EchoStar's EchoStar XIX satellite launched Sunday and is expected to go live in Q1. In a news release Monday, the company said the Ka-band satellite will be part of the HughesNet Gen5 high-speed satellite broadband service to be introduced in Q1.

SoftBank is putting $1 billion into satellite operator OneWeb, with the money to go toward OneWeb setting up a high-volume satellite production facility on Kennedy Space Center land in Florida, the Japanese conglomerate said in a news release Monday. The facility is expected to employ 3,000 within four years, with OneWeb starting production there in 2018, it said. Other investors have put in an additional $200 million, SoftBank said. SoftBank Group Director Ronald Fisher will join OneWeb's board, it said. SoftBank is the majority owner of wireless carrier Sprint. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said the development follows his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, during which Son said he “shared my commitment to investing and creating jobs” in the U.S. (see 1612060073). “This is the first step in that commitment,” Son said.

Marine IT and VSAT provider OmniAccess, which uses Telesat capacity for mobile broadband and cruise ships and yachts in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, is expanding its relationship with the satellite company to bring that service to superyachts and passenger vessels in the Caribbean, Telesat said in a news release Thursday.

Ligado, pushing use of a cloud-based content delivery network as a way to distribute National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data (see 1607280022), plans to test a beta version of such a CDN in conjunction with George Mason University. In a news release Thursday, it said they plan to jointly evaluate weather data delivery using the CDN, including speed and reliability. It also said the CDN potentially could expand to provide free NOAA data access to schools, libraries and the public. Some in the weather data community have been skeptical of use of a CDN to address Ligado terrestrial low-power service interference with NOAA satellite downlinks (see 1611250033).

Saying the Fox and CBS TV contracts that the NFL produced on discovery were redacted to the point of being meaningless, plaintiffs against the NFL and DirecTV over NFL Sunday Ticket antitrust concerns (see 1512300027) want the court to order it to provide unredacted copies, they said. In a position statement (in Pacer) filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the plaintiffs of 27 consolidated class-action complaints said the league cited portions of the contracts in a motion to dismiss and they in turn agreed to limit discovery during the pendency of the motion to dismiss as long as the NFL agreed to produce those contracts. What the league provided was nearly fully redacted copies to the point where one network even redacted portions of its NFL contract that already had been filed, the plaintiffs said. The NFL didn't comment Thursday.

Globalstar needs to clarify the protocol and operating parameters of its revised terrestrial low power service broadband proposal to make more clear what kind of interference problems it poses for unlicensed users of the 2.4 GHz band, said Hearing Industries Association (HIA) in a filing Wednesday in docket 13-213. Globalstar's original proposal involved IEEE 802.11 protocol technology, but its revision (see 1611100031) isn't clear on what technology would be employed, so it's impossible to say whether the out-of-band emission limits would be effective, HIA said. The group said it would back symmetrical OOBE limits that protect adjacent band operations on either side of Globalstar's spectrum. It said that of the company's OOBE proposals, its 43 dB OOBE requirement could be a problem for hearing aid receivers operating near the edge of Globalstar's range but is still the preferred route. HIA said if the satellite firm uses LTE technology with control signals, that could help assuage interference concerns since the control signals could be moved from adjacent band edges easily. Globalstar didn't comment Thursday.

Due to potential problems stemming from a Sirius XM Telephone Consumer Protection Act settlement website, the deadline for cash TCPA claims was extended from Nov. 26 to Dec. 12 and a fourth round of 5 million email notices to class members was sent out about that extension, counsel for the satellite radio company and for the class-action suit plaintiffs said in a joint memorandum (in Pacer) Tuesday. In the joint filing in U.S. District Court in Newport News, Virginia, the lawyers said the problems revolved around an incorrect filing deadline date on a settlement claims sites that, for the five-plus days it was wrong, could have dissuaded class members from filing a cash claim for part of the $35 million SiriusXM settlement regarding the company's alleged TCPA violations (see 1606080019). The company laid out its corrective steps, saying it's visited conductor sites with an expert to confirm the changes made by those vendors to separate autodialed systems from the manual dialing systems used for dialing mobile phones. A fairness hearing on the settlement is scheduled for Tuesday.

Assurances that Ligado is providing the FCC about being open to tighter out-of-band emission limits (see 1611030049) don't change that the company's proposed terrestrial operations would generate excessive out of band emissions that would interfere with Indium's operations in adjacent spectrum, Iridium said in a filing Wednesday in docket 12-340. It said Ligado's technical response to Iridium cherry-picks issues from non-similar FCC proceedings and it said its own assumptions line up with the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee final report issued in 2013, in which Ligado was a major participant. Iridium also said Ligado's legal arguments fall short and that the company is ignoring Section 25.255 of rules, which puts on Ligado an obligation to prevent harmful interference. Ligado didn't comment.

Dish Network will likely keep violating the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), requiring injunctive relief, DOJ and the FTC said in a proposed conclusions of law filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Springfield, Illinois, in advance of the second phase of the lawsuit alleging robocall violations by the company (see 0903260144). The agencies said in the filing (in Pacer) that the likelihood of future Dish violations is proven by 165 million violations it committed between 2003 and 2011, its failure to show that during that time it identified or tried to correct the underlying TSR problems and its ability to use such marketing tactics to continue selling its offerings. They said the company hasn't provided any evidence that would let them and the court evaluate current practices. "Fencing-in relief is appropriate against Dish's internal telemarketing operation because it admitted ... that 'mistakes' were made but never offered a competent explanation for how it came to commit so many violations of the TSR and what it did to ensure additional violations did not occur," DOJ/FTC said, adding that their proposed five-year telemarketing ban on the company would give it "time to rebuild its systems so it can comply with the law." They said the ban on Dish's accepting new orders from past or current Order Entry retailers until it ensures those retailers aren't violating telemarketing laws is justifiable given that OE retailer system "has been rife with shady, illegal practices" since it signed up its first OE retailer in 2003. The satellite-TV provider didn't comment Wednesday.

The U.S. hopes to incorporate more commercial satellite capabilities into its national defense architecture, but changes first need to made in federal procurement rules to allow longer-term contracts, said Robert Tarleton, director-Military Satellite Communications Systems Directorate, Air Force Space Command, at a satellite industry panel Tuesday. Tarleton said the Air Force is looking at issuing a Pathfinder that would let it buy transponder space on commercial satellites before launch, letting the agency be part of the design of the satellite architecture. Pathfinder is a DOD business model that lets the agency commit to using commercial satellite transponders for multiple years instead of shorter-term operations and maintenance leases. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is considering experimenting with an acquisition model where it would put out unclassified orders for imagery of specific areas or incidents -- such as troop placements in foreign countries -- and earth imaging companies could compete to provide the pixels, data and/or analysis, rather than its traditional approach of long-term acquisition contracts, said NGA Director-Source Strategies Chirag Parikh. He also said with capabilities from earth imaging satellite operators like DigitalGlobe and Planet Labs, imagery acquisition is no longer a challenge but data processing and analysis are, with the U.S. considering outsourcing more routine analysis work to commercial operators.