The FCC should encourage opportunities for minority ownership in the media, telecommunications and broadband industries, the Minority Media and Telecom Council (MMTC) told Chairman Tom Wheeler, commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mike O'Rielly, an aide to Commissioner Ajit Pai, and Enforcement Bureau staff in a series of meetings Friday, according to an ex parte filing released Monday. To encourage minority ownership, the commission should revise its designated-entity rules to “take into consideration the scale that is needed to participate as a competitor in the spectrum auctions” and encourage major telecom carriers to conduct secondary transactions with minority-owned businesses, the MMTC filing said. The commission should also relax cross-ownership rules “except in smaller and some medium markets where relaxation might result in excessive concentration of the media and, therefore, harm minority ownership,” the filing said. The commission should also tighten the rules governing sharing arrangements, MMTC said. On the open Internet, the commission should institute “light touch regulation premised on transparency and vigilant oversight and monitoring to discourage abusive practices,” MMTC said. The commission should also “give credence” to the FCC Diversity Advisory Committee’s recommendations, MMTC said.

Chances appear good lawmakers will approve comprehensive telecom legislation as early as the next Congress, said Rick Boucher, a former Democratic member of the House who once chaired the Communications Subcommittee, in an interview. Boucher is now head of Sidley Austin’s Government Strategies group. “When the new Congress starts in January of 2015 there will a two-year period of real ferment where bills will be introduced, legislative hearings will be held, markups will happen and legislation will move forward,” he said. “It’s hard to predict how long that’s going to take. Even in the best case we're talking about three years from now. But I think the odds are well more than 50 percent that at the end of this process and however many years it takes we're going to see a statutory reform.” Boucher noted that work on the 1996 Act really started in 1989 with proposed legislation modifying the Cable Act of 1984, which later became one of the four main elements of the ‘96 act. “You get a sense of the time frame,” he said. “I think it'll go faster this time and part of the reason is there’s a central motivating theme now and that is the old network is vanishing, the new network is arising and there must be a managed transition to get us from one point to the next,” he said. “Then within that theme go the other important issues, such as the need for regulatory parity among broadband providers, the need for revamped FCC regulatory structure to get away from silos and meet marketplace and technological realities, the need to make more spectrum available so that on the wireless where there is so much growth now the bandwidth will exist in order to meet consumer demand.” The legislation will also emphasize the need to promote “core consumer values” as the industry is transformed. “I think you'd get some pretty broad-based agreement that these are the important issues.” The IP transition is the biggest challenge facing industry through the rest of the decade, said Boucher, who represents carriers among his clients. “Most people have already made this transition,” he said. “It may surprise you to hear that only 5 percent of Americans today use the old circuit-switched telephone network as their exclusive means of communications.” The cost of maintaining the old network is “soaring,” he said. “It’s old. It’s outdated. Telecom equipment manufacturers typically are not manufacturing equipment for it. They're making routers for wireless networks. They're making packet-switched routers that fit into wired networks, but they're typically not making equipment anymore for the old circuit-switched network.” Between 2006 and 2011, the most recent period for which data are available, phone companies spent $154 billion maintaining the old network “and that is more money than they spent on developing modern new networks,” Boucher said. This mandatory investment has made wireline phone companies less competitive versus their cable competitors, he said. Boucher said any revamp of the regulatory structure at the FCC should focus on parity. “It’s clearly a remnant from an earlier era and it essentially regulates companies not based on the services they currently offer, but based on their historic heritage,” he said. “Cable companies are regulated one way, telephone companies are regulated another way, wireless carriers another way, and so forth. That is a structure that completely ignores technology and ignores modern marketplace realities.” Boucher said the FCC was on the right track in proposing IP transition pilot projects. The transition can’t be a “flash cut” and “has to be carefully planned and managed,” he said. “It begins with a time-tested process of having demonstration projects, trials in carefully selected markets.” Similar market tests worked very well prior to the DTV transition, he said. “My assumption is that there will be at least one urban trial, at least one rural trial, maybe more,” he said. “The goal is to make sure that we know what can go wrong and then remedies for those problems are put in place prior to the sunset of the circuit-switched network at the end of the decade.”

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission should “take prompt action against abusive patent trolls,” the American Antitrust Institute said Thursday in letters to the agencies. AAI urged DOJ to reopen its investigations into large patent portfolio transfers to Rockstar and Conversant Intellectual Property Management, two patent assertion entities AAI referred to as “trolls.” The two PAEs have used those patent portfolios to launch “an aggressive patent enforcement campaign” against Google at its competitors’ behests, AAI said. DOJ and FTC should also urge standards-setting organizations to adopt AAI-proposed patent policies that would “diminish the ability of patent trolls and others to enforce patents essential to technical standards -- such as 4G and Blu-Ray -- in an anticompetitive manner,” AAI said. The group said the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act (S-1720), which the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering, would empower the FTC to take action against PAEs that send out deceptive demand letters. “More transparent patent enforcement would encourage defensive measures by users and manufacturers of high-tech products and discourage offensive misuses of patents by trolls,” AAI said (http://bit.ly/LFlejp).

C Spire said it completed its buy of cloud provider Callis Communications. The purchase of Callis is C Spire’s latest business deal aimed at growing its footprint in the Southeast, which has also included expanded 4G LTE coverage in southern Alabama and plans for 1 Gbps fiber service in nine Mississippi cities, C Spire said (http://bit.ly/MyeBzY).

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., plans a hearing on the “kill switch” technology and broader questions of cellphone security, she told us Thursday. The hearing will be later this month within the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she chairs the Antitrust Subcommittee. On Dec. 30, Klobuchar demanded answers from several carriers about their cellphone security efforts and the kill switch, asking on behalf of her subcommittee. No hearing has formally been announced.

Correction: Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt’s FCC implemented the E-rate program created in the 1996 Telecom Act (CD Feb 6 p4).

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler gets “thousands of emails every day from real people talking about a vast variety of topics” through his agency e-mail address -- Tom.Wheeler@FCC.gov, he said. “I make it a point of a couple of times a day going through that and being able to take the pulse of really what’s going on out there.” The Internet has made it possible for people “to speak to decisionmakers without the need for intermediaries,” said Wheeler at a National Journal conference Thursday.

Total provisionally winning bids in the H-block auction stood at $1.2 billion after 42 bidding rounds Wednesday, still below Dish Network’s December commitment to bid $1.564 billion in the auction. On Tuesday, the FCC pushed the auction into phase 2, a step the agency takes as an auction gets into its later stages. During that phase “a bidder must be active on at least 95 percent of its current bidding eligibility in each round,” said a notice from the agency (http://bit.ly/1jgDy0U). Under stage 1, bidders had to exercise only 85 percent of their total eligibility. “This means that if you don’t bid, you're going to quickly run out of opportunities to just take a pass so the auction is going to come to close more quickly now than it would have if they kept eligibility use static,” said a wireless lawyer who’s following the auction closely. As of round 42 all 176 licenses the FCC is offering had provisionally winning bids.

Wireless broadband continues to grow at rapid rate, with global mobile data traffic up 81 percent in 2013, Cisco said in a report released Wednesday. “Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000,” said the technology equipment maker (http://bit.ly/1fuNCxV). “One exabyte of traffic traversed the global Internet in 2000, and in 2013 mobile networks carried nearly 18 exabytes of traffic.” But Cisco confirmed that Wi-Fi offloading is becoming a major factor worldwide, with 45 percent of total mobile data traffic offloaded onto a wireline network last year. The company said smartphone use also continued to grow at a rapid rate. “Smartphones represented only 27 percent of total global handsets in use in 2013, but represented 95 percent of total global handset traffic,” the report said. “In 2013, the typical smartphone generated 48 times more mobile data traffic (529 MB per month) than the typical basic-feature cell phone (which generated only 11 MB per month of mobile data traffic).” There were 22 million wearable wireless devices in use last year, generating 1.7 petabytes of monthly traffic, Cisco said. Its reports have often been cited by policymakers as evidence of a looming spectrum crunch. The Cisco report “underscores the need for rapid deployment of infrastructure,” said PCIA President Jonathan Adelstein, a former FCC commissioner, in an interview. “It’s more than a spectrum crunch, it’s a wireless data crunch. ... We need more spectrum, we need more antennas operating at more different frequencies. It’s very difficult to keep pace with the speed of the growth of consumer demand for broadband data. In the immediate term we are seeing the carriers densify their networks to accommodate the demand.” The FCC “is right on target in looking how we can speed broadband deployment,” he said (CD Feb 5 p3). “This data shows the FCC is right on track on conducting such a comprehensive review of how we can speed the siting of wireless infrastructure.” Jot Carpenter, CTIA vice president-government affairs, welcomed the report. “We agree with Cisco that demand for wireless broadband continues to grow at a significant rate, highlighting the need for additional spectrum,” Carpenter said. “Even with successful AWS-3 and broadcast incentive auctions, more will have to be done to enable America’s wireless industry to continue leading the world.” Wells Fargo said in a research note the Cisco numbers are positive for towers. “We reiterate our OVERWEIGHT rating on the tower sector,” Wells Fargo said. “In our view, the ... findings offer tangible evidence around the continued strong demand for wireless data usage. We believe carriers will need to continue to optimize their respective networks to handle the additional demands of mobile data usage.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance filed in support of NCTA arguments that the FCC should override objections from Globalstar and allow the use of the 5.1 GHz U-NII-1 band for Wi-Fi (CD Jan 24 p13). “As the NCTA Ex Parte correctly pointed out -- and as the Commission recognized in initiating its proceeding -- demand for Wi-Fi connectivity is rapidly expanding,” the alliance said (http://bit.ly/1n8Onj4). “The U-NII-1 band is ideal for swiftly making additional channels available to meet the skyrocketing demand, including outdoor use, for Wi-Fi technologies, particularly because the band is part of a larger contiguous block of unlicensed spectrum capable of supporting the new generation IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and also for the next generation High Efficiency WLAN ... technology presently under study by IEEE 802.11."