FirstNet may begin implementing the proposed nationwide 700 MHz national public safety broadband network (NPSBN) as soon as 2013, the FirstNet board said at its inaugural meeting Tuesday. All 15 members praised the $7 billion initiative and talked about next steps. But multiple organizations and a new report underscore FirstNet’s challenges of funding, scheduling and exclusion, and they questioned the manner in which the federal government has handled several suspended stimulus grants.

Broadband’s a civil right to Jesse Jackson, Sr., as are prison payphone rates, he said Tuesday in an annual ethics in telecom lecture. He cited many concerns voiced a day before by FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on what prisoners and the people they call must pay. “Access to broadband at home and school is not a magic bullet” to solve a gap in education between minorities and other Americans, Jackson said. It’s “a civil rights issue” because “the technology is being positioned as a primary driver of economic opportunity” and social change, he said at the Washington event.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said he would immediately work to free up more spectrum for wireless carriers, remove unnecessary telecom regulations and ensure that the FCC is not “preemptively” regulating the industry, if he were to become chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. He told us in an interview last week that the future of telecom policy depends entirely on which party wins the Senate majority this November. “I hope I have a chance to be chairman and move some positive legislation instead of just trying to stop bad stuff,” he said.

The FCC plans to consider two orders this year designed to encourage mHealth technologies, Chairman Julius Genachowski said Monday at an event hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. One will streamline the FCC’s experimental licensing rules to encourage the creation of wireless health device “test beds” to permit easier testing of mHealth technologies, he said. The other will “comprehensively reform and modernize” the Rural Health Care Program to permit networks of hospital and health care facilities to jointly apply for RHC funds to boost broadband capacity and enable electronic health records. The commission will also recruit a permanent Health Care Director to be a central point of contact to external groups on all health-related issues, he said.

LAS VEGAS -- T-Mobile is taking a long, hard look at how it could make sharing work in the 1755-1850 MHz band, T-Mobile Senior Vice President Tom Sugrue said on a Competitive Carrier Association convention panel Monday. Carriers as a whole have pressed the government to make the band available on a licensed basis. T-Mobile received special temporary authority from the FCC to test sharing with federal users and Sugrue said the carrier believes sharing could work, at least in the short term.

FCC staff targeting to finish work this year on an order letting Dish Network start a terrestrial wireless broadband network (CD Sept 12 p6) aim to protect a block of frequencies directly below part of the company’s network that a February spectrum law allows the commission to auction. So said agency and industry officials of a forthcoming waiver that would let Dish use spectrum it’s now allowed only to use with a network received by devices getting satellite signals. The lower end of the spectrum Dish needs a waiver to use terrestrially sits next to the H block that the agency must auction unless it finds the block would cause harmful interference to PCS spectrum. Wireless Bureau staff are considering whether to require Dish face what would amount in some eyes to a windfall penalty, because the DBS operator bought the spectrum in bankruptcy for far less than its value as a broadband network, so as to ameliorate interference concerns, agency and industry officials told us.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) server and its backup were down for more than 24 hours over the weekend, according industry executives and several messages to an Emergency Alert System (EAS) listserv discussion group. Broadcasters’ EAS equipment connects to the IPAWS servers for Common Alerting Protocol alerts (CAP) through the Internet. Saturday morning, station EAS equipment began sending out messages that they could not communicate with the server, and the problem was not resolved until about 2:30 p.m. ET Sunday, said Richard Rudman, a core member of the Broadcast Warning Working Group.

TiVo’s patent infringement settlement with Verizon cuts short a trial set of November and increases the pressure on Google’s Motorola Mobility and Time Warner Cable to reach a similar accord, analysts said.

Restrictions on Internet freedom continue to grow -- and the threats against it are shifting, said human rights group Freedom House’s 2012 report on worldwide Internet freedom. The report said Estonia had the most Internet freedom in the past year, followed by the U.S. and Germany. Iran was found to have the least online freedom, followed by Cuba, China and Syria. The report, released Monday, assessed events and shifts in the Internet freedom situation in 47 countries between January 2011 and May 2012. Researchers evaluated the situation in each country and assigned a numerical score, with 100 being the worst possible score. Estonia scored 10, while Iran scored 90; the U.S. scored 12, according to Freedom House (http://xrl.us/bnq8xh).The more repressive governments on the list continue to use traditional censorship methods like filtering and blocking content, but they are now supplementing those with “nuanced” tactics, Sanja Kelly, the report’s lead author, said at a Freedom House event Monday. Governments are increasingly engaging in proactive manipulation of online content, including hiring pro-government bloggers to attack anti-government bloggers’ credibility and paying people to bombard anti-government blogs with false information, she said. That tactic had previously only been found in Russia and China, but has now spread into countries like Iran and Belarus, said Freedom House. The report said 19 of the 47 assessed countries had passed new laws impacting Internet freedom since January 2011. Those have included a new law in Malaysia that holds intermediaries like ISPs responsible for “seditious” comments users post online, Kelly said. “As a consequence, in some of the environments we've seen some of the intermediaries almost voluntarily taking down the content they fear will get them into trouble."

Broadband ISPs excoriated the FCC for adopting unrealistic standards for its Section 706 report on the state of broadband deployment, in comments filed Thursday and Friday in docket 12-228. In response to a notice of inquiry asking what factors the commission should consider for its ninth report (http://xrl.us/bnqtzn), the telcos and cable companies aired some longstanding grievances about the commission’s findings the last three years that broadband was not being deployed on a “reasonable and timely fashion” (CD Aug 22 p1). States spoke of the need for the commission to tweak its USF rules to enable faster deployment of broadband, and interest groups expressed a need for a faster definition of broadband to enable more data-hungry applications.