"We now have seen how satellite radio performs in what was this terrible recession,” and the experience “bodes very, very well for our future,” Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin said Tuesday on a quarterly earnings call. “What we found is that consumers love our product. They stuck with us in spite of the 10 percent unemployment."

The time has come for the FCC to formally seek comment on whether it should “reclassify” broadband as a Title II service, subject to common carrier regulation, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said Tuesday in a debate sponsored by the New America Foundation. Hank Hultquist, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, countered that the FCC has plenty of authority regardless of the recent Comcast decision, and reclassification would be a mistake.

A draft version of long-awaited privacy legislation by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., would require more notification of consumers before collection of personal information. The bill would also expand FTC authority over online advertising practices. Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., worked together on the draft and unveiled it Tuesday. Industry groups may raise concerns about the burden to comply, said Kristen Mathews, a privacy attorney with Proskauer.

Standard group 3GPP’s LTE Release 9 is “functionally frozen with some minor exceptions,” Adrian Scrase, head of the Mobile Competence Center, said on an ATIS conference call Tuesday. The latest LTE specification includes continued integration of the femtocell concept, self-organization network functionality, positioning support, addition of spectrum bands like 800 MHz and 1500 MHz and broadening of LTE deployment scenarios, he said. 3GPP Release 8 formed the basis for the commercial LTE deployment, he noted.

A paucity of comments on an FCC radio rulemaking asking whether it should extend preferences for assigning stations to tribes without lands (CD Feb 4 p12) seems to underline the relative lack of controversy, several broadcast lawyers said. Three groups and a non-profit representing Native Americans and Alaska natives filed comments that were released Tuesday afternoon in docket 09-52. Other groups said they sat out the filing round. Commission action on tribal issues seems like it won’t take long, but acting on a more controversial matter raised by a 2009 rulemaking notice of whether to make it harder for stations to move into larger towns may take a while if it occurs at all, said three industry lawyers.

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- The National Broadband Plan’s proposal that 500 MHz of additional spectrum be reallocated for wireless broadband over the next five years is only a recommendation, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said at the FCBA annual meeting Saturday. The administration may reach another conclusion. Strickling said: “The administration continues to evaluate what is doable in this area and how to organize itself, conduct an evaluation. I don’t think there’s any question but that the administration understands the importance of looking for additional spectrum. In my own agency we're already starting to think about how we would do that on the federal side."

Competitive local exchange carrier Global Naps owes Verizon nearly $58 million in access charges under a 2002 order by Massachusetts, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled Thursday. It upheld a decision by a Massachusetts U.S. District Court. The sum is for services provided between 2003 and 2006. Verizon also had prevailed in the lower court on counterclaims for the debt against Global Naps President Frank Gangi and affiliates of the company. The appeals court also affirmed that decision.

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- The FCC has a huge agenda from the National Broadband Plan to work through, but the commission has every intention of completing the work assigned, top officials said at the FCBA conference over the weekend.

The FCC is expected to hire an outsider to oversee review of Comcast’s planned buy of NBC Universal to augment existing staff efforts of what many inside and outside the commission see as a unique deal because of the combination of broadband and cable with broadcast properties, agency and industry officials said. The move would be unusual in that most major transactions before the regulator are solely reviewed by long-time officials, though not unprecedented because of this commission’s hiring of outsiders for various roles. The regulator has looked at hiring existing employees and people outside the agency for the new role, FCC and industry officials said. It decided to hire an external candidate, an agency official said. We couldn’t learn the person’s name. This commission has used outsiders to work on the National Broadband Plan, most notably Blair Levin, who led that work.

Partnerships with non-profit and for-profit news sites and blogs will bring diversity to public media and create opportunities for pubcasters to carve a niche where market gaps exist, speakers said Friday at an FCC workshop on the future of public media. “It’s critical to expand and embrace the nonprofit online news startups,” J-Lab President Jan Schaffer said. “Collaborations can produce a lot of journalism.” With a focus on public service journalism, panelists noted gaps in investigative, local/statehouse and foreign reporting in both the private and publicly funded news industries and warned that traditional efforts to fill those gaps will be expensive.