Jimm Phillips

The FTC said HTC America reached a tentative settlement over charges that the company’s failure, until at least November 2011 to take “reasonable steps” to secure the software used on its smartphones and tablets, constituted “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” (http://1.usa.gov/YHPOtt). The agency accused the maker of consumer electronics of not using “well-known and commonly-accepted secure programming practices ... which would have ensured that applications only had access to users’ information with their consent."

Ukraine’s government is implementing the intellectual property rights (IPR) “action plan” it developed in consultation with the U.S. and hopes to fix remaining IP issues through forthcoming legislation, said Serhii Nalyvaiko, head of the State Intellectual Property Service of Ukraine’s control over IP objects use division, during a Special 301 review hearing Wednesday at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Nalyvaiko’s testimony came as the USTR-led Special 301 Committee considers whether to designate Ukraine as a “priority foreign country” (PFC) under the Special 301 statute.

Unless the U.S. is able to increase the amount of available spectrum, there will be a gap between supply and demand as mobile data use continues to increase, said FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Ruth Milkman Tuesday during a Broadband Breakfast event. Today’s smartphone and app economy “simply did not exist” in 2008; between 2009 and 2012, mobile traffic grew by 1,275 percent, and that level of growth will continue through 2017, she said. That demand is being driven by the proliferation of smartphones, and that “necessitates” the need to increase spectrum availability, Milkman said. The federal government has been engaged in a series of efforts to increase spectrum availability, including the FCC’s considerations of the 3.5 GHz and 5 GHz bands and the ongoing evaluation of the 1755-1850 MHz band. Wireless carriers have responded to the spectrum crunch by increasing their use of data caps to curb customers’ data use. While such caps are controversial, industry experts noted that the industry is changing so rapidly that it is not useful to specifically target the use of caps in the midst of larger competition issues.

There’s a “very urgent” need to address cybersecurity issues, “but it is also a long-term problem,” said White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel during an event Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We didn’t get here overnight, and we're not going to get ourselves out of this situation overnight either,” he said. President Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity Feb. 12, which he said would help “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy.” The order, among other things, directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to lead an effort in conjunction with other federal agencies and industry stakeholders to develop a Cybersecurity Framework of voluntary best practices and other standards that could be used to strengthen the cybersecurity defenses of critical infrastructure (CD Feb 14 p1).

President Barack Obama touted his executive order on cybersecurity during his State of the Union speech Tuesday as a step to “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy,” and urged Congress to pass legislation to further the order’s goals. Enemies of the U.S. are “seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems,” he said. “We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."

Policymakers need to ensure the U.S. maintains its “preeminent position” as the driver of telecom technology innovation by maintaining it as a friendly environment for capital investment, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said Sunday during an event at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “What keeps me awake at night is, five years from now, is that still the case?” he said at the Silicon Flatirons event. “Five years from now, are Chinese companies going to be driving the standards, are top Chinese companies going to be driving the technological innovation in this industry? … I think we as a country do not want that."

Spectrum sharing will be necessary to meet the Obama administration’s goal of finding 500 MHz for commercial broadband service, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling Monday at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The old method of clearing spectrum of federal users and then making it available for the exclusive use of commercial providers is not sustainable,” he told the Silicon Flatirons event. “We have moved the systems that are easy to move, and to continue this method of spectrum reallocation simply costs too much and takes too long. And just as important is the fact that the opportunities to find spectrum to which we can move the federal operations are dwindling rapidly."

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the FTC support the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO) efforts to “provide more complete information regarding patent ownership to the public,” the agencies said in a joint filing that PTO released last week (http://xrl.us/bofojr). The filing was one of several submitted in response to PTO’s request for input on its proposal to change its rules on collecting and publishing real-party-in-interest (RPI) patent ownership information. PTO held a roundtable discussion on the proposal last month, at which Google, Hewlett-Packard and IBM expressed support for improved RPI collection (CD Jan 14 p8). PTO had proposed two versions of the rules -- “Broad” and “Limited” -- that would define RPI in different ways. Justice and the FTC said they support “an RPI definition that, at a minimum, includes the [ultimate parent entities] either by including all UPE in the ‘Broad’ definition, or by adopting the ‘Limited’ definition."

Sprint Nextel lost a net 337,000 subscribers across its networks during Q4, with growth on its CDMA and LTE networks only partially outweighing a heavy subscriber exodus from the soon-to-be-shuttered iDEN network used by its Nextel service subscribers. The carrier’s Sprint networks added 401,000 postpaid and 525,000 prepaid subscribers, while its Nextel network lost a net 1.02 million subscribers. Sprint said it also lost a net 243,000 wholesale subscribers. Sprint added a net 605,000 subscribers for the entire year, down from a net 5.1 million added in 2011. Exits by Nextel subscribers will continue to accelerate as the service nears its targeted shutdown in the middle of the year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said Thursday during a conference call with investors. Sprint said it expects it will see a diminishing percentage of exiting Nextel subscribers choose to join the remaining networks; about 51 percent of Nextel subscribers who terminated their service during Q4 chose to join other Sprint services (http://xrl.us/boff9q).

Cisco forecast major increases in mobile data traffic through 2017. Faster than previously projected increases in 4G adoption and Wi-Fi offloading bear watching, experts told us. Mobile data traffic will reach 134 exabytes per year -- 11.2 exabytes per month -- by the end of 2017, Cisco said Tuesday in a report. That would be 134 times the total Internet Protocol traffic generated in 2000. It would also be a gain from 2012, when consumers’ global mobile data traffic rose by 70 percent, Cisco said. Traffic reached 885 petabytes per month by the end of 2012 -- up from 520 petabytes per month at the end of 2011, said the maker of equipment for telecom firms to handle data. The monthly mobile data traffic in 2012 was nearly 12 times the total monthly Internet traffic generated in 2000 -- 75 petabytes per month, Cisco said. Global traffic will continue to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66 percent through 2017, Cisco said. North America will see growth slightly below the global average -- at a 56 percent CAGR -- to 2 exabytes per month in 2017, Cisco said (http://xrl.us/bigzmr).