit entities. That could change if there’s another instance in which MVPD customers can’t watch broadcasts because of a contractual dispute, as with the removal for less than a day of Disney’s WABC-TV New York from Cablevision’s lineup this year (CD March 9 p2), some said.

A New York measure by Sen. Brian Foley, D-Blue Point, would increase scrutiny of telecom mergers and “require a portion of the benefits” be “returned to the state’s ratepayers” in refunds or infrastructure investments. The bill would protect the consumers in light of service problems from telecom acquisitions, said James LaCarrubba, Foley’s chief of staff. It would cover any residential line acquisition or sale, he said. The measure is in the Senate after passing the Assembly, LaCarrubba said.

Talk at the FCC of Universal Service Fund reform to include broadband services has satellite companies concerned over the possibility of increased contribution rates without any subsidy in return, industry executives said. Under the current system, companies pay into the USF based on their interstate and international end-user telecom revenue and generally leave satellite companies out of the running for subsidies. If a future version of the USF includes broadband, as proposed by the FCC and tentatively named the Connect America Fund (CAF), satellite companies could be left paying for expansion of competing technologies again, executives said.

The NTIA awarded the last of grants under the Broadband Technologies Program, closing out awards for the program created by broad economic stimulus legislation that cleared Congress shortly after President Barack Obama took office last year. NTIA beat Thursday’s deadline to complete awards for the $4 billion program. The Rural Utilities Service will announce final awards by the same deadline for its part of the broadband stimulus program, spokesman Bart Kendrick said Tuesday. The agency was still finalizing the review of a few applications, he said.

House Democrats are now eyeing lame-duck passage of their net neutrality bill, two House staffers said Tuesday. House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., may introduce the measure Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, they said Tuesday afternoon. Republicans were still reviewing the net neutrality draft bill Tuesday afternoon, House and industry officials said. Observers don’t expect Congress to pass the bill, but it could send a message to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that he shouldn’t reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act (CD Sept 28 p1).

Federal agencies must upgrade their public servers and services such as e-mail to use IPv6 by the end of FY 2012, while maintaining their ability to run IPv4 for the foreseeable future, said U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. His Tuesday Office of Management and Budget memo for federal CIOs contained steps and deadlines for adoption. Agencies will have an easy time switching if they roll it out over time, said speakers at a Tuesday IPv6 forum in Washington.

Lack of FCC enforcement of broadcast sponsorship identification rules has led to a resurgence in the use of questionable content by TV stations, Free Press wrote Chairman Julius Genachowski. The group, which petitioned the agency in 2007 to crack down on the use of sponsored programming passed off as news, pointed to recent reports in the Los Angeles Times that stations are again airing such programming, saying it’s evidence of a growing trend. “Fake news is alive and well,” said Craig Aaron, managing director of Free Press. “We would like to see them [the FCC] finish what they started back in 2007 and recognize this is still a problem."

The radio industry hasn’t reached agreement yet on whether the NAB should put its weight behind a possible deal with music labels that would cut streaming fees in exchange for the U.S.’s first terrestrial broadcast performance royalty, many industry executives and lawyers said. They said agreement among broadcasters on outlines of an accord with MusicFirst, first publicized by the NAB Aug. 6, doesn’t appear imminent. Some music and radio executives had hoped to reach a deal that included mandating FM chips on all cellphones by the time Congress returned from summer recess. With this Congress in its waning days, there may not be time to pass any legislation this year even if a deal is reached, some broadcasters said.

The FCC should use regulation to help revive the level of competition that existed when niche ISPs flourished in the 1990s, Small Business Administration economist Radwan Saade said at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors conference Tuesday. Saade, who works in the SBA’s Office of Advocacy, is finishing a Congressionally mandated study of small business’ broadband needs. It’s due in mid-October.