The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau on Monday delayed for a year some of the requirements of the agency's February 2024 Telephone Consumer Protection Act consent order (see 2402160048). Originally set to take effect Friday, the requirements were delayed until April 11, 2026.
Sinclair promotes Christina Tesauro to senior vice president-sales, Tennis Channel, AMP Sports ... Global aerospace consultant AeroDynamic Advisory adds Liang Sim, ex-Blue Origin, and JJ Gertler, Defense Concepts Organization, as senior advisers.
The initial group of Amazon's Kuiper satellites is set for launch April 9 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, Amazon said Wednesday. The 27 Kuipers will be deployed at an altitude of 450 kilometers, it added. Amazon expects to offer commercial satellite broadband service later this year, the company said, calling the 27 satellites "a significant upgrade" from the prototypes launched in 2023 (see 2310110007). Amazon said the satellites are coated in a mirror film that scatters reflected sunlight to make them less visible to ground-based astronomers. In the next several years, there are seven more Kuiper launches planned on Atlas V, along with 38 launches on ULA's larger Vulcan Centaur rocket and 30-plus launches by Arianespace, Blue Origin and SpaceX.
During the past 45 months, the number of unserved or underserved broadband-serviceable locations in South Carolina has dropped from more than 300,000 to 28,724, the South Carolina Broadband Office said Tuesday. Its $546.5 million BEAD allotment will address remaining unserved and underserved locations "and permanently solve the digital divide," it said. In the interim, it will use money from the state’s original $400 million American Rescue Plan Act funding to reduce the number of locations that will require BEAD funding.
A representative of the Open Technology Institute at New America warned an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr against higher power limits and lower out-of-band emissions (OOBE) levels in the citizens broadband radio service band (see 2503130049), said a filing posted Wednesday. “With more than 400,000 base stations deployed by more than 1,000 operators for a wide variety of use cases, it would be fatally disruptive to accede to the demands of a small subset of users to raise power to a level that will inevitably increase interference and reduce channel availability for most other users, especially [general authorized access] users who have just recently built out the vast majority of [CBRS deployments] in reliance on the Commission’s rules,” Michael Calabrese said in the filing in docket 17-258. That is especially true for rural and small communities where hundreds of wireless ISPs “have relied on the Commission’s CBRS rules to invest in equipment sold by [original equipment manufacturers] such as Cambium Networks and Tarana Wireless to offer more affordable fixed wireless broadband services.”
The FCC must follow the same designated entity (DE) rules in the reauction of AWS-3 as it followed in the original 2014 auction, Dish Network parent EchoStar told the agency in comments this week on an auction procedures NPRM (see 2504010055). EchoStar hinted at a legal challenge if the FCC changes the rules. Two Dish-controlled DEs, Northstar and SNR, defaulted on winning bids in the auction, and EchoStar and the DEs “reasonably could be subject to a deficiency payment” if the auction underperforms, said a filing Tuesday in docket 25-70.
Communications Daily is tracking the lawsuits below involving appeals of FCC actions. New lawsuits are marked with a *.
Top Senate Commerce Committee Democrats told us they are considering, but aren't yet committed to, scaling back or ceasing cooperation in advancing Republican nominees to federal entities ahead of a likely imminent panel confirmation hearing for GOP FCC nominee Olivia Trusty. Democrats are eyeing the tactic shift in response to President Donald Trump’s disputed March firing of Democratic FTC Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter (see 2503190057) and other actions against independent agencies. Any roadblocks Democrats place against GOP picks would be largely symbolic and likely only delay Senate confirmations, given Republicans' 53-47 majority in the upper chamber, observers said.
Telecom carriers are under pressure from the FCC to end their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, with Chairman Brendan Carr saying last week that the FCC won’t bless mergers by companies that have DEI policies in place. Carr sent a warning letter Friday to Disney on its DEI programs. Industry officials say companies have no choice to comply, though the FCC moves have created regulatory uncertainty. T-Mobile explained in a letter to the FCC how it’s getting rid of DEI.
The FCC Enforcement Bureau on Thursday asked voice service providers and USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group to file information by May 1 on “private-led efforts to trace back the origin of suspected unlawful robocalls necessary for the Commission’s annual report.” The reporting period for the request is all of 2024. “Unlawful prerecorded or artificial voice message calls -- robocalls -- plague the American public,” the bureau said in a notice in docket 20-195. “Spoofed caller ID makes it more difficult to identify the source of the call.”