Comments are due June 22, replies July 9, on two petitions for FCC interpretations under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The Insights Association and the American Association for Public Opinion Research asked for declaratory ruling clarifying four areas, including that "communications are not presumptively ‘advertisements’ or ‘telemarketing’ under the TCPA simply because they are sent by a for-profit company, or might be for an ultimate purpose of improving sales or customer relations,” said a Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice Wednesday in docket 02-278. The P2P Alliance, a coalition of providers and users of peer-to-peer text messaging, asked the FCC "to clarify that P2P text messaging is not subject to the [TCPA] restrictions on calls to wireless phone numbers because such messaging does not use an automatic telephone dialing system (autodialer)," said another PN.

The Supreme Court's overturning federal limits on some state gambling laws may help ISPs in the long run, assisted by the FCC's net neutrality rollback, said New Street Research analysts, referring to Monday's 6-3 decision in Murphy v. NCAA, No. 16-476. "The end game of all manner of gambling, particularly sports gambling, eventually opens the door for ISPs to enjoy some, if not a large portion, of the potential profits, without significant new costs," they wrote investors Tuesday, acknowledging further steps are needed and "potentially several years before those profits are realized." The analysts expect real-time online betting integrated with sports watching "will be a huge business," including "micro-betting" during a game that could require "high reliability, low latency, and huge backend computing power." ISP "leverage" to "offer services to platforms wishing to facilitate such gambling and to customers wishing to have the best performing platforms is greater than in the past due to the elimination of net neutrality protections," they wrote. "The ability of ISPs to monetize the gambling is even greater when the entities are vertically integrated ISPs and content distribution companies with sports programming." They said states must still pass new gambling laws and there must be underwriting of "the gambling risk of paying off more than the platform takes in," which will be a challenge in a real-time online setting.

The FCC established an online portal for ISP broadband disclosure filings required by transparency rules in its net neutrality rollback order, said a Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice in docket 17-108 and Tuesday's Daily Digest. ISPs choosing to disclose their network-management practices, performance characteristics and commercial service terms through the portal will be able to do so starting May 29, though the order doesn't take effect until June 11. Those that don't use the portal must provide the information on a "publicly available, easily accessible website," the PN said.

Cognitive Systems seeks to supplant infrared motion sensors used in many residential home security systems with a Wi-Fi alternative, Monika Gupta, executive vice president-sales, marketing and product, told us. Last week, it announced Cypress Semiconductor will incorporate support so Cypress customers can add “advanced motion technology” to smart home products. Gupta noted a November deal with Qualcomm for access points and routers. The company’s goal is “to target anything that has a Wi-Fi connection in the smart home,” Gupta said. The product is an Alexa skill and works with Google Assistant voice control engines.

“5G is not just a faster version of 4G,” said Matt Stagg, BT Sport director-mobile strategy, last week at the annual summit of the U.K.’s Digital Television Group in London. He said the much-vaunted low latency for 5G “only happened because the automotive industry needs it for braking autonomous cars -- so that cars stop at a red light.” Low latency “is expensive to provide from the network equipment,” but not everybody needs it, said Stagg. VoD, digital TV, autonomous vehicles “all have different requirements,” he said. Simon Fell, former director-technology and innovation at the European Broadcasting Union, backed up Stagg’s scenario of networks collapsing when all users -- consumers and professionals -- share the same pot of data and something happens to increase demand dramatically. “4G does not work under extreme load,” said Fell. “I was in Munich when there was a series of attacks and as more and more people used their phones to access sites like Facebook, the network collapsed.” News crews with 4G cameras, he said, “could not communicate and they had to bring in a satellite truck.” With “sliced” 5G, he said, consumer overload wouldn't affect broadcasters in that scenario because they would not be competing for bandwidth. Asked whether using 5G might be the way to distribute data-hungry 8K broadcasts, Fell said NHK is experimenting with 8K over 5G: “But who will pay?” Guido Meardi, CEO of V-Nova, the British company that promotes the new Perseus IPTV compression codec, said tests his company did showed it's possible to reduce an 8K data stream of 50 Mbps to between 30 and 35 Mbps, which could easily be sent over a 5G link.

Revised hearing aid compatibility rules for wireline handsets were approved by the Office of Management and Budget, said a Federal Register notice scheduled for Monday publication. The document said OMB approved May 1, "for a period of three years, the information collection requirements contained in the Commission’s Order.” Other parts of the order took effect in March. A March 26 Connect America Fund Phase II auction erratum for Monday's FR takes effect June 20; it includes a rule appendix inadvertently left out of a March 21, 2017, reconsideration order requiring CAF II support recipients to provide 2 terabytes of monthly usage for certain broadband performance tiers.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau resolved an investigation into whether 19-year-old Cameron Thurston violated Communications Act sections 301 and 303 by operating without authorization on spectrum licensed to the Michigan Public Safety Communications System (MPSCS), said a Wednesday order. Thurston pleaded guilty in court earlier this year, but due to his age, the nature of offenses and his willingness to tell Michigan State Police how he gained access, the court didn’t convict and instead named him a “youthful trainee” under Michigan statute, the bureau said. Under the consent decree, Thurston promised not to operate on or interfere with MPSCS, surrendered his amateur radio license and agreed not to apply for another license for two years. Thurston agreed to pay a $3,000 civil penalty, but would pay $17,000 for future such violations.

President Dan Berger and others from National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions met Chairman Ajit Pai about the future of FCC rules implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “Credit unions are still struggling to establish communication with their members for fear of violating the TCPA,” NAFCU said in a docket 18-152 filing. The discussion included the definition of "capacity" as it applies to autodialers and of called party "as it applies to reassigned numbers and the Commission's efforts to establish a reassigned numbers database,” the group said. “NAFCU reiterated its previous request for an expanded data security and fraud exception for credit unions trying to contact their members following a data breach.” The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau is asking for comment on interpretation and implementation of the TCPA in light of a court decision reversing some rules (see 1805150014).

Ford autonomous commercial vehicle efforts will start “city by city,” Chris Brewer, chief engineer of its autonomous-driving program, told an Evercore ISI investment conference Tuesday, standing by the company's forecasts to begin commercial deployments in 2021. In each city, “we’ll have a geo-fenced area that we feel comfortable we can operate in safely,” said Brewer. Ford on day one won’t “pop a hundred thousand vehicles” on the road. Once demonstrated the technology works, “you have to feel comfortable that you can safely deploy,” he said. “You need to have a regulatory environment that’s ready to accept it, and you have to have customers who believe it’s going to work.” The plan is to run an autonomous-driving “pilot” next year in Miami, where the automaker is “mapping the geo-fenced area" and working with partners like Domino’s and food-delivery service Postmates, the engineer said.

Fox Sports, with Fox Innovation Lab and partners AT&T, Ericsson and Intel, will stream 4K video over 5G for “potential broadcast” nationwide at the U.S. Open Championship June 14-17 in Southampton, New York, it said Tuesday. Fox will use 5G wireless technology to transmit 4K HDR images from two cameras at the seventh hole through the network’s production truck, making it available to Fox Sports viewers through DirecTV, it said. The 5G technology, deployed for the first time at broad scale earlier this year by Intel and partners at the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, could, in the future, deliver “disruptive abilities” to broadcasters and consumers, including real-time virtual reality views, Fox said. A network goal is to “aggressively explore evolving technologies as part of our live sports production,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports senior vice president-field and technical operations, “in preparation for what will become the industry standards.” Intel is providing its 5G mobile trial platform device to deliver the 5G to IP translation. AT&T will use millimeter-wave spectrum to deliver the 5G connection, and Ericsson is providing the 5G radios, baseband, simulated network core and 4K video encoder and decoder.