About 80% of the 240 million phone calls received by 911 public safety answering points (PSAPs) come from wireless callers. The goal of regulators is that technology automatically identify the location of callers even if callers don’t know where they are or are unable to speak the information because of injury or constraint by an...… Continue Reading
Your Emergency Alert System (EAS) equipment may have stopped passing through tests received via the equipment’s Internet connection to the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) because one of the trust root certificates used to validate digital signatures associated with alerts expired a little over a week ago. If your EAS equipment is rejecting...… Continue Reading
The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has invited comments on a petition filed jointly by America’s Public Television Stations (“APTS”) and the National Association of Broadcasters (“NAB”), requesting a relaxation of restrictions on where digital television stations may locate Distributed Transmission System (“DTS”) antennas. Digital television technology allows a station to broadcast from multiple transmitters on...… Continue Reading
The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has announced that on April 28, 2020, it will offer for sale at auction 130 FM channels that are currently vacant. These are channels formerly occupied by stations that lost or cancelled their licenses, channels sold to bidders who failed to pay their bids, channels that were offered but drew...… Continue Reading
The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has adopted new rules requiring manufacturers, importers, vendors, installers and managers of multi-line telephone systems (“MLTS”) to configure those systems to provide automated location information (called “dispatchable location”) and a location-specific callback number when a caller makes an emergency call to 911, at least to the extent feasible using technology...… Continue Reading
Yes, REC Networks (“RECNET”) is on a roll with the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) when it comes to the FM radio broadcast band. Describing itself as a “leading advocate for a citizen’s access to spectrum with a heavy focus on the LPFM and full-service non-commercial radio,” RECNET has succeeded in getting the FCC to propose...… Continue Reading
On June 20, 2019, I blogged about the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) plan to vote on July 10 to relax the rules governing the Educational Broadband Service (“EBS”), including eliminating the requirement to devote part of the air time to educational purposes and opening up license eligibility to commercial entities. Sure enough, the FCC voted,...… Continue Reading
The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has released a tentative Report and Order, scheduled for a vote on July 10, which, if adopted, will lift many restrictions from the Educational Broadband Service (EBS), including allowing educational institutions to sell their licenses to commercial entities and eliminating the requirement that 5% of system capacity be reserved for...… Continue Reading
The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or the “Commission”) has opened a new frontier in the amount of spectrum available for unlicensed and experimental operations, adopting rules covering frequencies between 95 GHz and 3 THz (3,000 GHz). Once upon a time, the world’s techies thought that radio waves at extremely high frequencies (i.e., with very short...… Continue Reading