Applications for rural broadband experiment funding are due Oct. 14, the FCC Wireline Bureau said in a public notice Tuesday (http://fcc.us/1ti1vs9). The FCC is awarding up to $100 million in rural broadband experiment support (CD July 14 p11) to bring next generation voice and broadband service to high-cost areas of the country, the notice said. The budget calls for $75 million for projects in high-cost areas proposing to offer broadband service at 25 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream; $15 million for projects in high-cost areas proposing to offer broadband service of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream; and $10 million for projects proposing to serve extremely high-cost areas with broadband service of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, the notice said.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the Patent and Trademark Office based on a Washington Post article (http://wapo.st/1oVE7Po) alleging USPTO remote employees lied about their hours, said a letter from committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/1thQ4Rl). “Reportedly, patent officers and paralegals routinely lied about their work and logged thousands of hours on the taxpayer’s dime,” said a committee news release Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/VEMa8e). “Raising questions about USPTO’s internal investigation, the USPTO also removed the most damaging reports of employee fraud in a report to the agency’s independent watchdog.” Issa asked Pritzker to arrange a briefing by Friday for the committee’s staff. “We are carefully reviewing the Committee’s request and will respond and remain in close contact with the Committee on this matter,” the USPTO said in a statement Wednesday. The office “welcomes this opportunity to demonstrate that the agency’s award-winning telework programs -- and their measurable work production requirements for patent examiners -- have been integral to the USPTO’s dramatic, quantifiable progress in fulfilling its core functions of reducing the backlog of patent applications and the wait time for applicants,” it said.

One in four U.S. broadband homes with smart home devices experiences problems on a monthly basis, said research from Parks Associates, which plans a webcast Wednesday at 2 p.m. EDT to address service and support issues with smart devices in connected homes. “Internet of Things: Impact on Support Services & Solutions” is being held jointly with Support.com. “The dramatic shift in technology driven by the cloud and the Internet of Things increases product and call complexity,” said Amy Millard, Support.com vice president-marketing, in a Parks news release Monday (http://bit.ly/1rO08Pe). Technology providers have to “continuously optimize their service interactions,” Millard said, saying automating agent processes “is a key step” toward optimization.

While no final decisions likely have been made, the FCC appears unlikely to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, Paul Gallant, analyst at Guggenheim Partners, said Friday in a research note. “We don’t believe any final decisions have been made, but we continue to believe the most likely outcome is for the FCC to keep broadband classified under Title 1 and adopt rules that clearly restrict paid prioritization.” That would likely be the preference of Chairman Tom Wheeler, and few big Internet companies are pressing for reclassification, he wrote. Meanwhile, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte said in a video blog post he questions whether net neutrality rules make sense (http://bit.ly/1sJQZeH). All bits are not equal, he said. “People don’t appreciate that a book, a normal novel, is about a megabyte,” he said. “And yet a second of video is more than a megabyte. So when you look at video for a couple of hours it’s the equivalent of hundreds of books.”

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative seeks comment on Chinese compliance with World Trade Organization commitments, and will convene an Oct. 1 public hearing on the matter. Comments and testimony will be used to compile an annual USTR report on Chinese WTO compliance. The U.S. has claimed victory in a number of recent disputes with China, including the early August WTO appellate body decision to affirm China violated trade rules through its export restraint regime on two rare earth metals. Comments should be submitted on www.regulations.gov under docket number USTR-2014-0015. Comments and requests to participate at the hearing are due Sept. 17, said a USTR notice appearing in Friday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1nTxQz3).

The government’s email metadata surveillance program suffered from years of “systemic overcollection,” said a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) decision declassified Monday (http://bit.ly/1oYk1nF). The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified Monday a trove of FISC orders, judicial oversight documents and NSA inspector general audits after a White House review and Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy and Information Center. In its blog post, ODNI said “this Internet communications metadata bulk collection program has been discontinued” since 2011 because of the concerns of both the FISC and NSA.

The government must declassify in full a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) decision on the government’s Patriot Act Section 215-authorized surveillance programs (http://1.usa.gov/1yekcfM), said a Thursday FISC ruling, released Friday in docket Misc. 13-02. The American Civil Liberties Union last summer filed motions to declassify the opinion, the ruling noted. The government has until Aug. 29 to release the Feb. 19, 2013, opinion.

TIA said its TR-42.1 Engineering Committee on Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling is developing an American National Standards Institute-accredited standard for physical network security for ICT networks that it believes will also address telecom networks’ cybersecurity concerns. The standard, TIA-5017, will cover the security of telecom cables and other physical infrastructure by consolidating existing security measures and new guidelines into one document, TIA said. The standard will also incorporate an integrated security approach that includes recent developments in automated administration management that will help locate unauthorized connections, TIA said.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is trying to learn more about the U.S. government’s collection of communications under Executive Order 12333, filing a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, it said in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/1nZWW4Z). The full scope of the programs 12333 authorizes is not known, and EPIC said it hopes its requests to the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA “will shed light on these invasive programs.” The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recently said it would examine 12333 after issuing reports on Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (CD July 24 p4).

A “weak slate of movies” at Redbox and high World Cup viewership “stunted the typical seasonal lift we get in June when summer vacation begins” and contributed to lower-than-expected Q2 rentals, Outerwall CEO Scott Di Valerio said on a quarterly earnings call Thursday. As a result, Redbox revenue fell 6.9 percent from Q2 a year earlier to $445.5 million, based on lower rental activity, the company said. But Blu-ray “continued to perform well and grew as a percent of Redbox revenue and rentals,” Di Valerio said. Neither Outerwall nor Verizon is pleased with the rate of subscriber growth at the Redbox Instant by Verizon streaming service that launched two years ago, Di Valerio said in Q&A, though neither partner has disclosed subscriber figures publicly. The good news from Outerwall’s standpoint is that “transactional” VoD viewing at Redbox Instant platform is increasing, he said. The bad news is that Outerwall has poured $63 million into the service since 2012 and is obligated contractually to invest millions more, he said: “We're continuing to work with Verizon around our Redbox Instant to see if there’s proper ways from a funding perspective to increase subscribers and continue to grow out the business.” But “if we don’t hit certain subscriber thresholds, then we have some decisions to make in March,” he said. That was a reference to a statement in Outerwall’s 10-Q SEC filing Thursday (http://bit.ly/1ljNqEc) in which it said Redbox “has certain rights to cause Verizon to acquire Redbox’s interest” in Redbox Instant “at fair value.” The filing said “the earliest point we could provide our notice of intent to withdraw is expected to be in March.” Verizon representatives didn’t immediately comment.