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The LA Times reports on the Senate Commerce Committee's hearing on the transition to digital television. Senators claimed that the public was dangerously uninformed on the issue, and that without a better education effort, the Senate could have “a disaster on our hands.” Currently the FCC has only $5 million allocated for educating the public, and thus far the television industry and consumer electronics companies have yet to advertise new products for the digital transition.
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Reversing an earlier decision, Verizon agreed to bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction under the conditions set by Chairman Martin's proposal. However, CNet wonders whether this concession will have any impact on consumers:
Martin's proposal, which few people have actually seen yet, only would require the “any device rule” to apply to a small sliver of the 700MHz spectrum. So if Verizon won these licenses, the requirement would be only for areas where those licenses are used. The rest of the Verizon Wireless network would be just as closed off as it always has been. What would this mean for consumers? Well, if you're a Verizon customer, you could theoretically bring your own phone to the network, but it would only work in regions where Verizon has won and built out its network using the 700MHz licenses.
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AT&T's Lightspeed IPTV video service is a cable service and therefore subject to local franchising laws, a Connecticut US District Court ruled. This reversed the decision of the Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control, which had ruled that because AT&T's service delivered channels only when subscribers' set-top boxes requested them, not all at once, it was an information service. The judgement was a victory for the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, which said the IPTV service should be treated like a cable service, and a loss for AT&T, which argued that it should not.
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As part of it's plan to build a national WiMAX network, Sprint will team up with Google to offer a suite of email, search, and chat services for its wireless broadband customers. Dave Girouard, a Google VP announced that “We look forward to working with Sprint to bring to market a rich and compelling broadband experience for WiMAX customers.” However, this deal will presumably prevent other companies to offer competing services over the same network.