InterCel Inc. wants to learn if cellular customers who are familiar with rate plans will behave differently when let loose on a 1900 MHz system for a flat $50 a month."We'll be able to analyze usage in an unlimited threshold," said Ed Horner, chief...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission plans to seek legislation to privatize spectrum auctions, a move that would shift debt collection to a third party with banking expertise.While the FCC would continue to be responsible for crafting and enforcing auction rules as well as administering bidding...
WASHINGTON-If the wireless telecom industry has learned one thing in recent years, it is that rules for paging, cellular, specialized mobile radio, personal communications services, mobile satellite, microwave, wireless local loop and private wireless services are not made in a vacuum.Wireless regulations and legislation-even...
The broadband personal communications services auctions held during the past two years have spawned a plethora of novel policy and fiscal issues for policymakers.The reason: $20 billion. Money changes everything, even in ways not altogether obvious. Federal regulators will insist licensing is still bound by...
WASHINGTON-The Clinton administration's free Internet plan would discriminate against wireless carriers by forcing them to pay extra into the universal service fund without the likelihood of gaining access to monies to connect schools and libraries, say wireless industry executives.While policymakers say they want to...
WASHINGTON-The remaining private sector board members of the congressionally mandated Telecommunications Development Fund have been named, capping an eight-month controversy that had the White House trying to mediate a fight between the Congressional Black Caucus and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt over the...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission shifted into damage control last week after two officials contradicted each other over whether candidates for the Telecommunications Development Fund board were vetted by the White House.Catherine Sandoval, director of the FCC Office of Communications Business Opportunities, said nominees for...
As an embattled small business curmudgeon and wireless industry activist, I find it necessary to respond to Federal Communications Commission spokesperson Michele Farquhar's recent letter that appeared in the July 29 issue of RCR.Ms. Farquhar excels in her newly appointed role as FCC chief...
Several state tax offices and wireless carriers responded to the tax predicament faced by Western Wireless Corp. in Oregon.The Oregon Department of Revenue sent Western a proposed assessment that included in the valuation the $34 million Western paid for the Portland personal communications service...
On the surface, neither the odds-on re-election of President Clinton nor a dramatic upset victory by GOP rival Bob Dole in the presidential race should impact telecommunications policy.The blueprint for a deregulated, competitive marketplace was etched in sacred stone with Clinton's signing of the...
WASHINGTON-Only weeks after luring Alex Mandl away from AT&T Corp. for a reported $20 million in a much celebrated coup, Associated Communications L.L.C. now finds itself mired in controversy over the suddenly popular 18 GHz spectrum for local broadband wireless multimedia services that Mandl...
WASHINGTON-Democrats will meet this week in Chicago to launch President Clinton's re-election campaign and try to take away the bounce that the Republican national conventional gave to the Dole-Kemp ticket earlier this month. Both major political parties are playing to middle-class voters with proposals...
WASHINGTON-President Clinton, continuing to pitch low-risk, low-cost initiatives linked to telecommunications, last week called on Attorney General Janet Reno, the Federal Communications Commission and the private sector to create a community policing number for non-emergency calls to relieve over-congested 911 systems.The directive, made in...
Airadigm Communications Inc. is one of the few small business ventures that endured the delays, lawsuits, rule changes and exorbitant bidding prices of the C-block Federal Communications Commission auction for personal communications services and emerged a winner, unscathed and primed to fulfill the entrepreneurial...
WASHINGTON-Despite Congressional passage of a six-year balanced budget plan last week that assumes $19.2 billion from auctions, telecom policymakers are growing concerned that fiscal and political forces are increasingly driving spectrum auction policy on Capitol Hill and that the Federal Communications Commission has become...
WASHINGTON-Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor, touting economic accomplishments of the Clinton administration and laying out his own agenda, said America must continue to invest in high technology and press for free trade while protecting U.S. markets closed overseas."We are and will be the pre-eminent economic...
WASHINGTON-The House GOP strategy to reach out to voters this election year by repealing a 4.3 cents gasoline tax hike and underwriting forgone federal revenue by auctioning 35 megahertz of unspecified spectrum highlights tensions that have come to exist between budgeters and lawmakers with...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission's renewed effort to foster diversity in wireless telecommunications could collide with election-year politics as Republicans that control Congress and Democrats that occupy the White House struggle with the politically explosive affirmative action issue.The FCC, acting on a mandated provision in...
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a "videot." There is no such thing as too much television. My personality-when split into its definitive sectors-reflects the social mores of Roseanne, Murphy Brown and Martha Stewart.There are others out there like me*...*who get nervous when the power...
WASHINGTON-GOP congressional leaders and the Clinton administration agreed on another short-term funding bill late last week to avert a third shutdown and an unprecedented government default, a looming prospect that could make credit more expensive for firms building capital-intensive digital pocket telephone systems.Meanwhile, Republicans...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission, one of the government agencies GOP lawmakers beat up on much of 1995, could be brought to its knees this year if stalled budget talks collapse completely and Republican congressional leaders shift to a strategy of fully funding programs they...
From the bidders' view of the post-C-block auction landscape, not only the Goliaths but also the Davids seem likely to gain ready access to financing to construct personal communications services systems.The wireless spectrum auction was designed initially to give women- and minority-owned businesses a...
WASHINGTON-Expanded spectrum auction authority and other telecommunications legislation are about to get caught up in a high-stakes budget battle between the Clinton administration and the GOP-led Congress that might not get settled until Christmas.The House and Senate late last month passed sweeping bills to...
WASHINGTON-The level of frustration over entrepreneur block auction litigation is running so high at the Federal Communications Commission that Chairman Reed Hundt is willing to lose in court if it means getting bidding for 493 personal communications services licenses back on track before year's...
