NCTA President Michael Powell, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President James Cicconi and Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen met with a senior aide to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Thursday to discuss the pending judicial review of the net neutrality order, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1gUR1dT). They said that “regardless of how the case comes out, the principles articulated by the Commission enjoy widespread support and broadband customers will continue to enjoy unfettered access to Internet content and applications."

Japan’s SoftBank plans to make an offer of more than $19 billion for T-Mobile US, to merge it with Sprint, which the company already owns, Japanese news service Nikkei reported Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1cm8kAO). The deal is likely as early as the spring, the report said.

There are nearly 262 million Internet connections over 200 kbps in the U.S., the FCC said Tuesday in its report on Internet access services (http://fcc.us/1gUSFfx). The report is based on Form 477 data submitted by ISPs, and includes data collected through 2012. At year-end 2012, there were almost 65 million fixed and 64 million mobile connections with speeds of at least 3 Mbps down/768 kbps up, the report said. That’s more than a 100 percent increase for mobile connections over the past year, it said. “Growth is particularly high in mobile Internet subscriptions,” the FCC said.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau dealt with various requests for more time beyond a Nov. 20 deadline for licensees along the Mexican border seeking 800 MHz rebanding reimbursement from Sprint to file cost estimates with the company. The order released Tuesday was part of the ongoing 800 MHz rebanding process. FCC rules say “extensions of time shall not be routinely granted,” the bureau said (http://fcc.us/JoldPC): “The import of that rule is especially relevant to 800 MHz rebanding where delay in rebanding by one licensee can cause a ‘domino effect’ delay in the rebanding efforts of other licensees that have met the Commission’s 800 MHz band reconfiguration deadlines, with a consequent delay of the overall program.” The bureau approved some extensions for licensees that “have shown that grant of the request will not unreasonably delay rebanding” while holding other requests in abeyance. Among those getting an extension were Tucson Electric Power Co. and the Glendale Police Department in Arizona and San Diego Gas and Electric Co. Some large licensees need to justify an extension, including Maricopa County, Ariz., Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego County, Calif., the bureau said. All licensees that won approval have promised to complete rebanding cost estimates by March 10.

Time Warner Cable and Viacom reached a multiyear renewal of their retransmission consent agreement. The agreement allows TWC and Bright House Networks “to continue delivery of the entire portfolio of Viacom networks to their subscribers and provides an enriched multiplatform experience to a vast library of popular on-demand content,” Time Warner Cable and Viacom said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1jFxb8i). The agreement enables continued carriage of Viacom’s channels and content across linear TV in both SD and HD, video on-demand, authenticated websites and apps, it said. As part of an expansion of the arrangement, TWC will make the entertainment network Epix available to its subscribers under the terms of the agreement, it said. Time Warner Cable sometimes negotiates carriage deals on behalf of Bright House.

Members of the GPS community again said the FCC shouldn’t permit the operations proposed in LightSquared’s request to use its spectrum for a terrestrial network until technical interference concerns have been resolved. The concerns should be resolved in “transparent, public notice and comment rulemaking proceedings,” like the process involving Dish Network’s AWS-4 spectrum, the GPS Innovation Alliance said in an ex parte filing in docket 11-109 (http://bit.ly/1cPXT5e). The filing recounted a meeting last week with members of the Wireless Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis, it said.

The bill text of the Department of Commerce and the Workforce Consolidation Act was posted online this week. This Senate legislation proposes to merge the Commerce Department and Labor Department; unsuccessful variations have been introduced in the past. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., introduced S-1836 Dec. 17, and it was referred to the Homeland Security Committee. “The goal of this legislation is twofold: to achieve cost savings by combining duplicative functions, and to improve the quality of our country’s economic policies by ensuring a coordinated approach,” Burr said in a document providing background information on the bill. It would save billions of dollars, he said, citing the potential consolidation of 35 offices into 12 and the killing or reducing of funds for seven programs or initiatives. The new cabinet agency the bill proposes to create would be called the Department of Commerce and the Workforce. In an envisioned organizational chart of the department, NTIA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would report directly to the department’s secretary and deputy secretary. It would put the Small Business Administration within the Commerce Department and move the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Department of the Interior, a news release said (http://1.usa.gov/1c522RI). The bill has two co-sponsors, Dan Coats, R-Ind., and James Inhofe, R-Okla.

There’s optimism multichannel video programming distributors will embark on a third stage of reducing power consumption by set-top boxes after an expanded voluntary agreement (VA) among MVPDs that now includes energy efficiency advocates ends Dec. 31, 2017, said two advocates. They said in interviews that they have some hope that a Tier 3 for further reductions in set-top energy, following the Tier 2 in the new voluntary agreement disclosed Monday (CD Dec 24 p1), could come to fruition, though they said further VA expansion would be a long way off. Jennifer Thorne Amann, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy buildings program director, is “guardedly optimistic” for a Tier 3, she said. “We've laid the basis for a relationship where we hopefully can get there,” and now she wants to see how the industry does with the new commitments, she said. “We'll be able to keep working with them to make continued progress,” because advocates are joining the steering committee overseeing the energy savings, said Amann. “It looked like a good opportunity for us certainly to capture a larger amount of savings” for set-tops than would have occurred absent the pact and waiting for the Department of Energy’s rulemaking process, she said. DOE said Monday it’s ending that process. The Environmental Protection Agency, which has targeted version 4 Energy Star specifications for set-top boxes, had no comment Tuesday on the amended VA. “Industry was very willing to work with us to make sure we had a seat at the table” and to make continued improvements, said Amann. Any Tier 3 could start Jan. 1, 2018, said Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz. Information on set-top boxes’ energy use had been in the public domain, and with the deal “now, through other forums, the information will be more readily available,” said Vice President Evan Groat of Arris, which is part of the VA. “If consumers are interested, it’s something they can look at.” At Cisco in recent years, it has “become clear that we can do better when it comes to reducing set-top-box energy consumption,” wrote Vice President Joe Chow, who runs the company’s Connected Devices unit, on the blog of the participating VA company Monday (http://bit.ly/19e9IV9). He said the amended VA is a win for saving consumers money, protecting the environment and providing “regulatory certainty for manufacturers and providers alike.”

Special access purchasers rely heavily on five- and seven-year special access plans, and AT&T’s attempt to eliminate them will lead to increased rates, Sprint and XO told officials from the FCC Wireline Bureau and Office of General Counsel Thursday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1eCFvUf). The companies repeated the points they made in their petitions to suspend and investigate AT&Ts tariff filing, they said. The FCC Wireline Bureau suspended AT&T’s latest tariff revision Dec. 9 and has five months to investigate and determine whether it’s reasonable (CD Dec 10 p1).

The FCC should issue a declaratory ruling that “equivalent functionality” for end office switching does not require a CLEC or its VoIP partner to provide the loop facility to the called party under the VoIP symmetry rule, XO said in an ex parte filing Monday (http://bit.ly/1eCBTl6). “AT&T’s interpretation of access charges applicable to VoIP-PSTN traffic turns the VoIP symmetry rule on its head, increasing carrier disputes where AT&T has withheld payment of end office access charges that do not meet AT&T’s criteria,” XO said. XO agrees with other CLEC commenters that the core function of an end office local switch “cannot and should not rationally be defined by the lines to which it connects, but by the functions it actually performs on the network,” it said, quoting a letter by Level 3 and Bandwidth.com.