SpaceX successfully launched the Thaicom 6 satellite into the 22.5 degrees inclination orbital position. The satellite was launched Monday on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Fla., SpaceX said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1dcX8IR). The mission is Falcon 9’s second flight to a geosynchronous transfer orbit “and begins a regular cadence of launches planned for SpaceX in 2014,” it said.

Any Communications Act update should kill the regime of silos pegged to service classifications, Free State Foundation President Randolph May said in a Washington Times op-ed. He outlined several principles for an update, citing the December announcement by House Commerce Committee Republican leaders to take on the task this year and the next. “These legacy service classifications are grounded in outdated techno-functional constructs, and they often favor one marketplace competitor over another without good reason,” May said (http://bit.ly/1cj8Zly). The FCC should also have to accept a competition-based standard to determine whether a market failure exists before regulating. Its orders should be more narrow than broad, he advocated. The review should be deliberative but “given the competitive changes that already have occurred in the communications marketplace -- and that continue to occur at a rapid pace -- deliberative should not be allowed to turn into never-ending,” May said.

Morgan Murphy Media agreed to renew its retransmission consent agreement with Time Warner Cable for KLXY-Spokane, Morgan Murphy Media said in a news release Friday. Morgan Murphy Media also operates WISC-TV Madison and WKBT LaCrosse in Wisconsin, and KAPP Yakima-Kennewick in Washington.

The FCC’s 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee will meet Jan. 27, the FCC said Monday in the Federal Register. The committee is collaborating with NTIA’s Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee Radio Conference Subcommittee on consensus opinions on multiple WRC agenda items, which it will eventually present to the State Department (CD Dec 23 p9). The WRC Advisory Committee’s Jan. 27 meeting will include a presentation of the committee working groups’ preliminary views and draft proposals, the FCC said. The meeting is set to begin at 11 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room. The meeting will also be webcast on the FCC’s website (http://1.usa.gov/1fW5DG2).

The FCC Public Safety Bureau extended by an additional six months, until June 30, the “true-up” date for calculating whether Sprint owes the government money as part of the 800 MHz transition. When the FCC approved the 800 MHz rebanding in 2004 it required Nextel, before its merger with Sprint, to pay the total value of the 10 MHz national spectrum license it got as part of deal. At the time, the FCC set the price of the license at $4.8 billion. Subtracting the value of the spectrum Nextel agreed to give up, $2 billion, left $2.8 billion Nextel had to cover by paying for the rebanding. The FCC has been extending the true-up deadline in six-month increments since 2008. While the Broadband Auxiliary Service relocation “is now complete and substantial progress has been made in 800 MHz rebanding, a significant number of 800 MHz licensees have yet to complete the process, and rebanding in the US-Mexico border region has only recently begun,” the bureau said (http://bit.ly/1dPhzaV). While Sprint has contended that enough has been paid out that the government can now conclude no money will be owed, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA) has advised that taking this step would be “premature,” the bureau said. “We conclude that conducting a true-up of Sprint’s rebanding expenditures as of December 31, 2013 would be premature. Accordingly, we provisionally extend the true-up date, as recommended by the TA, until June 30, 2014, and direct the TA to file a report by May 15, 2014, with its recommendation on whether the true-up should be conducted as of June 30, 2014, or be further postponed."

Several associations for deaf and hard of hearing people supported a request by cvideo relay service providers for a one-year waiver of the daily measurement of speed of answer (SoA) requirement, they told the FCC in a letter Saturday (http://bit.ly/1cij9iY). The rule and associated penalties are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The groups “appreciate the stronger SoA requirements but are concerned that significant rate reductions were imposed in the same order without taking in account the costs for the new SoA requirements,” they said. SoA measurements should be calculated daily, but meeting this requirement in the next year “may not be feasible” in some instances, and could cause providers to incur “significant costs through overstaffing” to meet the requirements, they said. The groups, including Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the National Association of the Deaf, recommended implementation of the new 30-second SoA requirement without penalty as a “testing phase” for one year.

The White House has been “engaged” with the House Intelligence Committee as its members put together a proposal on surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a White House spokeswoman told us. The status of the rumored bill has been contested within the committee, which has not cleared any legislation or settled on a final bill (CD Dec 30 p4). Privacy advocates have criticized initial indications of what the bill may look like, fearing it will codify phone metadata surveillance practices and resemble the Senate Intelligence Committee’s FISA bill. “The Administration has and will remain engaged with Members and staff of the Committee regarding various proposals for reforming signals intelligence collection authorities, policies, and operations,” the White House spokeswoman said.

The Department of Defense highlights the challenge faced by the government of getting enough spectrum available for all of the military’s unmanned systems, including drones and unmanned ground systems. The “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap” cites broader demands by spectrum-dependent systems (SDS) used by the military (http://1.usa.gov/1kWnzEc). “U.S. military operations are now occurring in many parts of the world where adequate spectrum is not available for [command and control], sensor, and data link systems,” DOD said. “There is a significant increase in the number of SDS the United States, our partners, and our coalition forces deploy to address current, and may want to deploy to address expected future, mission areas. In addition, these SDS collect more information, and missions often require greater bandwidths to send their information directly to warfighters.” Areas where the military has to operate are becoming more spectrally “noisy” in general “because of increasingly cluttered and hostile spectrum environments.” Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as promoted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can help, but isn’t a cure-all, DOD said. “DSA offers the ability to change frequency band use based on the actual use or nonuse of certain bands by other adjacent SDS,” the report said. “Developmental challenges include susceptibility to countermeasures, costs of integrating with existing systems, developing standards (including regulatory aspects), and cosite Interference.”

The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology granted a waiver Monday to Autoliv ASP and Caterpillar that temporarily exempts the companies from the FCC’s Section 15.515(c) emissions rules. The waiver allows Autoliv to continue manufacturing and marketing its C4 vehicular radars to Caterpillar until Dec. 31, 2014 -- and for Caterpillar to continue importing the radars until the same date. The radars comply with the FCC’s existing Section 15.515(c) emissions limits, but do not comply with revised limits set to take effect Wednesday. Autoliv and Caterpillar had told the FCC that Caterpillar’s vehicles could not safely operate without the Autoliv radars, which Caterpillar will need until it can complete a planned redesign that will allow use of dually compliant radars. The FCC said the waiver will apply to only the about 900 vehicles Caterpillar believes it will manufacture through the end of 2014 that will require the Autoliv radar systems, most of which will operate outside the U.S. or in situations that will have a “negligible” influence on satellite interference in the 23.6-24.0 MHz band (http://bit.ly/1emBsXv).

Iridium asked to modify its space station authorization for its Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit Mobile Satellite Service constellation. Iridium would like the authorization to include the Iridium Next second-generation satellites, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/1ajs049). In a separate application, ViaSat requested FCC consent for the assignment of Intelsat’s authorization “to operate the Ka-band payload on the Galaxy-28 satellite in the 19.7-20.2 GHz and 29.5-30.0 GHz bands” at 89 degrees west, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/19xv7LF).