SpaceX successfully launched the Thaicom 6 satellite into the 22.5 degrees inclination orbital position. The satellite was launched Monday on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Fla., SpaceX said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1dcX8IR). The mission is Falcon 9’s second flight to a geosynchronous transfer orbit “and begins a regular cadence of launches planned for SpaceX in 2014,” it said.

Any Communications Act update should kill the regime of silos pegged to service classifications, Free State Foundation President Randolph May said in a Washington Times op-ed. He outlined several principles for an update, citing the December announcement by House Commerce Committee Republican leaders to take on the task this year and the next. “These legacy service classifications are grounded in outdated techno-functional constructs, and they often favor one marketplace competitor over another without good reason,” May said (http://bit.ly/1cj8Zly). The FCC should also have to accept a competition-based standard to determine whether a market failure exists before regulating. Its orders should be more narrow than broad, he advocated. The review should be deliberative but “given the competitive changes that already have occurred in the communications marketplace -- and that continue to occur at a rapid pace -- deliberative should not be allowed to turn into never-ending,” May said.

Downloads of apps for mobile devices jumped 91 percent Christmas Day, compared with an average day in the first three weeks of December, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry (http://bit.ly/1cCYjzx). Flurry said 2013 “was the biggest Christmas yet for mobile app downloads,” with downloads up 11 percent over Christmas 2012. The one-day increase goes along with a 25 percent increase in app downloads in December 2013 compared to the same month in 2012. However, the rate of year-to-year growth for the December and Christmas Day spikes has slowed, Flurry said. The slowing growth could signal “market maturation,” said the blog post. “Many consumers in Western Europe and English-speaking countries -- large mobile markets where Christmas is a big holiday -- already have a smartphone and/or a tablet,” Flurry said. “Fewer people are coming online with mobile for the very first time.” Since consumers who are already regular mobile users already have a stable of apps they trust, they are less likely to try a bunch of new ones, and less likely to be in a hurry to download the ones they use, the blog said. Successful developers going forward will be those who focus on retaining users, said Flurry.

Submitting refined study area boundary maps, necessary for implementation of the FCC’s Connect America Fund benchmarking rule, “would require a very substantial, industry-wide effort with (at best) speculative results,” and in any case cannot be completed by Jan. 13, Verizon told the FCC in a filing Monday (http://bit.ly/19AIKUt). Verizon was writing to support a Dec. 17 petition by several ILEC associations -- including USTelecom, of which Verizon is a member -- to stay the requirement, or grant an extension of time to reconcile study area boundaries (CD Dec 19 p12). The Wireline Bureau’s proposal that ILECs review an online map of aggregate study area boundary data and resolve and recertify overlaps and voids is “an extensive process” that can’t realistically be performed by the requested deadline, Verizon said. It’s not even clear that the data will be needed at all, the ILEC said, given that it’s intended for use as an input to the quantile regression analysis, which may itself be eliminated (CD Dec 18 p2). Even if the commission continues to use the quantile regression analysis, the Jan. 13 deadline doesn’t give ILECs and state commissions enough time to reconcile and revise their study area boundary data, Verizon said.

The Federal Aviation Administration chose six unmanned aircraft system research and test site operators across the U.S., the agency said Monday (http://1.usa.gov/19xp7CB). The sites will be run by the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, Griffiss International Airport in Rome, N.Y., the North Dakota Department of Commerce, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Virginia Tech.

The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology granted a waiver Monday to Autoliv ASP and Caterpillar that temporarily exempts the companies from the FCC’s Section 15.515(c) emissions rules. The waiver allows Autoliv to continue manufacturing and marketing its C4 vehicular radars to Caterpillar until Dec. 31, 2014 -- and for Caterpillar to continue importing the radars until the same date. The radars comply with the FCC’s existing Section 15.515(c) emissions limits, but do not comply with revised limits set to take effect Wednesday. Autoliv and Caterpillar had told the FCC that Caterpillar’s vehicles could not safely operate without the Autoliv radars, which Caterpillar will need until it can complete a planned redesign that will allow use of dually compliant radars. The FCC said the waiver will apply to only the about 900 vehicles Caterpillar believes it will manufacture through the end of 2014 that will require the Autoliv radar systems, most of which will operate outside the U.S. or in situations that will have a “negligible” influence on satellite interference in the 23.6-24.0 MHz band (http://bit.ly/1emBsXv).

Several associations for deaf and hard of hearing people supported a request by cvideo relay service providers for a one-year waiver of the daily measurement of speed of answer (SoA) requirement, they told the FCC in a letter Saturday (http://bit.ly/1cij9iY). The rule and associated penalties are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The groups “appreciate the stronger SoA requirements but are concerned that significant rate reductions were imposed in the same order without taking in account the costs for the new SoA requirements,” they said. SoA measurements should be calculated daily, but meeting this requirement in the next year “may not be feasible” in some instances, and could cause providers to incur “significant costs through overstaffing” to meet the requirements, they said. The groups, including Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the National Association of the Deaf, recommended implementation of the new 30-second SoA requirement without penalty as a “testing phase” for one year.

Iridium asked to modify its space station authorization for its Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit Mobile Satellite Service constellation. Iridium would like the authorization to include the Iridium Next second-generation satellites, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/1ajs049). In a separate application, ViaSat requested FCC consent for the assignment of Intelsat’s authorization “to operate the Ka-band payload on the Galaxy-28 satellite in the 19.7-20.2 GHz and 29.5-30.0 GHz bands” at 89 degrees west, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/19xv7LF).

Tribune closed on its $2.2 billion purchase of Local TV, Tribune said in a news release Friday (http://bit.ly/19sYNta). The FCC approved the transaction Dec. 20 (CD Dec 23 p3). Tribune now owns 39 TV stations, and provides services through sharing agreements to three former Local TV stations now owned by Dreamcatcher. As a result of the sale, Tribune is both the largest Fox affiliate group and the largest CW affiliate group in the U.S., the release said. “The transaction creates the largest combined independent broadcast group and content creator in the country,” Tribune said.

The Department of Defense highlights the challenge faced by the government of getting enough spectrum available for all of the military’s unmanned systems, including drones and unmanned ground systems. The “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap” cites broader demands by spectrum-dependent systems (SDS) used by the military (http://1.usa.gov/1kWnzEc). “U.S. military operations are now occurring in many parts of the world where adequate spectrum is not available for [command and control], sensor, and data link systems,” DOD said. “There is a significant increase in the number of SDS the United States, our partners, and our coalition forces deploy to address current, and may want to deploy to address expected future, mission areas. In addition, these SDS collect more information, and missions often require greater bandwidths to send their information directly to warfighters.” Areas where the military has to operate are becoming more spectrally “noisy” in general “because of increasingly cluttered and hostile spectrum environments.” Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as promoted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can help, but isn’t a cure-all, DOD said. “DSA offers the ability to change frequency band use based on the actual use or nonuse of certain bands by other adjacent SDS,” the report said. “Developmental challenges include susceptibility to countermeasures, costs of integrating with existing systems, developing standards (including regulatory aspects), and cosite Interference.”