Time Warner Cable is opening a facility in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for six days immediately before the Feb. 2 Super Bowl to show off its products and cable networks from companies including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, 21st Century Fox and Disney, said the cable operator in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1gEOykI). It said more than 25,000 of the operator’s customers are expected to visit the facility Jan. 27-Feb. 1, and there will be social media, online and video-on-demand tie-ins.

SBA Communications plans to buy 2,007 towers in Brazil from Brazilian wireless carrier Oi for $645 million, SBA said Wednesday. SBA will own or otherwise control more than 5,000 towers in the country following the deal’s expected close in Q1 -- about 22 percent of its total tower holdings (http://bit.ly/IEsxpW). The company in July bought exclusive rights to 2,113 towers in Brazil from Oi for $303 million (CD July 16 p10). The Grupo Oi deal “is in line with management commentary regarding further expansion into Brazil,” Evercore Partners analyst Jonathan Schildkraut said in an investor report. After the deal, SBA will get 8-10 percent of its revenue from Brazil-based towers, Schildkraut said.

The engineering/infrastructure task force of the Fast Access for Students, Teachers and Economic Results Arkansas committee submitted its recommendations to Gov. Mike Beebe (D) on how to improve broadband access to schools, in a report Tuesday. Act 1280, signed into law in April, will require Arkansas public school districts to provide at least one digital learning course to their students beginning in the 2014-2015 school year (http://bit.ly/18ma5Jz). The task force recommended the state’s network have the capacity to “provide concurrent access” to world-class educational content for all students and staff and the ability to grow and adapt to meet future demands, said the report. For the 2014-2015 school year, the task force recommends making 100 kbps available at minimum for each student and staff member and at least 1 Mbps available by the 2017-2018 school year, it said. Management for statewide network support services should be centralized, including operations for billing, E-rate applications, network recommendations/implementation/construction, network monitoring and problem resolution while the individual school districts should manage local area networks that interconnect school buildings, it said. The Arkansas Research Education Optical Network should be extended to provide connectivity to K-12 institutions, said the report.

Iridium and Wyless joined the International M2M Council. Other sustaining members include Orbcomm, Deutsche Telekom and Digi International, IMC said in a news release. AT&T joined the London-based group earlier this year (CD Oct 16 p16). More companies are expected to join the organization in the coming weeks, the council said.

The Senate Commerce Committee confirmed that it plans a full committee hearing on the voluntary incentive spectrum auction, as expected (CD Dec 3 p8), on Tuesday, it said in a notice Wednesday. The hearing will take place at 2:30 p.m. in 253 Russell. The notice said the hearing will examine issues of auction implementation. Witnesses have not been announced.

"Digital enterprise, in my mind, is under some stress” due to privacy concerns, said Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at the Small Business Forum hosted by The Atlantic Wednesday. “The governance of the Internet today is run by ICANN and there’s a lot of pressure globally” for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers not to govern independently, but “to be run by the U.N.,” or other multilateral organizations, which Commerce doesn’t support, she said. The Internet should be “as fluid and flexible and free as it has been,” said Pritzker. Commerce is “sitting on a treasure trove of data,” she said. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produces 19 terabytes of information daily, but only 2 terabytes are made available to the private sector for weather information, she said. The department’s job is to determine “what do we do with that data and how do we make it available,” which Pritzker described as a “long-term process.”

China-based telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei won’t completely exit the U.S. market despite media reports that the company’s CEO said “it’s not worth it” to remain in the U.S. due to recent scrutiny from Congress, a Huawei spokesman told us. “We remain committed to our customers, employees, investments and operations and more than $1 billion in sales in the U.S., and we stand ready to deliver additional competition and innovative solutions as desired by customers and allowed by authorities.” Foreign Policy reported that Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei told reporters Nov. 25 that “we have decided to exit the U.S. market, and not stay in the middle” of U.S.-China relations. The House Intelligence Committee said after an investigation last year that the U.S. government and American companies shouldn’t do business with either Huawei or ZTE because of long-term security risks. The committee was not able to conclusively determine that either company was involved in any spying or cyberattacks and both companies denied they were engaged in any wrongdoing (CD Oct 10/12 p3). Those concerns later threatened Japanese telco SoftBank’s buy of 78 percent of Sprint and Sprint’s buyout of Clearwire, but the companies agreed to mitigate the use of Huawei equipment in their U.S. networks (CD April 1 p5).

Lawmakers and industry stakeholders applauded NTIA’s announcement it would convene multistakeholder discussions on facial recognition technology. But some privacy advocates said the decision further avoids addressing the heart of the privacy issue. The talks are another step in implementing the White House’s Privacy Bill of Rights (http://1.usa.gov/1hwy3KA), said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling in a blog post Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/18B9klC). “Facial recognition technology has the potential to improve services for consumers, support innovation by businesses, and affect identification and authentication online and offline. However, the technology poses distinct consumer privacy challenges.” Senate Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken, D-Minn. -- who has sent a letter to the NTIA asking the agency to conduct these talks (CD Nov 25 p10) and held a hearing on the issue -- called the announcement “great news for privacy.” He said “expansive facial recognition programs” from “major companies like Facebook and government agencies like the FBI” have shown that “while facial recognition can be useful, these programs don’t do enough to protect privacy -- and they are just the beginning of what is a growing technology.” Center for Digital Democracy Executive Director Jeff Chester disagreed, saying the announcement showed the NTIA was bowing to industry pressure. “Industry lobbyists pressed the NTIA to focus on creating a self-regulatory scheme for facial recognition, so marketers can expand without worry how they capture our physical features and combine it with other personal data,” he said. NTIA scheduled its first facial recognition meeting for Feb. 6, said the announcement.

Data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks will increase by 560 percent between now and 2017, said Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs Tuesday in a study. Metro networks’ data traffic will grow primarily due to demand for video and continued proliferation of data centers, Bell Labs said. Traffic from video services alone will grow 720 percent by 2017, while data center traffic will rise 440 percent, the study said. Video services are increasing their local delivery of content over metro networks, meaning that by 2017 about 75 percent of traffic originating on metro networks will completely stay on those networks rather than access content through a backbone network. About 57 of metro network traffic remains on the network now, Bell Labs said (http://bit.ly/18flqhF).

Nearly half of all calls received by 911 emergency centers in North Carolina from wireless phones in June didn’t include accurate location information, said the Find Me 911 Coalition in a news release Tuesday (http://yhoo.it/1bdJ67e). Statewide data released by the FCC and analyzed by the Find Me 911 Coalition showed 211,241 of the 447,918 wireless calls received by 911 emergency centers in June lacked accurate “Phase II” location information that displays the location of the caller, said the coalition. It said the problem has worsened over the past year, as the percentage of calls lacking such information has risen from 36 percent in June 2012 to 47 percent this June. Carriers have been locked in a fight with the coalition, which they say is funded by technology provider TruePosition and has been spreading bad information to the states (CD Nov 19 p1). AT&T, T-Mobile and the Carolinas Wireless Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.