Next-generation 911 will take significant, costly and long investments of time and money before the system can work, National Emergency Number Association (NENA) officials said at a Thursday USTelecom briefing. The future will spell change for regulations and the number and arrangement of 911 centers, the officials said. The U.S. “must address” NG-911 if the public switched telephone network will be sunsetted in the next few years, said NENA CEO Brian Fontes, citing the FCC’s recent push on text-to-911 and this week’s FCC Technological Advisory Council report (CD Dec 11 p2). Fontes asked USTelecom members to engage with NENA.

Many agree the Telecom Act of 1996 is out of date, but whether Congress attempts a rewrite anytime soon will come down to one question, said speakers at a Practising Law Institute event Thursday: “Can we make it better, or will we make it worse?” One consideration is whether the weight of a rewrite can be carried by the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which Congress must deal with by its expiration at the end of 2014 (CD Nov 2 p5). Congress is also watching the net neutrality appeal closely to see what the courts think about the FCC’s authority over the Internet, speakers said.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The U.S. delegation put its foot down in Wednesday’s session of the World Conference on International Telecommunications. There must be clear limitations on what kind of operators will be covered by the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), said Richard Beaird, deputy head of the U.S. delegation, introducing language to limit the treaty to “operating agencies authorized or recognized by a Member State to establish and operate a public correspondence international telecommunications service."

The long-awaited order seeking data on the special access market was approved on circulation, FCC officials said Wednesday. Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing that the order has been voted on by all commissioners, and agency staff is finalizing the order. Commissioners Robert McDowell and Ajit Pai dissented from part of a further notice of proposed rulemaking, which would be implemented in the middle of 2013, agency officials told us. The text of the order was not released Wednesday.

Under new content deals, major studios will pay Redbox Instant by Verizon per-subscriber fees to give the new streaming service incentive to add subscriptions, said Scott Di Valerio, chief financial officer of Redbox parent Coinstar, Wednesday at the Wedbush Capital conference in New York. Like standard content deals the studios have with Netflix and Amazon, Redbox Instant by Verizon also will pay the studios upfront fees, but the new streaming service hopes the per-subscriber payments, small as they might be, could potentially spur a new round of content competition, Di Valerio said.

Minnesota will fall short of its broadband goals, a governor’s task force said this week. The 13-member group assembled its recommendations over 12 months, it told Gov. Mark Dayton, the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party member who created the group in November 2011. Minnesota should offer grants or tax credits to encourage some of its roughly 120 providers to deploy in unserved areas, the task force recommended. Its members include the presidents of AT&T Minnesota, Communications Workers of America Local 7201, MVTV Wireless and the Midwest Region of CenturyLink. The state should also expand a tax credit for central office equipment to cover fiber and broadband equipment purchases, coordinate the efforts of supplying broadband to anchor and safety institutions to help deploy in rural Minnesota, coordinate broadband deployment with highway construction and develop a Minnesota Fiber Collaboration Database, among other proposed initiatives like funding students in need of broadband scholarships and spending more on library and school computer stations, it said.

The FCC is considering collecting more detailed data for mobile users who are “more comfortable” sharing detailed statistics that “identify their phone” at specific coordinates at a particular time, said FCC attorney James Miller. He’s heading the mobile broadband measurement group’s effort to develop a privacy disclosure statement (CD Nov 29 p3). The group met Wednesday to get a sneak-peek at what the smartphone app will look like, and to discuss potential privacy issues. Officials emphasized that all data collected would be cleansed of detailed GPS information before it’s released publicly.

The FCC voted unanimously to approve an order letting Dish Network build out a terrestrial network with mobile satellite services spectrum, while the agency keeps the adjacent H block of spectrum protected for auction next year. The vote as expected (CD Dec 12 p15) on the AWS-4 spectrum rules, and the approval of a notice of proposed rulemaking to open up a proceeding for the H-block auction, came Tuesday night. That was ahead of the commission’s meeting Wednesday, where the order and NPRM were scheduled to have been voted on. It was unclear how the H block that Sprint Nextel hopes to bid on was protected, and before the vote it was expected that Dish would be required to keep its out-of-band emissions limits more stringent than the DBS company wants (CD Dec 7 p4).

The FCC approved a further notice of proposed rulemaking asking a battery of questions about how the commission can best make sure that all wireless subscribers will one day be able to send emergency text messages to 911 public safety answering points. But Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that even with the agency’s actions on text-to-911, widespread ability to send emergency text messages to 911 call centers could be many years way. Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the four major carriers, public safety groups and the FCC had agreed to put in place by June 30 a mechanism for sending bounce back notifications to subscribers when text-to-911 is unavailable in their area, telling them they should instead call 911 (CD Dec 10 p1). Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile also agreed to make their networks capable of transmitting texts to 911 call centers by May 15, 2014.

Partisan strife flared in a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Wednesday over the FCC framework for the spectrum incentive auction. Republican lawmakers and FCC commissioners sparred with Democrats over how the government should acquire and reallocate some of the nation’s most valuable airwaves. Partisan differences over how much spectrum should be preserved to protect licensed spectrum and be used for lower-power unlicensed activities played out in recent days in commissioners’ prepared testimony (CD Dec 12 p7). Democrats separately expressed disapproval of a draft order that would relax media cross-ownership rules (CD Dec 12 p5), which they said would have a negative impact on media diversity and localism.