T-Mobile USA is looking to provide “a whole range of different pricing options” for its data services, Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said in an interview at the carrier’s technology showcase in Washington last week. The company is “aggressively” looking at postpaid and prepaid plans to make data service affordable, he said. Many U.S. consumers don’t want to pay $30 or $40 for data plans, he said. Several major carriers have cut minimum data charges and analysts have expected T-Mobile USA to follow suit.
A House subcommittee chairman won’t be diverted from pursuing behavioral-ad legislation by the start of a multimillion-dollar self-regulation effort by a united front of industry groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Direct Marketing Association and the Better Business Bureaus, a congressional staffer said. The announcement this month of the Advertising Option Icon program for online education about cookies and access to an opt-out mechanism is “not going to slow us down” in pursuing passage of the Best Practices Act (HR-5777), Tim Robinson, counsel to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, told us last week.
NEW ORLEANS -- Eager to extend their industry’s video reach to all IP-enabled consumer display devices, cable technologists are now openly discussing how they will make the big transition to all-IPTV. However, they're not yet sure how much bandwidth, time and effort will be required to carry out that transition. Speaking at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers show last week, speakers from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cisco Systems and SCTE said cable operators will soon begin the long-awaited IPTV migration by simulcasting their linear channels via an IP overlay. They differed somewhat over the number of bonded channels that cable operators will need to get the transition underway.
The U.S. wireless industry will run into a spectrum deficit as early as 2013, the FCC said in a white paper released Thursday at its Spectrum Summit. Chairman Julius Genachowski opened the summit, as expected (CD Oct. 21 p1), warning of the coming shortfall.
NTIA is recommending reallocating 115 MHz of spectrum in two bands for mobile broadband over the next five years as part of its plan for making 500 MHz of spectrum available for broadband over the next 10 years, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said Thursday. Only 15 MHz of the spectrum recommended by the agency is below 2.5 GHz, the spectrum most sought by carriers.
Requests to ban blocking of online video by NBC after control of its parent company goes to Comcast may gain traction at the FCC after a different broadcast network prevented its Web video from being seen by some cable broadband subscribers, antitrust lawyers and industry analysts predicted. The blocking of Fox.com and Hulu.com video from News Corp. over the weekend, in the company’s retransmission-consent dispute with Cablevision, has raised speculation about similar action by NBC against a pay-TV provider during a retransmission contract dispute when it’s controlled by Comcast (CD Oct 21 p5). The American Cable Association, DirecTV and Dish Network -- foes of the Comcast-NBC Universal deal as it’s planned -- cited the Fox Web video blackout to the approximately 2.6 million broadband subscribers with Cablevision Internet Protocol addresses to renew their request for curbs on Comcast.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Connected TV is a “survival game” for the industry, Gaurav Arora, senior manager of Broadcom’s consumer electronics group, said on a panel at this week’s CEA Industry Forum. The Internet-centric purchasers of five to 10 years from now are in college and if TV sets aren’t connected for them, “the product will die” and be replaced by an iPad, laptop or smartphone, he said.
BELLEVUE, Wash. -- The arrival of Apple TV, Google TV and other services to deliver programming directly to consumers threatens cable companies’ business model, venture capitalists said Thursday at the Network Computing Architects Security & Technology conference. Carriers will also have to re-think business models as data-intensive applications, such as video, swamp their networks, VCs said. The backdrop to the discussion was Cablevision’s fight with Fox over carriage fees. Fox briefly blocked Cablevision subscribers Saturday from its programming on Hulu, and on Thursday was still denying Cablevision customers in New York and Philadelphia wired access to Fox TV stations.
The FCC has shipped 1,000 “white boxes” to academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech, in an effort to test broadband speeds around the country, the commission said Thursday. The boxes are designed to be installed in consumers’ homes to track hourly data on broadband speed. By month-end, 10,000 of the boxes are scheduled to have gone out, Chief Walter Johnston of the commission’s Electromagnetic Compatibility Division told an agency meeting on broadband.
AT&T added and retained more wireless customers in the third quarter than it had in any previous Q3, the carrier said Thursday. And it sold a record number of Apple iPhone handsets, though many were to subscribers it already had. AT&T mobile broadband “is approaching a $20 billion a year business, and the business is growing at 25-30 percent,” Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner said on the carrier’s earnings call. Wireline isn’t achieving the same success, but Lindner said the carrier isn’t thinking about ditching the business.