It will take roughly two years, until Q4 2019, for the FCC's new home at Sentinel Square III at 45 L St. NE to be constructed, an official connected with the project told us. Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt keeps a swatch of the carpet that lines the agency's current Portals headquarters in his office as a memento of his involvement in that building's interior design, and it could be an interim chair or the commission's next permanent chair who will oversee the design of the work spaces in the new building.
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team now includes a telecom executive eyeing FCC changes to come under the new administration, according to its roster of landing team members updated Thursday. Joining the three American Enterprise Institute scholars on the FCC landing team is David Morken, CEO of North Carolina-based Bandwidth.com. He chairs the Bandwidth.com subsidiary company Republic Wireless, which outlined plans to spin off from Bandwidth earlier this month.
Obama administration pushback to the Senate’s Mobile Now drafts last year targeted core bicameral and bipartisan spectrum proposals from Capitol Hill. Federal officials successfully killed attempts to provide financial incentives to federal agencies to relinquish spectrum and a mandate to free up a higher amount of spectrum, largely through criticisms never made public but shown in emails that Communications Daily acquired through a Freedom of Information Act open records request to NTIA. Emails also show the administration’s hand in adding language on bidirectional sharing and its objections to spectrum leasing language, which surprised some we interviewed who saw the critique.
The FCC Media Bureau can't approve a waiver allowing Nexstar/Media General to complete their $4.6 billion deal because it “has no delegated authority to waive spectrum auction rules,” said the American Cable Association in a letter filed in docket 16-57 Tuesday. “Rather than file their request for waiver with the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau -- which has delegated authority regarding spectrum auctions, Applicants wrongly filed their request for waiver in the docket for the Media Bureau’s review of the transfers of control of Media General’s broadcast television licenses to Nexstar,” said ACA. The cable association also objected to granting the transaction on any bureau's delegated authority, because of the uniqueness of Nexstar's request. “Given the unprecedented situation Applicants’ request presents, sound policy requires a decision to be issued by the full Commission,” ACA said. The association also filed in opposition to aspects of Nexstar/Media General itself, seeking conditions on the combination to prevent it from affecting retransmission consent negotiations (see 1611250042). Nexstar and the Media Bureau didn't comment.
The FCC incentive auction “quiet period” has stretched on 10 months, longer than most TV broadcasters expected, squashing dealmaking and making it difficult for lawyers to serve their clients, broadcast attorneys said in interviews last week. With the auction widely forecast to stretch into 2017, some broadcast industry officials are seeking relief. The quiet period was expected to make dealmaking difficult (see 1411280041). The Incentive Auction Task Force said it will consider ending the communications prohibitions after the auction's final stage rule has been satisfied to give broadcasters more time for the repacking. It's the dampening effect on transactions that's the real difficulty of the quiet period, said broadcast attorneys and BIA/Kelsey Chief Economist Mark Fratrik.
Charter Communications and T-Mobile were among those spending much more on lobbying in Q3 than a year earlier. Charter's lobbying expense was $1.99 million, vs. $980,000. Charter successfully acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in the interim. T-Mobile spent $2.17 million, up from $1.4 million.
The FCC spent just more than $100 million on spectrum auctions in FY 2015, said a report released by the agency Tuesday. The biggest expense, $56 million, was “other contractual services,” followed by personnel costs at $27 million. FromFY 1994-2014, the FCC said it spent $1.42 billion on auction, bringing in an average $4.3 billion per year in cash receipts including receipts from FY 2015.
Commissioner Ajit Pai said the FCC should get tough on siting issues as carriers get set to deploy 5G, in a keynote at the Competitive Carriers Association meeting, live-streamed Wednesday from Seattle. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told the CCA Tuesday there's broad support among the commissioners for tackling siting issues (see 1609200058). Pai also endorsed Wheeler’s calls for a new mobility fund. Commissioner Mike O’Rielly also spoke Tuesday on zero-rating, though not at CCA.
Correction: Jonathan Cohen of Wilkinson Barker was part of the FCC team that designed the early spectrum auctions in the 1990s, but was not an adviser to the agency on the incentive auction design (see 1608300064).
Stage two of the TV incentive auction will start Sept. 13, with a second reverse auction, the FCC said Wednesday, the day after stage one closed (see 1608300064). The FCC has a 114 MHz clearing target for stage two, which would yield 90 MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. Industry analysts and observers say they don’t expect the FCC’s price target to drop substantially from its goal of $88.4 billion in stage one or for the auction to end in the next stage. Carriers and other bidders in the forward auction made $22.45 billion in net bids since the forward auction started Aug, 16.