The FCC restarted its 180-day clock on review of Comcast’s agreement to buy control of NBC Universal after the companies on Tuesday submitted economic studies requested by commission staff. In pausing the clock at 29 days elapsed last month (CD April 19 p1), the Media Bureau said it would restart after the studies, on the stated benefits of the deal and its impact on online video competition, were filed. A bureau public notice Wednesday afternoon set new deadlines for opposition to the deal and other comments.

Similarities between WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE) would make migration from WiMAX to LTE or even convergence of the 4G technologies possible, Clearwire Chief Technology Officer John Saw said in an interview. The WiMAX operator is set to launch in many new markets this year.

SES said it’s considering several different in-orbit maneuvers to mitigate interference on subsidiary SES World Skies’ AMC-11 satellite from the nearby Intelsat Galaxy 15 satellite that’s unresponsive and continuing to transmit while slowly drifting outside its slot (CD April 9 p10). The amount of interference created by the proximity of the two C-band payloads is hard to estimate, but the company is considering a number of movements that should keep interference at a minimum as Galaxy 15 passes through AMC-11’s orbital spot at 129 degrees west, said a company spokesman.

Internet technologies will take center stage as a U.S.-led program to tie together international military communications in Asia and the Pacific is extended to enabling data-sharing and to cooperation with technology companies and private, U.N. and relief organizations, organizers said. Military organizations of 22 foreign countries are scheduled to take part Aug. 16-27 in the fourth edition of an exercise called Pacific Endeavor, to be held at Singapore’s Changi Command and Control Centre.

Standard group 3GPP’s LTE Release 9 is “functionally frozen with some minor exceptions,” Adrian Scrase, head of the Mobile Competence Center, said on an ATIS conference call Tuesday. The latest LTE specification includes continued integration of the femtocell concept, self-organization network functionality, positioning support, addition of spectrum bands like 800 MHz and 1500 MHz and broadening of LTE deployment scenarios, he said. 3GPP Release 8 formed the basis for the commercial LTE deployment, he noted.

A draft version of long-awaited privacy legislation by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., would require more notification of consumers before collection of personal information. The bill would also expand FTC authority over online advertising practices. Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., worked together on the draft and unveiled it Tuesday. Industry groups may raise concerns about the burden to comply, said Kristen Mathews, a privacy attorney with Proskauer.

A paucity of comments on an FCC radio rulemaking asking whether it should extend preferences for assigning stations to tribes without lands (CD Feb 4 p12) seems to underline the relative lack of controversy, several broadcast lawyers said. Three groups and a non-profit representing Native Americans and Alaska natives filed comments that were released Tuesday afternoon in docket 09-52. Other groups said they sat out the filing round. Commission action on tribal issues seems like it won’t take long, but acting on a more controversial matter raised by a 2009 rulemaking notice of whether to make it harder for stations to move into larger towns may take a while if it occurs at all, said three industry lawyers.

The time has come for the FCC to formally seek comment on whether it should “reclassify” broadband as a Title II service, subject to common carrier regulation, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said Tuesday in a debate sponsored by the New America Foundation. Hank Hultquist, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, countered that the FCC has plenty of authority regardless of the recent Comcast decision, and reclassification would be a mistake.

Trade groups representing IT, telecom and Internet companies worry that financial industry revamp legislation being considered by Congress might be too broad and that some language in the House bill could significantly expand the FTC’s rulemaking authority, officials told us. But public interest groups supported expansion of FTC power under the House bill, which was absent from the Senate version.

"We now have seen how satellite radio performs in what was this terrible recession,” and the experience “bodes very, very well for our future,” Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin said Tuesday on a quarterly earnings call. “What we found is that consumers love our product. They stuck with us in spite of the 10 percent unemployment."