NTCA commended the Rural Spectrum Accessibility Act, S-1776, while slamming the wireless market as “consolidated” and backing spectrum licenses based on small geographic areas. That “would allow smaller carriers like those in NTCA’s membership to bid only for the territory they are interested in serving and ensure rural areas are not ignored when it comes time to deploy services,” said NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield in a statement Wednesday. Two carriers are now “holding 78% of the country’s low-frequency, broadband-capable spectrum and accounting for more than 80% of wireless industry revenues,” Bloomfield said. The bill was introduced and referred to the Senate Commerce Committee before the Thanksgiving recess.

The Georgia Public Service Commission should reverse a $5 fee imposed on about 785,000 state residents on the federal Lifeline program in late October (CD Oct 18 p18), consumer advocacy groups urged the PSC in a joint statement Thursday (http://bit.ly/condemningGAPSC). Consumer Action, the Community Action Partnership, League of United Latin American Citizens, Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition, National Consumers League and National Grange urged the PSC to “reverse this punitive, anti-consumer fee.” The new fee “flies in the face of the goals” of the Lifeline program, which was created to ensure that “qualifying Americans have the opportunities and security that phone service brings,” said the groups. The federal Lifeline program doesn’t use funds from the states, and any possible savings “from squeezing low-income consumers out of the program” wouldn’t impact state-level taxpayers, it said. No other state charges its Lifeline consumers this fee, and the monthly fee “of this sort” was rejected by the FCC when it was considered, said the groups. There’s no factual basis or evidence that this kind of fee will result in reduced fraud or less abuse of the program, or that it will result in better sales practice conduct on behalf of the Lifeline providers, said the letter. It said the National Lifeline Accountability Database is going online in five states this month to help carriers identify and resolve duplicate claims for Lifeline-supported service, and Georgia will begin participating in the database in January. The coalition urged other states to not follow Georgia in “attacking the pocketbooks of low-income Americans in this misguided fashion.” The Georgia PSC didn’t respond to request for comment.

Carriers that have already adopted IP technology, but that will continue to be required to interconnect with others that are still transitioning, should not “be penalized” by being “forced to bear excessive interconnect costs” to connect to TDM circuits, YMax told the FCC (http://bit.ly/1byJLvV). It’s “crucial” the commission “continue to regulate inter-carrier interconnection terms,” and work with states to ensure disputes can be arbitrated quickly, the VoIP provider said in a letter to the commission.

The White House must issue an official response to a petition asking for stronger email privacy protections, after the petition hit the necessary 100,000 signatures needed by Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1avKNbR). Digital 4th, an industry and advocacy coalition, filed the petition, attempting to restart debate over updating the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CD Nov 14 p19). The group was formed in March to advocate for an ECPA modernization bill from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, which would protect electronic communications collected and maintained by third-party service providers (CD March 20 p10). The bill never made it out of committee. “Several bills in Congress would fix this by updating ECPA to require a warrant, but regulatory bodies are blocking reform in order to gain new powers of warrantless access,” said the petition. “We call on the Obama Administration to support ECPA reform and to reject any special rules that would force online service providers to disclose our email without a warrant."

Spectrum is the “central issue” for smart automotive technologies, said Leo McCloskey, Intelligent Transportation Society of America senior vice president. “If you look at the progress of technology from where we are today to where we want to be, I think everyone in the room would put a show of hands up that if they could go and in jump in a vehicle that was driven by a robot and safely get to their destination, they'd gladly not drive the car, especially in D.C.,” he said at a Politico event. ITS America has raised concerns about an FCC proposal to use the 5850-5925 MHz band, already allocated for a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) backbone, for Wi-Fi on a secondary basis (CD Jan 16 p1). “If the spectrum should disappear in such a way that precludes us, or hampers us in getting to autonomous transportation, which requires a lot of connectivity … we're being shortsighted,” McCloskey said Thursday. But Information Technology & Innovation Foundation President Rob Atkinson said that when the DSRC spectrum was allocated by the FCC in 1999, the world was a very different place. “The world back then was people got slices of spectrum for single purpose uses,” he said. But today spectrum is viewed as “a generalized pool and you get specialization in the application,” he said. “When you think about most interesting applications, they are going to run on the LTE platform or sharing that with some kind of Wi-Fi platform.”

Broadband customer premise equipment (CPE) shipments are expected to surpass 147 million at the end of 2013, said ABI Research Thursday (http://bit.ly/1hP9tVi). CPE shipments are expected to grow to 150 million in 2014, said the industry research firm. These devices include modems, wired routers and gateways, it said. In 2014, DOCSIS 3.0 CPE devices will account for more than 89 percent of cable CPE shipments at 50 million, but total DSL CPE shipments are likely to be around 2 percent lower than total shipments in 2012 due to slower subscriber net additions in DSL broadband service, said ABI. Higher speed VDSL shipments are growing stronger, and ABI said it expects these shipments to account for more than 25 percent of DSL CPE device shipments in 2014. ZTE topped the broadband CPE shipments list in Q3 with a 13 percent market share, said ABI. Arris jumped to second place in the market share after acquiring from Google Motorola’s Home Division in April, and combined shipments of Arris and Motorola now represent 12 percent of the market compared to Huawei’s 11 percent market share, said ABI.

Ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski backed the delay of the broadcast incentive auction to mid-2015 by current Chairman Tom Wheeler. Genachowski said he wanted to join three other ex-chairmen from both parties who earlier this week backed the delay that Wheeler disclosed Friday (CD Dec 10 p6). Genachowski “fully agrees with Chairman Wheeler’s decision,” said an assistant to Genachowski by email Thursday. Genachowski had planned a 2014 auction when he was chairman.

EU law requiring storage of e-communications traffic data seriously interferes with citizens’ fundamental right to privacy and should be suspended until it’s fixed, said European Court of Justice (ECJ) Advocate General (AG) Pedro Cruz Villalón Thursday in an opinion (http://bit.ly/18nKR2G). The ECJ isn’t bound by its advisors’ opinions but generally follows them. The case involves challenges in Ireland and Austria to those countries’ versions of the EU data retention directive, which their respective high courts referred to the ECJ. Taken as whole, the measure is incompatible with the requirement in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that any limitation on the exercise of such a right must be provided for by law, the AG said. Use of retained data could make it possible to create a faithful map of much of a person’s conduct or even a complete picture of his private identity, and it could also increase the risk that the data may be used for unlawful purposes, he said. The directive doesn’t require that the data be retained in the territory of an EU country, so it could be held anywhere in cyberspace, he said. Given its serious impact on privacy rights, the legislation should have defined the fundamental principles on which access to the data collected and held would be based, instead of leaving that task to each individual country, he said. Another problem is that the law requires EU members to ensure that data is kept for up to two years when evidence showed here’s insufficient justification for such a long period, the AG said. Instead of advising the ECJ to strike down the law, however, he recommended that it be suspended until the EU remedies the problems. Digital Rights Ireland (DRI), which brought one of the challenges, said it’s happy with the opinion but would have preferred that the AG find the directive unlawful in principle, which he didn’t do, Chairman TJ McIntyre told us. If the ECJ upholds the opinion, it will strike down the directive, he said. The AG wants governments to have a grace period in which to change their laws, but DRI hopes that, given the political climate surrounding former U.S. NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations, there’s enough political opposition to data retention for the law to die, he said. When DRI launched its challenge seven years ago data storage wasn’t a big issue, but the political scene is different now, he said.

A workshop to be convened by NTIA Friday on lessons learned from developing a process for sharing the 1755 MHz band will hopefully “produce ideas for even greater collaboration that can be incorporated into ongoing work across the Federal agencies,” said White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Tom Power Thursday in a blog post. “Balancing the growing needs of both commercial and Federal spectrum users presents opportunities for increased efficiency and economic growth, but also poses challenges,” Power wrote (http://1.usa.gov/18odb53). “Commercial wireless providers must learn how to operate their systems in spectrum bands that will be shared by Federal agencies using that same spectrum for operations such as conducting military training exercises, maintaining air safety, or tracking criminal activity."

Prometheus Radio Project urged the FCC to delay opening an FM translator filing window for AM stations until all LPFM applications have been resolved. Limited signal coverage remains a significant threat to the success of the low-power FM service, said the LPFM advocate in an ex parte filing in docket 99-25 (http://bit.ly/1kDklm5). Raising the maximum effective radiated power from 100 watts to 250 watts for LPFMs and holding an FM translator window exclusively for LPFM licensees “would significantly unburden LPFM stations while remaining faithful to the word and intention of the Local Community Radio Act,” it said. The filing recounted meetings with Peter Doyle, Media Bureau Audio Division chief, and staff from the offices of commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel.