AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Grain Spectrum said in a filing at the FCC that a series of spectrum deals unveiled last month (CD Jan 28 p9) are in the public interest and should be approved by the commission. The transaction was criticized by the Competitive Carriers Association and public interest groups when it was announced. The Competitive Carriers Association said it “raises serious spectrum aggregation concerns.”

The federal government’s broadband initiatives must continue, said FCC commissioners Thursday at the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Services. But such programs need more accountability and a sharper focus, they said. Panelists emphasized the importance of digital literacy, and telco executives promoted a message of grassroots outreach in encouraging broadband adoption. “We are going to approach adoption with a little more nuance than we have in the past,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the conference’s new federal chair, told the summit. The FCC will be looking at “how to quantify how much can be saved when services migrate online and how citizens and consumers can help by sharing in those savings,” she said, describing an intention to look at the accountability of sustainable broadband programs to find out which are “truly sustainable” and strengthen the successes.

Time Warner Cable responded to Google’s gripes that the operator is withholding a regional sports network (RSN) in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where the Internet company sells a nascent video and super-fast broadband product. The dispute points up bigger issues over program access in an Internet Protocol context, said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and an Internet lawyer not part of the spat over access to Time Warner Cable’s Metro Sports Kansas City RSN. Time Warner Cable’s new response to the Internet company’s criticisms made in recent months in FCC filings -- and most recently in a program access proceeding -- was the operator’s first rebuttal, a cable industry lawyer said.

The FCC is taking aim at dead air, fake ringing sounds and poor audio quality, in a series of proposed rules intended to deal with call completion problems that have plagued customers of rural telcos. One year after issuing a declaratory ruling to “remind” carriers of their obligation to connect calls to rural areas (CD Feb 7/11 p10), a notice of proposed rulemaking released Thursday imposes what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called “meaningful new burdens” on some carriers. As expected (CD Jan 25 p1), the notice proposes reporting and data retention requirements to help the commission figure out where exactly the call completion problems are taking place.

The FCC should carefully test whether wireless operations in the AWS H-block will cause interference in the 1930-1995 MHz band, but should auction the spectrum for carrier use if at all possible, CTIA said in comments to the FCC. The FCC approved proposed rules “setting the stage for an auction of the H Block in 2013” in an electronic vote before its December meeting (http://xrl.us/boffzj). Comments on the notice of proposed rulemaking were due Wednesday. Last February’s spectrum law instructed the FCC to auction the 1915-1920 and 1995-2000 MHz bands, the upper and lower H-blocks, respectively, unless the agency determined that doing so would cause interference to other 1.9 GHz licensees.

Liberty Global’s proposed $23 billion acquisition of Virgin Media could provide an opening for TiVo to expand its reach across Europe, Brean Capital said in a research note. While TiVo has 1.3 million customers, with an installed base of about 35 percent of Virgin’s U.K. cable customers, its DVR service could gain a foothold in Europe, where Liberty Global launched Horizon TV with its Dutch cable operator UPC Netherlands. UPC customers can stream 80 live TV channels for a dedicated website and access 3,500 TV shows.

The ongoing “Internet transformation” of video means the FCC should get from Congress the same authority to forbear from regulations as the agency now has for telecom issues, Commissioner Ajit Pai said. The 20-year-old Cable Act “is deterring progress, to the detriment of consumers,” he said Thursday at a luncheon of cable and telecom lawyers, lobbyists and executives also attended by commissioners Robert McDowell and Jessica Rosenworcel. Pai opposed, in a speech to the Media Institute event, a draft order’s making attributable for some TV station sharing agreements to the broadcaster contributing the resources, and said in a later interview that Democratic and Republican FCC members continue talking about ways to change the draft. Deadlock remains on the item, even as consideration of changes occurs, another agency official told us this week.

Policy and proposed legislation to boost European network and information security were unveiled Thursday by EU officials. At the heart of the policy is the protection of fundamental rights on the Internet, said EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton at a press briefing. The EU is determined to promote and defend its values online but also believes there should be norms of behavior among countries to protect against cyberattacks, she said. Hewlett-Packard and European telecom network operators cheered the initiative, but some of the proposals drew criticism from privacy advocates, an IT security firm and high-tech industries.

The NTCA and OPASTCO, the two major associations representing rural wireline carriers, are combining effective March 1, both groups said Wednesday. Merger talks were under way for some time, said executives of other associations. The new group will be called “NTCA, The Rural Broadband Association.” John Rose, longtime OPATSCO president, is retiring at the end of February, an OPASTCO spokeswoman said.

Measurement Lab is pulling out of the FCC’s mobile broadband measurement program, citing irreconcilable differences on how best to collect data in the mobile space. “We don’t feel that this technology, and that the measurement, is ready at this point to produce the kind of research-quality data that we need to support our program,” Meredith Whittaker of Google Research told a group of industry, governmental and academic participants at a meeting Wednesday. M-Lab will have to “back out of the mobile measurement process at this stage, in this form,” she said. M-Lab will still be involved in the FCC’s wireline testing program. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.