The FCC Public Safety Bureau provided an update of its Public Safety Answering Point Text-to-911 Readiness and Certification Registry. The registry lists PSAPs that are ready to receive text-to-911 messages and provides notice to carriers and other providers of interconnected text messaging services of the PSAP’s date of readiness.
Globalstar countered CableLabs and NCTA claims (see 1504230054) about Globalstar's terrestrial low-power service (TLPS) demonstrations, in an ex parte notice posted at the FCC Friday in docket 13-213. The compatibility demos confirmed that TLPS will be a "good neighbor" to Wi-Fi operations in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed band, including IEEE 802.11 Channel 11, Globalstar said. CableLab's demo was flawed, it used an unrealistic equipment setup and it didn't demonstrate negative effects from TLPS on the adjacent Wi-Fi band, Globalstar said. "The Commission should give no weight to this contrived attempt to produce a detrimental impact on Wi-Fi." Globalstar said CableLabs didn't submit all of its test results to the commission and instead selected "specific data points that purportedly show a negative effect on Wi-Fi Channel 11," it said. The commission shouldn't require additional tests for every deployment scenario possible under its proposed TLPS rules because it would be "bad policy and bad precedent," Globalstar said. The commission's Part 15 rules don't protect unlicensed services from interference, it said. CableLabs wants to test five to 10 other Wi-Fi devices with TLPS for interference issues for a "representative sample," said Rob Alderfer, CableLabs principal strategic analyst, Friday. “There’s a wide range of equipment that is out there in the Wi-Fi ecosystem today,” he said. “We’d want to look at different grade access points on the Wi-Fi and TLPS side and different types of client devices.” CableLabs offered its radio frequency chamber and an outdoor residential environment to test real-world impacts of TLPS, Alderfer said. “We’re happy to participate in other venues as well,” he said. “We’re looking to be a technical resource in this process.”
Intel will do what it can to make the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band a success story, the company said in a statement released Friday. The FCC approved the 3.5 GHz order April 17 and it was released last week. “It’s clear that the FCC, NTIA, and Federal Agencies are serious about enabling spectrum sharing with the federal government,” Intel said. “The 3.5 GHz band has been globally harmonized for mobile broadband and is incredibly valuable for improving peak cellular use in major markets, for WLAN use, and for enabling new wireless broadband uses in general. Importantly, the Commission's approach protects incumbent use and includes an innovative sensor-based scheme in a future phase of development which could further enhance spectrum utilization and may provide the key to unlocking other highly desirable bands especially the 5 GHz band."
Declan Byrne, president of the WiMAX Forum, and officials from Hitachi, Honeywell and the Federal Aviation Administration updated FCC officials on the forum's efforts to “develop a consensus within the aviation industry over possible service rules to facilitate the deployment of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System,” an ex parte filing said. The World Radiocommunication Conference approved a global allocation for AeroMACS in 2007, a presentation by the group said. The core band is 5091-5150 MHz. In an earlier filing, NTIA said AeroMACS is an airport surface local area network. The filing was posted in docket 12-338.
Wireless medical networks and devices are at the very center of the shift in how healthcare is being delivered and received, said FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn at a Connect2Health event promoting medical technology. “In the same way X-rays used an invisible property in order to produce incredible changes to medicine, wireless networks, while invisible to the naked eye, power devices that are transforming healthcare,” she said. “Today’s innovative technologies are completely changing when, how and where medical care takes place.” As the transformation of the healthcare system continues, it’s imperative that all of these medical devices are safe and reliable, Clyburn said, according to prepared remarks. For that reason, wireless test beds are a critical piece of ensuring safe, reliable technologies, she said.
Windstream received a nine-year, multimillion-dollar contract from the General Services Administration as part of the Public Buildings Service green buildings initiative, it said in a news release. The contract will provide Enterprise Network Services for 1,200 buildings nationwide, Windstream said. It extends the current relationship between Windstream and the GSA to give telecom and technology solutions to more than 1,200 buildings nationwide, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security offices, Windstream said.
Nomi Technologies agreed to settle FTC charges that it misled consumers about their ability to opt out of in-store tracking and that consumers would be informed when locations used Nomi’s tracking services, an FTC news release said Thursday. In late 2012, Nomi Technologies promised in its privacy policy to “provide an opt-out mechanism at stores using its services,” the release said. “This promise implied that consumers would be informed when stores were using Nomi’s tracking technology” to track the MAC address, device type, data and time the device was observed and signal strength of the device, the FTC said. But these promises weren't kept, the FTC alleged in its first-ever complaint against a retail tracking company, because “no in-store opt-out mechanism was available, and consumers were not informed when the tracking was taking place,” the FTC said. “Nomi collected information on about nine million mobile devices within the first nine months of 2013,” the FTC said. “It’s vital that companies keep their privacy promises to consumers when working with emerging technologies, just as it is in any other context,” said Director of the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau Jessica Rich. “If you tell a consumer that they will have choices about their privacy, you should make sure all of those choices are actually available to them,” Rich said. With its tracking technology, Nomi provided aggregated information on how many consumers passed by a store instead of going in, how long consumers stayed in the store, the types of devices used by consumers, how many repeat consumers a store had and whether the consumer had visited that store at another location, the FTC said. While the company provided an opt-out on its website, “consumers were not informed of the tracking taking place in the stores at all,” the FTC said. Under the settlement, Nomi “will be prohibited from misrepresenting consumers’ options for controlling whether information is collected, used, disclosed or shared about them or their computers or other devices, as well as the extent to which consumers will be notified about information practices,” the FTC said. The Commission voted 3-2 to issue the complaint and accept the proposed consent order, with Commissioners Maureen Ohlhausen and Joshua Wright dissenting, the FTC said. Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and Commissioners Julie Brill and Terrell McSweeny issued a joint statement in favor of the order, Ohlhausen and Wright issued separate dissenting statements. Comments on the consent agreement will be accepted through May 25, after which the Commission will vote whether to make the order final. “We continually review our privacy policies to ensure that they follow best practices and had already made the recommended changes in pursuit of that goal by updating our privacy policy over a year and a half ago, while we were still an early-stage startup that was less than a year old,” a Nomi spokesman said in a statement emailed to us. “Our mission has always been to help clients deliver the best possible customer experience, and a key part of achieving that goal is empowering consumers with choice,” the spokesman said. Ohlhausen noted in her dissent that Nomi is a “young company that attempted to go above and beyond its legal obligation to protect consumers but, in doing so, erred without benefitting itself,” he said. “Commissioner Wright believes that Nomi did not violate the FTC Act,” the spokesman said.
The Digital Living Network Alliance created new extensions of its VidiPath specifications that “allow for cloud delivery of commercial video content to retail consumer electronics devices,” DLNA said in an ex parte filing posted in FCC docket 15-64 Tuesday. Content using the extensions is protected using digital rights management and delivered through “standards-based MPEG-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP,” it said. Leading desktop browsers already support the extension specifications or are planned to, DLNA said. The guidelines will let multichannel video programming distributors and over-the-top content providers offer commercial content to retail devices either using traditional content delivery mechanisms or using cloud/IP content delivery mechanisms, DLNA said. “VidiPath Cloud Extension Guidelines also support accessibility services including closed captions, emergency alert messages, and secondary audio programming.”
Federal and state regulators should “make a goal-line stand” and block Comcast 's planned buy of Time Warner Cable, said the Sports Fan Coalition in a news release Tuesday. The coalition opposes the deal because both companies have a track record “of acquiring and hoarding the rights to sports programming, and then restricting fans' access to telecasts of local teams,” said the group. The deal would give Comcast “the leverage and incentive” to restrict the availability of over-the-top programming from competitors, said the group. "The facts and economics clearly show that this proposed merger would empower Comcast to engage in even more of the anticompetitive behavior sports fans have faced in markets throughout the country," said coalition Chairman David Goodfriend. The Department of Justice is giving close scrutiny to the deal (see 1504200049).
The FCC is still working on the cybersecurity assurance process that the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) recommended last month in its report on suggestions for communications sector cybersecurity risk management, but assurance meetings “won’t be depositions,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during a speech Tuesday. The CSRIC report was meant to adapt the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework for communications sector use (see 1503180056) “We do not envision an adversarial process in which corporate officials are cross-examined in an attempt to draw out embarrassing admissions about security lapses,” Wheeler said during an RSA Security conference, according to a prepared version of the speech released by the FCC. “The sweet spot is a process that is open, honest, and interactive, with the parties working as partners in addressing a matter of national concern.” Adequate safeguards will need to be in place to ensure that sensitive information that companies disclose during assurance meetings doesn’t go public, Wheeler said. The FCC also will need to assure companies that the information they disclose won’t be used to “generate regulatory proposals,” he said. Wheeler said information sharing will be the “biggest challenge” to implementing the CSRIC report’s recommendations, noting that the FCC has established a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center that allows the FCC to share outage information. Information sharing is “essential” and “my view is that there are no insurmountable barriers to making this work, and the public interest demands nothing less,” Wheeler said.