The reason some Americans don’t or won’t subscribe to broadband has nothing to do with FCC policies, Phoenix Center Chief Economist George Ford said Monday during a debate sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Some don’t subscribe because they don’t want broadband in their homes, Ford said. Others can’t because of costs.

How universal service fits into Congress’ planned rewrite of the Telecom Act is expected to come up at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Thursday on the Universal Service Fund, industry lobbyists said Monday. The Senate hearing opens a new avenue of Hill dialog on USF, an issue that lately has been mainly the domain of the House. House and Senate Commerce Committee staff meetings on the telecom law revamp start Friday (CD June 21 p8).

Sprint Nextel will work with its manufacturers reviewing green design criteria and specifications beginning Q1 2011, said Ralph Reid, vice president of corporate social responsibility, in an interview. Green is expected to play a bigger role in the company’s overall strategy, he said.

The FCC is considering comments in a rulemaking on robocalls. The commission is proposing changes to its rules under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and it intends to harmonize “TCPA rules with the FTC’s recently amended Telemarketing Sales Rule,” the commission said in the notice. The FCC is considering adopting the FTC’s rule, which would require companies to obtain prior express written consent from consumers before transmitting prerecorded messages to them.

Critics of Comcast’s plan to buy control of NBC Universal played up to regulators the horizontal aspects of the deal ahead of the Monday evening deadline for oppositions to be filed with the FCC. The combination of Comcast’s regional sports networks and the NBC TV stations NBCU owns will lead to higher prices for programming in the five markets where they overlap, the American Cable Association said Monday. It worries Comcast would control too much “must-have” programming in such markets, ACA said. Meanwhile, supporters of the deal filed comments praising Comcast.

Cable operators can use any set-top box with an Internet Protocol-based connector to output video in a format other devices can receive, instead of the required FCC IEEE 1394 interface for all HD boxes that some consumer electronics makers have said is outdated, the FCC Media Bureau ruled Friday afternoon. The waiver responds to requests for exemption from the IEEE 1394 standard made late last year by Intel, Motorola and TiVo. But any set-top box maker that manufactures compliant devices can take advantage of the waiver, which applies to any cable operator, said a bureau order. Operators won’t need to apply for individual exemptions, it said, http://xrl.us/bho6ne.

The FCC will proceed as planned on the National Broadband Plan while it considers whether to change the regulatory classification of broadband, General Counsel Austin Schlick said Friday during a teleconference sponsored by the National Regulatory Research Institute. Schlick also said the FCC could issue an interpretive order on reclassification without first proposing and taking comments on a notice of proposed rulemaking.

The FCC’s Spectrum Task Force is preparing a rulemaking notice that would promote leasing of 90 MHz of mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum, and it’s expected to circulate for the July 15 meeting, leaders of the task force said at a press conference Friday. The commission is not expected to propose rules similar to those in the order approving the Harbinger-SkyTerra transaction, which requires the nation’s two largest carriers to seek FCC permission before leasing that spectrum.

The idea of mapping telephone numbers to Internet Protocol addresses on the public Internet flopped but e-numbering (ENUM) technology is evolving into a key -- and lower cost -- way for mobile and fixed telecom carriers to route calls, sources said. The plan to have telephone numbers resolve in e.164.arpa faltered for several reasons, but carriers increasingly use ENUM telephone number translation to send calls within their own networks or to other providers’ networks, they said.

Broadcast mobile video network operators could benefit if more wireless carriers adopt mobile broadband usage limits as AT&T has, industry executives said. That’s because services like Qualcomm’s MediaFLO and the TV broadcasters’ mobile DTV don’t consume any bandwidth on the carriers’ network. But some are concerned consumers might avoid mobile video altogether if they're worried about exceeding the limits and don’t understand the distinctions between various mobile video services.