One of the big surprises from the World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai, which ended in December, was the role that fear played in many of the negotiations, Charles Glass, chief of the International Spectrum Policy Division in NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management, said during an FCBA webinar Wednesday.
Public interest and consumer groups urged the FCC take a more aggressive stance on a November Further NPRM about protecting consumers from SIM swapping and port-out fraud (see 2311150042). CTIA said the commission should “pursue a flexible and risk-based approach” toward customer account security and fraud deterrence. Reply comments were due this week in docket 21-341, and they largely mirror initial comments (see 2401180053).
The proposed $150,000 fine for Mission Broadcasting's alleged retransmission consent negotiation violations (see 2401120069) is unreasonably large, and the violation finding is wrong, Mission said Tuesday. In a docket 22-443 response to the FCC Media Bureau's notice of apparent liability, Mission said the NAL focuses on Nexstar-proposed language for inclusion in an agreement to settle litigation with Comcast, not for a retrans consent agreement. It said the proposed forfeiture is in excess of the bureau's delegated authority and should be $7,500 at most. In addition, Nexstar said the NAL "is procedurally improper, prejudicial, and unsupported by the facts or the law." It added that the NAL claims it doesn't address allegations against Nexstar, but Comcast's allegations concerned Nexstar's conduct as Mission's negotiating representative for WPIX New York. Nexstar said the bureau "impermissibly prejudges" allegations against it that supposedly remain under investigation. Treating the settlement proposal that was quickly rejected as a continuing violation over a period of days is unreasonable and not factually supported, Nexstar said.
The full FCC unanimously denied an appeal from the Albuquerque Board of Education seeking the reversal of a 2023 Media Bureau decision denying the reinstatement of a canceled AM station and FM translator in Los Alamos, New Mexico, said an order Tuesday. Filings from the board were procedurally defective and the board lacks standing in the matter, the Media Bureau ruled, and the commissioners agreed. The licenses for the stations were voluntarily surrendered to the FCC by owner Gillian Sutton and canceled in May 2023, leaving the area with no local AM service. The board asked the agency to reinstate the licenses and assign them to the board on a temporary basis, but it did so in a petition filed two months late. The agency previously ruled third parties without attributable interest in a surrendered station lack standing to seek reinstatement. The item was set for Thursday's commissioners' open meeting, and a deletion notice was released Tuesday.
The FCC's affordable connectivity program is a "true unicorn among public policies," USTelecom President-CEO Jonathan Spalter wrote in a Tuesday blog (see 2402120068). Spalter urged that policymakers consider "rolling the ACP into the Universal Service Fund." This would "bring greater accountability to Big Tech" and "create a stable, permanent source of funding." ACP's future "offers a telling gut check on whether our nation remains committed to our shared goal of connectivity," Spalter said: "Congress abandoning ACP funding a mere two years into its existence would be profoundly disruptive to the country’s digital affordability and equity goals."
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark met with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel about proposed net neutrality rules and their potential effect on network slicing. The proposed rules “create friction for innovation, specifically related to network slicing,” said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 23-320: “Nokia described the market for slicing, why it is essential at this point in the 5G cycle where returns on investment have lagged, and its critical importance to the business case for 6G.” Slicing will be important to “enabling enterprise cases and providing network solutions for many use cases for which a stand-alone purpose-built network is not feasible,” Nokia said. The Open Technology Institute at New America earlier complained that network slicing shouldn’t be used as an excuse to exempt from the rules any specialized application or service that a mobile carrier delivers (see 2401310046).
The Arizona GMRS Repeater Club opposed Garmin International’s pursuit of a waiver of FCC rules to allow certification of hand-held general mobile radio service (GMRS) devices (see 2310060031). Midland Radio supported the waiver request (see 2402120059). “There are simply not enough [GMRS] frequencies available for the necessary separation between analog and digital transmissions,” the Arizona group said in a filing Monday in docket 24-7: “Our organization has suffered from interference to our GMRS repeater from commercial repeaters transmitting with [time-division multiple access] TDMA digital emissions. Digital transmissions can and do cause co-channel and adjacent channel interference to analog communications.” Other opposition came from a few amateur radio operators. “Digital data sounds are difficult to listen to and would be considered interference to the regular FM users,” amateur operator Jim Logue said. Noting “GMRS has very limited spectrum which is probably well utilized across the country,” he said he's "not sure there is room to introduce digital data.”
The FCC sought comment Tuesday on long-form applications from Quick Current to buy 2.5 GHz licenses in Iowa and Nebraska. Petitions to deny the applications are due no later than Feb. 23, oppositions March 1 and replies to oppositions March 8, said a notice from the Wireless Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics. Under the 5G Spectrum Authority Licensing Enforcement Act, enacted in December, the FCC can issue licenses won in the 2022 auction despite the expiration in March of its general spectrum auction authority (see 2312200061).
The FCC Wireline Bureau seeks comments by March 15, replies by April 1, on a proposal to use data from the broadband serviceable location fabric to "update and verify compliance with certain high-cost program support recipients’ deployment obligations," said a notice for Wednesday's Federal Register. Comments are due in docket 10-90.
An FCC draft NPRM seeking comment on using scripted templates to facilitate multilingual emergency alert system messages is expected to change little from the original draft and be approved unanimously, agency officials told us. By eliminating the difficulty of translating the messages, “this model potentially should make issuing multilingual EAS alerts simpler and more accessible for alert originators,” the draft said. Many proposals in the draft item could severely burden MVPDs and broadcasters, according to NCTA and alerting industry officials. The item is on the agenda for the commissioners' open meeting on Thursday.