Juniper Research is forecasting consumer spending of $43 billion for smart home devices this year, jumping to $100 billion by 2020. Entertainment services including Netflix and Spotify are enlarging the smart home market on “universal appeal” and low-cost service, Juniper said, but emerging segments including home automation will begin to catch up, driven by falling hardware prices and growing consumer awareness. To date, numerous home automation subscription services, such as AT&T's Digital Life, “have struggled to address the mass-market,” Juniper said. Unit product purchases, rather than systems, are the most likely entry point to the smart home for consumers, Juniper said. It cited Nest and SmartThings as companies that have “successfully added subscription services to their hardware sales in order to generate lifetime value.”

Windstream signed an agreement with TierPoint to sell its data center business for $575 million, Windstream said in a news release Monday. Windstream will establish an ongoing partnership with TierPoint as a part of the transaction, it said, and its new structure will allow Windstream to "focus capital on its core telecom offerings while continuing to offer traditional data center services to enterprise customers across a broader data center footprint." Both companies have approved the transaction, which is expected to close in two to four months, said Windstream.

Apple, AT&T, Cox Enterprises, Dell, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Microsoft are among the 81 companies that signed the White House’s American Business Act on Climate Pledge and support an agreement being reached to reduce carbon emissions and achieve a sustainable future at the U.N. Climate Change Conference beginning next month in Paris, a White House fact sheet said Monday.

Uber said that its driver partners in more than 180 cities will begin receiving “geographically targeted” Amber Alerts as part of the company's partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Uber's nationwide participation in the Amber Alert program follows on a pilot program for drivers in Colorado, the company said. “Uber’s presence in communities all across the country will be an incredible asset and we are proud to team up with Uber to increase the reach of the AMBER Alert program and help bring more missing children home safely,” NCMEC Missing Children Division Director-Special Programs Robert Hoever said in a news release.

Commissioner Terrell McSweeny will deliver opening remarks at the FTC Start with Security conference in Austin Nov. 5, an agency news release said Wednesday. Speakers will include those who “helped build and run security programs at large-scale enterprises and rapid-growth startups in Austin, like Dell, RetailMeNot, Honest Dollar, and National Instruments, along with top security experts,” it said. Panelists will address how startups can “build a culture of security, including how they can effectively model threats, train their developers, and ensure secure coding practices; scale security testing when they are growing rapidly and continuously iterating their products; work with third-party code and bug reports, and effectively address vulnerabilities; and move past bug hunting to embrace key security features,” it said. A full list of speakers is available on the event website. The conference begins at 9:30 a.m. and will end at 4 p.m. at the University of Texas-Austin’s AT&T Conference Center, it said.

The FTC approved early termination requests from Ericsson and Amazon in their respective pending acquisitions, effectively eliminating the remainder of the waiting period during which the commission and the Justice Department may have reviewed the deals. Amazon Web Services is buying Elemental Technologies (see 1509040030), and Ericsson is purchasing Envivio.

The Association for Telecommunications Industry Solutions issued an IP "roadmap" to ease the migration of public-safety applications to "IP-enabled media, products and services." The report provides an overview of public-safety needs, IP solutions and new capabilities to spur the adoption of all-IP systems in technologies used to protect lives and property, an ATIS release said Thursday. "This report is vital in helping network operators and the public safety community usher in the all-IP and M2M era in the public safety infrastructure," said CEO Susan Miller.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s goal is to integrate drones into U.S. airspace while “maintaining the highest levels of safety,” a spokeswoman told us in response to a complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the FAA for failing to establish privacy rules for commercial drones (see 1510050053). “Safely integrating UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] into the national airspace system is one of the biggest and most exciting challenges we face,” the FAA said. “We are finalizing our final rule for small unmanned aircraft and will have that out next year,” the FAA said. “Meanwhile, we’ve granted more than 1,700 exemptions to commercial operators through the Section 333 process,” as the agency has successfully done for decades, the spokeswoman said. “These operations are approved and authorized by the FAA so we can ensure the safety of the public,” the FAA said. It didn't respond to questions surrounding EPIC's privacy concerns.

Netflix and Zayo's co-location business, zColo, partnered to expand Community IX Holdings' (CIX) peering platform by sponsoring a peering exchange in Atlanta, Zayo said in a news release Tuesday. The space, power and underlying network connectivity of the new exchange, named CIX-ATL, will be provided by zColo, while Netflix will provide the necessary switching equipment and associated technology to run the exchange, said Zayo. CIX serves the southeastern U.S. and Latin American markets and its new CIX-ATL platform will reside in zColo's facility in Atlanta, the release said.

AT&T detailed customer migration from legacy to IP services in two wire-center trials it's doing in Carbon Hill, Alabama, and West Del Ray Beach, Florida. In filings posted Monday in docket 13-5 on meetings with FCC officials, AT&T said the transition of targeted TDM-based customers in the trial centers through May 31, 2015, can be summarized as follows: "...in Carbon Hill, AL, consumer legacy accounts declined by 22% and IP accounts increased by 42%; in West Del Ray Beach, FL consumer legacy accounts declined by 20% and IP accounts increased by 20%; in Carbon Hill, AL simple business legacy accounts declined by 11% and IP accounts increased by 22%; and in West Del Ray Beach, FL simple business legacy accounts declined by 9% and IP accounts increased by 25%." Customers using AT&T's VoIP, mobile and legacy TDM networks "all experienced robust performance," the telco said, citing its own reports. AT&T said it's continuing to contact people in both communities to give them information on the IP transition. It also said it expects soon to begin offering an enhanced U-Verse service targeting small businesses.