The House approved by a 413-0 vote an Internet governance bill (HR-1580) late Tuesday aimed at codifying the U.S. policy “to preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet.” A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., did not say when or if Reid would bring the legislation to a floor vote in the Senate. The House passed the bill in the same week that world leaders convene for the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum.

Congress has many champions of space programs and scientific research, said Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, which has jurisdiction over the NASA budget. “There are many of us in the House that are doing our best to fund the programs which we believe are necessary.” That includes programs that foster deep space exploration, he said Wednesday at a Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) meeting in Washington. Some companies, including Bigelow Aerospace and Sierra Nevada Corp., are using their own funds to explore “what kinds of commercial activities can be maintained without subsidies from the taxpayer,” he said. Aderholt said he hopes NASA receives sufficient funding to carry out its missions over the next few years.

"There is no business plan -- there is research,” said FirstNet board member Jeff Johnson, CEO of the Western Fire Chiefs Association and FirstNet’s head of outreach, referring to more than 400 pages of FirstNet material cited at a recent board meeting. “But there is no plan until we've listened to you.”

Virtualization and the complete transition to more efficient LTE networks could help bring down the costs of mobile handsets as storage and processing power requirements shrink in coming years, said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. “Fascinating, underlying trends” going on within the wireless infrastructure are leading to a “downward bias” in capital requirements for carriers and a residual impact on handset costs, he said Wednesday at a J.P. Morgan investor conference webcast from Boston.

The cities of New York and Los Angeles told the FCC having to move their operations out of the T-band, as required by last year’s spectrum law, would pose a huge burden. In February, the FCC’s Wireless and Public Safety bureaus sought comment on implementation of Section 6103 of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, which requires public safety to leave the 470-512 MHz band within nine years of enactment (http://bit.ly/142X3QG).

Despite persistent efforts to speed transition from IPv4, “the proportion of IPv6 traffic on the Internet remains very small,” said a draft opinion expected to be adopted Thursday at the ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF) in Geneva. Internet operators are clinging to the legacy technology, sometimes by using network address translation, but increasingly by buying IPv4 addresses from organizations that don’t need them. There’s growing interest in leasing IPv4 addresses, said regional Internet registry (RIR) American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). A proposed policy under discussion in European RIR Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) could make IPv4 addresses more transferable by removing the existing requirement that address allocations be needs-based. It’s unclear whether other RIRs will buy into the concept.

Commenters on the FCC’s proposed call completion data collection (CD Feb 8 p8) agreed that call completion to rural areas is crucial, but differed on where the obligations of monitoring and reporting most properly fall. Several groups suggested that the originating long distance provider is the best positioned to capture meaningful data. Commenters also differed on the details of which data should be collected.

Apps will dominate public safety endeavors like FirstNet and will be significant for first responders, said speakers at the second day of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Broadband Summit. The meeting focused on many apps that are out there and how to figure out what features and tools will help public safety best. FirstNet will play a role, and APCO, the federal government, and others are already engaging with these issues, speakers said.

FirstNet General Manager Bill D'Agostino offered an olive branch to the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council at its meeting Tuesday. He assured NPSTC he plans to listen to public safety as the network is built. D'Agostino was named GM by the FirstNet board last month, at the same meeting where board member Paul Fitzgerald, sheriff of Story County, Iowa, said that public safety has been kept too often on the sidelines as plans for the network take shape (CD April 24 p1).

FirstNet faces many architectural challenges to meet its potential threats, speakers said at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Broadband Summit Tuesday. The proposed $7-billion public safety broadband network is still fighting to win support, they agreed. The network must meet public safety standards to withstand natural disasters as well as the threat of cyberattacks to the effort, panelists said.