General Communication boosted its investment in cloud services in Alaska with the purchase of Network Business Systems, a news release from the company said Thursday. The purchase closed that day and GCI has offered all NBS employees positions, it said.

Level 3 received a contract with Pennsylvania, a news release from the company said. Level 3 will expand its current Master IT Services Invitation to Qualify program contract to include security, network and telecom services, the company said. These services are in addition to the existing consulting services awarded under a previous master contract, it said.

NTIA plans a one-day regional broadband summit, “Digital New England,” Sept. 28 in Portland, Maine, a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register said. It's part of the BroadbandUSA program and is being hosted in conjunction with Next Century Cities, NTIA said. The summit will present best practices and lessons learned from broadband network infrastructure build-outs and digital inclusion programs from Maine and surrounding states, including projects funded by NTIA's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and State Broadband Initiative grant programs funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it said of the event at Holiday Inn by the Bay, 88 Spring St.

A ribbon cutting for the D.C. region's first exclusively licensed 24 GHz spectrum wireless fiber link was held Wednesday, said a news release from FiberTower. The ultraGig network meets federal Physically Diverse Network building standards and will provide gigabit service to the Silver Spring (Maryland) Innovation Center, it said. UltraGig is part of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Executive’s Ultra Montgomery program, which aims to expand knowledge-based jobs that depend on high-speed broadband, the release said. The ultraGig network is the result of a partnership between Atlantech Online and FiberTower.

Silver Lake is investing $1 billion in Motorola Solutions, which provides communications solutions to local, state and national public safety agencies, Motorola Solutions said in a news release Wednesday. Silver Lake is a technology investment company. The public safety vendor plans to use the investment to expand its smart public safety products and services businesses through new partnerships, investments and acquisitions, it said. Motorola Solutions also said it intends to repurchase up to $2 billion of stock. The company will fund the tender offer with a combination of existing cash and a portion of the proceeds from the $1 billion investment by Silver Lake. Motorola Solutions stock closed up 6.3 percent to $64.04 Wednesday.

San Antonio was selected as the next city to get a Google Fiber network, the company said Wednesday on its Google Fiber blog. At 1.4 million residents, San Antonio is the largest city to get Google Fiber so far, it said. The network will offer up to 1 Gbps and require a build-out of more than 4,000 miles of fiber, the company said.

TeleCommunication Systems got a Tennessee contract extension through January 2021 to provide next-generation 911 management and integration services, said a company news release Tuesday. TCS is the first company to build an NG-911 system using the state's existing IP network, the firm said. TCS' service lets Tennessee implement NG-911 services that will offer citizens the ability to communicate with emergency dispatchers via voice, data, video, images and text messages, it said.

Three coalitions of industry and public interest groups filed amicus briefs with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans Monday supporting Google's bid to sustain a preliminary injunction barring Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood from enforcing his subpoena of the company’s search practices. Hood, a Democrat, filed an appeal with the 5th Circuit in late March. That was after U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate ordered the preliminary injunction because there was a “substantial likelihood” that Google would prevail in its lawsuit against Hood on claims he violated the company’s First Amendment rights (see 1504010029). If Hood is “allowed to continue, the pressure tactics employed by the Attorney General here would send a dangerous message to large and small service providers, as well as the Internet users who rely on their platforms to communicate, learn, and organize online,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology and other groups in a joint brief. “That message would stifle innovation, chill online speech, and flout the public’s First Amendment interest in an uncensored Internet.” The Computer & Communications Industry Association, CEA and Engine also urged the 5th Circuit to affirm the injunction. They said in a joint brief that “although state law enforcement officials are not wholly precluded from enforcing state laws that affect the Internet, Congress unambiguously intended to limit states’ ability to regulate Internet intermediaries’ display of third party content -- which is precisely what Attorney General Hood seeks to do here.” Hood “does not, and cannot, demonstrate any compelling interest in the wholesale gathering of information about a wide and disparate array of protected speech on Google’s various services,” the American Civil Liberties Union and its Mississippi chapter said in a joint brief. “Indeed, the subpoena seeks such a vast amount of information about so many people that by its very nature it cannot be narrowly tailored to any legitimate investigative need. As such, the subpoena is presumptively invalid.”

Iowa Communications Network is offering CenturyLink's unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), said a news release from CenturyLink. ICN operates a fiber broadband network for Iowa's government, healthcare, education and public safety sectors, the release said. With UCaaS available from ICN, the agency's education, public safety and government users can buy a managed services package that includes managed data networking, managed VoIP, and applications such as instant messaging and presence, it said.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the availability of loans to build broadband infrastructure in rural areas, along with changes to the program required by the 2014 Farm Bill, said a Thursday USDA news release. In a notice in the Thursday Federal Register, USDA said it's establishing two funding cycles to review and prioritize applications for the Rural Broadband Access Loan and Loan Guarantee program, the release said. USDA also is setting a minimum level of acceptable broadband service at 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, it said. To be eligible for funding, an applicant must serve an area where at least 15 percent of the households are unserved, it said. USDA is accepting comments on the changes through Sept. 28, the release said. Applications are due Sept. 30.