The FCC needs to work with the states to ensure that 911 accountability across jurisdictions “is not diluted,” said FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson in a speech at a NARUC meeting Wednesday, according to a prepared version of the speech the FCC posted Thursday. The FCC and states’ “combined jurisdiction is clear, and we need to adjust our governance to make that clear as well,” he said. The FCC plans to explore 911 accountability issues in the coming months, including ways to ensure all participants are “fully accountable,” including for the carriers, Simpson said. “The buck stops with the carrier,” he said. “The transition to IP does not -- and will not -- absolve providers’ responsibilities for ensuring that 911 functions as our citizens expect it to function.” Simpson said its investigation of a multi-state 911 outage April 9-10 that affected IP-based facilities supporting 911 calls revealed that there’s “a need for close coordination between critical service providers in the end-to-end 911 chain.” Any lack of a shared operational picture, common situational awareness, or a clearly designated “tier one"-level operations center empowered to coordinate rapid localization of problems discovered by other providers can put public safety at risk, Simpson said (http://fcc.us/1yyf20b).

The U.S. could help restart recently stalled growth in trade of technology goods through the completion of Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, said TechAmerica in a report (http://bit.ly/1oYIhoV). “These new agreements could expand U.S. free trade markets to 53 countries, creating significant opportunities for U.S. technology companies,” TechAmerica said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1ww0AD1). Tech goods exports totaled $205 billion in 2013 and imports accounted for $351 billion, the report said. Many of the tech imports are part of a global supply chain, where U.S. multinational companies create and design the products in the U.S. while producing the final product overseas, the report said. Often such imports represent “an intra-company transfer” as U.S. firms bring their products into the U.S. for sale from overseas production facilities, the study found. While both exports and imports have recovered since the recession, “the past two years have seen a slowdown in the growth rate as key overseas markets have experienced economic malaise and the economic recovery in the United States has been slow,” said TechAmerica. NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada were by far the largest destination for U.S. tech exports, accounting for $39 billion and $28 billion worth, respectively, said the group.

Intellectual property company Inventergy filed a patent complaint Tuesday against telecom software and product manufacturer Genband, Inventergy said in a news release (http://on.mktw.net/1mejM2r). Inventergy is alleging Genband infringed on five of its VoIP and information management services patents. Inventergy owns over 750 telecom-related patents. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Plano, Texas. Genband did not comment.

Friday’s rural broadband order (CD July 14 p11) was “another important step in modernizing the nation’s phone network,” said Benton Foundation Policy Director Amina Fazlullah in a statement (http://bit.ly/1nnYhwf). “As the public switched telephone network makes a complex transition to Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled networks, regulators must protect the nation’s core values to ensure the newest technologies benefit all Americans,” she said Friday. “Universal service, consumer protection, competition, and access to emergency services must be part of communications networks whether they be copper, fiber, or wireless. The FCC’s experiments to bring broadband to rural areas are needed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and its Our Fair Deal coalition (http://bit.ly/1ok0x97) partners released two letters to Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators highlighting how the TPP could strengthen the position of copyright holders, said Jeremy Malcolm, senior global policy analyst, and Maira Sutton, global policy analyst, in an EFF blog post (http://bit.ly/1qkJWnZ) Wednesday. The letters address TPP’s “copyright term extension proposals” (http://bit.ly/1rTXmLR) and its “intermediary liability proposals” (http://bit.ly/1qKR4MK), they said. On liability proposals, “countries around the Pacific rim are being pressured to agree to proposed text for the TPP that would require them to adopt a facsimile” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, said the blog post. “Industry lobbyists are pushing for an even stricter regime, dubbed ‘notice and staydown,’ that would make it harder than ever before for users and innovators to safely publish creative, transformational content online,” it said. Concerning copyright term extensions, the TPP would extend the “rash 20 year extension of the term of copyright protection” to “all other TPP negotiating countries,” it said. “This would be a senseless assault on the public domain and on those libraries, authors, educators, users and others who depend upon it,” it said.

Demand for Wi-Fi routers and Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices will continue to grow at a double digit percentage clip, reaching 3 billion systems shipped in 2018, said a Tuesday news release from consultant Strategy Analytics (http://bit.ly/1r6ATZ6). “External CMOS PAs have started to compete with GaAs-based PAs in WiFi just as in cellular, but GaAs will maintain its position for the foreseeable future, especially in higher-performance applications such as 802.11ac WiFi infrastructure,” said Eric Higham, director of the Strategy Analytics Advanced Semiconductor Applications service.

Global revenue from wholesale telecom services will reach $142 billion annually by 2019 due to accelerating traffic and “intensified retail competition,” research firm Ovum said Monday in a report. The Asia-Pacific region will have the “steepest” growth in wholesale revenue because of retail competition and “escalating international traffic,” it said, noting China, Malaysia and South Korea as major contributors to that growth. Asia-Pacific’s share of wholesale revenue will grow to 26 percent by 2019, up from 17 percent in 2012, Ovum said. Wholesale revenues will still be concentrated among the largest telcos in 2019, with most of the top 20 wholesale telcos that year still based in North America and Europe, Ovum said. “New types of service provider are emerging, but their need for connectivity will stimulate greater demand for traditional wholesale services, while those telcos that do innovate at a retail service level will create demand from those that don’t,” said David James, Ovum’s practice leader-wholesale research, in a news release (http://bit.ly/1zkChfF).

CEA expressed its opposition to Philip Johnson as the White House’s likely nominee to head the Patent and Trademark Office. “We are concerned, and frankly puzzled” by Johnson’s “potential nomination” to PTO chief, said Michael Petricone, CEA senior vice president-government and legal affairs, in a statement Wednesday. Johnson, chief intellectual property counsel for Johnson & Johnson, “took a leading role in stalling patent reform efforts earlier this year in the U.S. Senate, and worked diligently to weaken or kill a variety of White House initiatives to stop patent trolls,” Petricone said. “It seems absurd that a strong opponent of attempts to reduce frivolous litigation should be asked to implement the Obama Administration’s initiatives to fix our broken patent system.” The White House needs to go “back to the drawing board and find a qualified candidate who shares the President’s stated goal of improving our patent system by reducing litigation abuse,” Petricone said.

AT&T believes the Internet interconnection “ecosystem developed without any regulation to handle all of the traffic exchanged on the global Internet,” executives including Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory Bob Quinn told FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and aides during a Thursday meeting. There are “many options available to edge providers to reach consumers and businesses,” and regulatory “intervention” has “potential ramifications,” said the telco. A handout from the meeting, posted with an ex parte filing Tuesday in docket 10-90 (http://bit.ly/1qgTW3q), discussed different types of Internet interconnection including peering. The commission has been gathering details on peering deals (CD June 16 p1). Traffic carriage “is Not Without Cost,” and there are “Cost Implications of Carrying Additional Traffic,” said AT&T’s handout. “The Internet interconnection ecosystem is competitive."

Some trade groups coalesced in opposition to Philip Johnson, the presumptive nominee to head the Patent and Trademark Office, in statements Monday. Computer and Communications Industry Association President Ed Black called Johnson, chief intellectual property counsel for pharmaceutical and medical device company Johnson & Johnson, “a candidate who is not clearly committed to advancing the administration’s long held position that the patent system needs reform.” In the recent push -- now on hiatus -- to get patent legislation through Congress, technology and pharmaceutical groups often clashed (CD May 22 p11). “Such a move could undermine the public’s perception of the Administration’s commitment to addressing the anti-innovation aspects of our patent system, especially as it relates to the tech industry,” Black said. The Main Street Patent Coalition (MSPC) -- which includes trade groups from the retail, advertising and financial industries -- also expressed concern (http://bit.ly/TzZ4mu), saying Johnson isn’t committed to passing legislation to curb “patent trolls” -- entities that enforce at-times broad patents and often don’t produce any products. “American business owners remain vulnerable to patent troll lawsuits, and now one of the most prominent opponents of reform has been appointed to be the umpire, calling balls and strikes for [PTO],” said Michael Meehan, MSPC manager. “Mr. Johnson spent years trying to keep patent trolls in business by blocking legislative efforts so we cannot expect him to make fair calls.” Some patent lawyers have supported Johnson’s potential nomination to the post (CD July 1 p8). PTO didn’t comment.