The Fashion One TV network began the world’s first global Ultra HD channel, Fashion One 4K, using a SES satellite to deliver the free-to-air channel to North America, South America and Europe, SES said in a Wednesday announcement. Fashion One 4K has a “technical reach” of 100 million homes in North America via SES’s Ultra HD platform on the SES-3 satellite at 103 degrees West and 23 million households in South America on the NSS-806 satellite at 47.5 degrees West, SES said. In Europe, the channel, broadcast under the brand Fashion 4K, reaches more than 116 million households via SES’ prime orbital position at 19.2 degrees East, SES said. Since last year, Fashion One has been upgrading its production format to Ultra HD and now owns “an extensive library” of Ultra HD content with all the content rights, SES said.

Gilat Satellite Networks' SkyEdge II-c platform will replace an existing very-small-aperture terminal system used now in GeoTelecommunications' satellite broadband service in Russia, Gilat said in a Monday news release. GeoTelecom chose Gilat's SkyEdge after evaluating all the major VSAT competitors, Gilat said.

Dish has been underpaying what it owes in retransmission license fees, a "deliberate and systemic" practice within the direct broadcast satellite company, Bayou City Broadcasting said in a suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Denver. Bayou claims Dish paid it far less than it should have in subscriber retransmission fees that were owed in late December through late February. Dish calculated the number of subscribers authorized to receive Bayou City's WEVV-TV Evansville, Indiana, using numbers from when WEVV-TV was temporarily blacked out in a retrans consent fight, and it also unilaterally prorated the payments to Bayou City, the broadcaster said. A 2012 decision by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a similar case points to this being regular Dish practice, Bayou City said. The suit doesn't specify dollar damages but says the amount, not counting interest and costs, exceeds $75,000. Dish didn't comment.

ViaSat seeks authority to operate as many as 50,000 of its AT2200 mobile earth terminals to communicate in the L-band with LightSquared's SkyTerra-1 satellite. The AT2200 Aviation Earth Terminal is to be mounted on helicopters or light aircraft, and provide such services as real-time aircraft location updates and providing in-cabin communications and weather data, ViaSat said in an FCC International Bureau filing posted Thursday.

Despite competing demands for spectrum for everything from wireless communications to weather data, NTIA is "confident we can continue to find the right balance to ensure the United States maintains its commercial wireless leadership, while enabling federal agencies to do important work on behalf of the American people," it said in a blog post Friday. Written by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere Kathryn Sullivan and NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling, the post said that since Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, NOAA is "better positioned to deal with these types of disasters" due to better satellite technology and more investments in supercomputing, all allowing for improved forecasting. At the same time, with the Obama administration pushing both innovation in the wireless industry and maintaining that federal agencies must have the spectrum needed to perform their jobs, NTIA is working with those agencies and the industry "to identify, clear and relocate federal users from bands, where possible, for use by the commercial sector and by promoting spectrum sharing between nonfederal and federal users where that solution is the best option," Strickling and Sullivan said.

One of two Space Systems/Loral-built Ka-band satellites for Australia's Nbn broadband network was delivered to the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, where it will be launched by Arianespace, SSL said in a Thursday news release. SSL is building a second satellite for the Nbn network, it said.

SpaceX worries about air-ground (AG) mobile broadband service interference with its planned fixed satellite service system operating in overlapping spectrum are overblown, Gogo said in an FCC filing posted Thursday in docket 13-114. While SpaceX didn't provide details of its interference calculations, Gogo's own math claims to calculate a far smaller rise over thermal -- the ratio between the total interference and thermal noise. The Gogo filing was in response to SpaceX concerns in a filing last month about establishment of such a broadband service in the 14-14.5 GHz band as Qualcomm has proposed, with SpaceX's planned constellation also planning to use that same spectrum. Adopting a rise over thermal cap such as SpaceX is proposing "would impose an unnecessary and disproportionate level of complexity or loss of performance for the AG system" when compared with SpaceX's planned nongeostationary orbit system, Gogo said. Even if broadband service licensees were to account for as much rise over noise to a nongeostationary satellite orbit system as SpaceX claims, "the impact on noise rise would be minimal," Gogo said.

LightSquared and Roberson finalized how they will gauge the scope and degree of L-band LTE network interference to GPS, if at all, they said. In a 42-page GPS sensitivity measurement plan to be filed in FCC docket 12-340, the two spell out the key performance indicators to be looked at, as well as signal-to-noise ratios and other GPS receiver data. "Emphasis is on real world expected LTE signal levels," with GPS devices being tested by Roberson for accuracy and sensitivity in the presence of LTE downlink and uplink signals, LightSquared said. The key performance indicators include 2D and 3D position errors, loss of real time kinematics and timing errors. The testing is underway now. In a statement Tuesday, the company said it expects to have results this fall. Being tested are nearly four dozen different GPS devices, ranging from high precision and aviation -- both certified and non-certified -- units to general location and navigation models and some smartphones and tablets. The LTE signals to be used in the key performance indicators testing will be 1526-1536 MHz, 1670-1680 and -- schedule permitting -- 1545-1555 downlinks, and 1627.5-1637.5 and 1646.7-1656.7 uplinks, LightSquared said. It and a variety of GPS makers have been at loggerheads over interference worries stemming from the satellite company's satellite LTE plans (see 1507020056). The GPS Innovation Alliance has criticized the test as redundant to similar efforts in the planning stages at the Department of Transportation, as well as containing questionable methodology (see 1508180019). "After years of indecision and inaction, it is time to move forward," LightSquared said in its statement.

The FCC Connect America Fund Phase II build-out should look at an alternative set of eligibility requirements that allow for different technology platforms, minimize the contribution asked of end users and still provide service capable of such broadband applications as video streaming, ViaSat said in a filing posted Monday in docket 10-90. Those proposed requirements include speeds of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, since speed is a far more important factor to quality of service than such issues as latency and jitter, ViaSat said. It also recommended a voice service with a mean opinion score of four, MOS being a better measure than latency of perceived quality, ViaSat said. And those requirements also should add service plans with usage allowances to the FCC's urban rate survey results, packet loss of no more than 0.01 percent and average one-way jitter of at most 30 milliseconds for interactive, real-time applications, ViaSat said. It responded to back-and-forth filings by Adtran and Hughes Network Systems about CAF standards (see 1507280024). While agreeing with Hughes that standards shouldn't be so firm as to preclude any type of technology out of hand, ViaSat agreed with Adtran that Hughes' proposed satellite-specific alternative standards could mean a "second class" broadband. The 100 milliseconds latency requirement in CAF Phase I "effectively 'boxed out' ... satellite broadband providers that use geostationary spacecraft," ViaSat said. Its own set of proposed alternate criteria, meanwhile, would meet CAF objectives better than a 100 millisecond latency requirement because they would ensure high-quality broadband and voice services while also allowing competition among an array of technologies and providers, ViaSat said. If the FCC keeps the 100 millisecond yardstick, it should make it clear that applies only to latency-sensitive traffic, the company said. "Low latency has little bearing on the end-user experience with respect to video streaming, which now accounts for most peak downstream traffic." ViaSat said having one latency benchmark even for nonlatency-sensitive traffic would make network operators "forgo the advantages of higher speeds offered by geostationary satellite technologies with no offsetting benefits in terms of user experience."

A surety -- increasing by fixed amounts every year the penal sum of a bond -- would meet FCC goals of an "escalating" bond requirement for satellite operators so that a potential payment increases over time, Robert Duke of the Surety & Fidelity Association of America told International Bureau staff in a meeting detailed in an FCC filing posted Friday in docket 12-267. The agency last year initiated a rulemaking to modify Part 25 rules for earth station and satellite licenses, including revising bond requirements to try to deter spectrum warehousing (see 1411060049).