Matt Daneman

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the two Republican commissioners are at odds over letters the agency sent Wednesday to AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile, seeking input on zero-rating product offerings that could have net neutrality implications. "This is not an investigation," Wheeler said Thursday during the commission's meeting. "These were 'let's get informed.' This is to help us stay informed as to what the practices are." On the contrary, Commissioner Ajit Pai said later as he and Commissioner Michael O'Rielly criticized the letters and the way they were issued: "This is an investigation. This is not simply benign."

A decision in Tennis Channel's legal complaint against the FCC could come within a couple of months, or might take longer if the federal appellate court decides to schedule oral argument, Stephen Weiswasser of Covington and Burling, representing Tennis Channel, told us. Friday was the deadline for the agency, Tennis Channel and intervenor Comcast Cable Communications to file in the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The FCC went dramatically overboard in response to Congress' desire to streamline the cable-TV effective competition petitioning process when it decided the cable market is effectively competitive in every franchise area and put the onus of rebutting that presumption on franchising authorities, said NAB, NATOA and Minnesota's Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission (NDCCCC) in a brief. It was filed Monday, the deadline for those petitioners to file their initial brief in their lawsuit against the FCC at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. NAB, NATOA and Minnesota's NDCCCC -- whose executive director, Jodie Miller, is president of NATOA -- sued the FCC in August (see 1508280033), asking the D.C. Circuit to reject the June order (see 1506020060).

The long-sought goal of the commercial communications satellite industry to get more Defense Department traffic on its satellites is closer than ever due to the increased commercialization of space, growing space-based national security threats, and federal budget sequestration meaning "no more open checkbook," Intelsat General President Kay Sears said Tuesday during a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion on the possibility of DOD and the Air Force using more commercial satellites for communications.

The Supreme Court's ruling for DirecTV on binding arbitration language in customers' service agreements has little applicability in the real world, "but the consequences are profound" since it marks a landmark reversal of a state court decision on arbitration, on the grounds a state court misapplied state contract law, said Harvey Rosenfield, a founder of Consumer Watchdog. As a result, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) now seems to supersede everything, including parties' contract terms, legal experts tell us. "What the majority did here was dangerous and leads to a very slippery slope. In effect, the majority just federalized a big area of contract law, which has traditionally been a subject of state regulation and oversight," said Imre Szalai, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and co-author of an amicus brief in the case.

The new iteration of FCC.gov is functional and -- at the very least -- doesn't make the site less usable, unlike the last upgrade and redesign, communications regulation practitioners told us Friday, the second day it had been live. "It seems to be easier to read, generally more like what you'd expect a modern website to look like," said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld: "It looks like my internal bookmarks to things like ECFS [Electronic Comment Filing System] still work."

The FCC likely will tweak its two-degree satellite spacing rules but not do away with them altogether when commissioners vote Thursday on Part 25 rule changes at their December meeting, one lawyer with a satellite client told us. Much of the industry's lobbying efforts in recent months have involved two-degree spacing, the most contested issue in the agency's array of proposed Part 25 changes (see 1508050034).

Rather than a definitive victory or defeat of the FCC net neutrality order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is likely to deliver "a hodgepodge of wins and losses," NCTA President Michael Powell said in an interview for C-SPAN's The Communicators. "That will create a sort of Swiss cheese of a regime, which is part of what I've been concerned about all along. It will leave more confusion and complexity than it will stability and finality." The three-judge decision likely won't be issued for four months, and it will almost surely be appealed to the Supreme Court, Powell said.

A legal and regulatory settlement this week between John Deere and LightSquared includes ending legal claims against Deere by a former LightSquared investor and specific handset and base station power and out-of-band-emission (OOBE) limits. An ex parte filing posted Wednesday in FCC docket 12-340 includes a copy of the 15-page settlement agreement and mutual release announced by the two companies Tuesday (see 1512080022). Deere said in a statement Wednesday that it "looks forward to working with LightSquared and other spectrum users on the important dual goals of expanding mobile broadband networks while protecting GPS and other navigation technologies."

Any 5G deployment will need low- and mid-band spectrum allocations plus high band to enable such applications as IoT, and sizably different infrastructure from 4G, with many more small cell sites, said CTIA Chief Technology Officer Tom Sawanobori Wednesday at an FCBA telecom and wireless committees event. Unlike the traditional spectrum evolution where a technology came first, followed by technical requirements and regulations, 5G represents "a slightly different equation," said Michael Ha, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Policy and Rules Division deputy chief. The increasing demand for bandwidth for data transmission and the relative lack of unassigned spectrum is pushing the move into the millimeter wave bandwidths to support 5G, Ha said. The spectrum frontiers rulemaking (see 1510230050) is looking at bands above 24 GHz for 5G, and the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference identified some bands for 5G -- though 28 GHz, a subject of the FCC proceeding, wasn't included in the WRC work, Ha said. While numerous incumbent satellite operations already use that spectrum, Ha said, sharing is inevitable: "We know it's not going to be exclusive use." The satellite industry wants to be part of 5G -- such as in potential applications like driverless vehicles -- but also wants assurances and safeguards against harmful interference, said Satellite Industry Association President Tom Stroup. "We certainly are advocates of sharing, where it works." 4G has become ubiquitous in the U.S., with roughly 98.5 percent of the nation covered and traffic on the 4G network expected to sextuple over the next five years, Sawanobori said. Such applications as Voice over LTE are expected to become commonplace as soon as more products offer "high-definition voice," he said. 5G, by contrast, probably won't be deployed ubiquitously across the U.S. due to different business models, Sawanobori said.