July 2013

FCC Seeks Comment on EchoStar's Petition for Waiver of Over-the-Air Analog Tuner Requirements

EchoStar has filed a petition requesting that the Federal Communications Commission waive Section 15.117(b) of the Commission’s rules. Section 15.117(b) states that “TV broadcast receivers shall be capable of adequately receiving all channels allocated by the FCC to the television broadcast service.” EchoStar seeks a waiver of Section 15.117(b) in order to import, market, and sell two models of the Channel Master K77, a high-definition (“HD”), Internet-enabled, digital video recorder (“DVR”) that does not include an analog broadcast tuner.

Section 15.117 of the Commission’s rules generally ensures that TV broadcast receivers, including devices such as the Channel Master K77, are capable of receiving all of the channels allocated by the FCC to the broadcast television service, including channels in both analog and digital formats. EchoStar states that the Channel Master K77 models will combine access to broadcast programming with over-the-top and DVR functionalities, promoting consumer choice in both retail equipment and in services for households seeking a non-MVPD option for video programming. EchoStar maintains that requiring an analog tuner “would dramatically increase the device’s cost, size, and energy consumption without any countervailing benefits to consumers.” Further, EchoStar claims that consumers who purchase the device would still be able to access analog signals through their television tuners. The FCC seeks comment on EchoStar’s request for waiver of Section 15.117(b) with respect to its Channel Master K77 models. The FCC notes that, unlike recent similar petitioners, EchoStar did not voluntarily commit to educating consumers about the functionality of the K77 devices. Accordingly, the FCC seeks comment on whether EchoStar should be required to undertake similar consumer education efforts as a condition of any potential waiver relief.

Broadcast Station Totals As Of June 30, 2013

The Federal Communications Commission has announced the following totals for broadcast stations licensed as of June 30, 2013:

15,297 full power radio stations
797 low power FM radio stations
1,782 full power TV stations

[more at the URL below]

FCC Names Sayre to Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services

The Federal Communications Commission has appointed Gregg Sayre, New York State Public Service Commissioner, to serve on the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services. This appointment fills the position vacated by Randy Mitchell, former Commissioner of the South Carolina Public Service Commission.

FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel: E-rate Rulemaking Imminent

Federal Communications Commission member Jessica Rosenworcel signaled that the FCC would likely be launching its revamp of the E-rate program next week.

E-Rate is the FCC mandate to provide affordable access to cutting-edge telecommunications service to schools and libraries, with that subsidy coming out of the Universal Service Fund. Commissioner Rosenworcel that there should be bandwidth goals -- calling for 100% school access to 100 Mbps by 2015, and one gig by the end of the decade -- and that giving every student access to first class communications was a civil rights issue. Commissioner Pai said he agreed the program needed revamping, and said his goal was to move the focus from bureaucracy to targeting and tailoring it to the needs of individual students. Both he and Rosenworcel indicated they would have more to say on the subject next week.

The Starting Block America Needs: High-Speed Broadband in Every School

[Commentary] The White House's report, Four Years of Broadband Growth, shines a light on what broadband expansion means for women and minorities across America. Education is the most important tool we have to serve low income communities, and 21st century students deserve 21st century technology in every school nationwide. It's encouraging to see the Federal Communications Commission pursue the modernization and expansion of E-Rate to support the communications needs of U.S. schools and libraries. This renewed focus by the FCC follows President Obama's announcement of a nationwide educational initiative, ConnectED, that will serve to outfit 99 percent of America's students (K-12) with high speed wired or wireless internet connectivity by 2018. To move this initiative forward, FCC Acting Chairwoman, Mignon Clyburn, publicly stated her support for modernizing and expanding the E-rate program to bring high-speed broadband to more U.S. schools and libraries, as well as creating new incentives for broadband service providers to deploy new fiber connections in communities with limited or no access to high-speed internet services.

Without the option of privacy, we are lost

[Commentary] Privacy is a wonderful and complex thing.

To my mind, it should operate on a sliding scale under the individual’s control: total privacy for those who want to research information for themselves or communicate in confidence with others, through partial privacy for those willing to exchange personal data for convenient services, down to zero privacy for those who want to strut their stuff in public. The partial or total surrender of privacy is familiar to us through our transactions with the likes of Google and our use of platforms such as Twitter. That’s fine, as long as the individual chooses to surrender their personal data. But I’d like to dwell for a moment on the concept of total privacy, and why it should be an option even in the online age.

AT&T is trouncing Verizon in LTE performance tests. Here’s AT&T’s explanation why

Although AT&T was a full year behind Verizon Wireless in deploying its LTE systems, it’s now routinely outscoring Verizon on multiple network speed and performance tests. Part of the explanation lies in congestion. Verizon’s network is hardly brimming over – it’s maintaining average speeds in excess of 10 Mbps – but it has more LTE devices on its network by virtue of having sold them for far longer. Cellular capacity is ultimately shared capacity so the more devices you have competing for airtime the slower everyone’s speeds will be. But this is quickly becoming less of a point of difference on their networks, considering smartphone replacement cycles are so short. Samsung and Apple just flooded both networks with millions of new Galaxy S 4s and iPhone 5s. AT&T Senior EVP of technology and network operations John Donovan has an alternate explanation: AT&T took its time to build a better network.

Charles Koch: Tribune bid 'possible'

Conservative billionaire Charles Koch has confirmed reports that he and his brother may make a bid for the Tribune Company's newspaper holdings, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. In a rare interview with the Wichita Eagle, Koch said it was "possible" that Koch Industries would make a bid but that they were still analyzing other media buys. “It’s possible,” Koch said of a Tribune bid. “It’s not on the front burner, but it’s possible.”

How Military Counterinsurgency Software Is Being Adapted To Tackle Gang Violence in Mainland USA

Analysts believe that insurgents in Afghanistan form similar networks to street gangs in the US. So the software for analyzing these networks abroad ought to work just as well at home, say military researchers.

What’s Your Social-Media Genotype?

Your pattern of behavior on Twitter can be defined by a simple “genotype” and used to predict your future behavior, say network researchers.

The researchers start with the hypothesis that each individual has a stable, pre-existing interest in certain topics and that this determines his or her pattern of behavior on Twitter. One of the goals of their research is to determine whether it’s possible to extract an individual’s genotype from the firehose of data that Twitter produces. To that end, they analyzed one data set consisting of 467 million tweets sent by 42 million users in 2009, and another consisting of 14.5 million tweets sent by nine thousand users in 2012. They grouped the hashtags from these data sets into five topics—sport, business, celebrities, politics, and science/technology. “Our hypothesis is that individual users exhibit consistent behavior of adopting and using hashtags (stable genotype) within a known topic,” says Petko Bogdanov at the University of California Santa Barbara. His analysis confirms exactly this—that users tend to adopt a stable pattern of hashtag adoption by these topics. This is their social-media genotype.

Benton

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