Continued speculation about a possible Sprint/T-Mobile US merger has been a major boon for Sprint’s stock value, said Seeking Alpha in an email Friday to investors. Sprint’s stock value rose 32 percent between Dec. 13 -- the day The Wall Street Journal first reported speculation about a possible merger -- and noon Friday, Seeking Alpha said.

A federal judge defended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone metadata in a ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan in American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper. The ACLU plans to appeal the ruling and make its case in the 2nd Circuit in New York, it said (http://bit.ly/1jQfh2Q). “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said, judging the program lawful while acknowledging the danger to privacy if the program were unchecked (http://bit.ly/Jxc9Ig). “The question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of Government to decide,” he said, citing the “extensive oversight” the program operates under. The court granted the government’s motion to dismiss the ACLU’s complaint, filed in June. He lamented the “level of absurdity” in ACLU’s lawsuit given the group only learned of the program through leaks earlier in the year. “A target’s awareness of Section 215 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus,” Pauley wrote. He defended the ability of intelligence officials to make connections on the basis of metadata collection: “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed.” What corporations do with consumer data is “far more intrusive,” he said. He said the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, pointing to the 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case, or the First Amendment, calling the need to determine that “unnecessary” due to another previous ruling. The court’s decision “misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement. “As another federal judge and the president’s own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans’ privacy.” The phone surveillance program, done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, has been upheld by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court multiple times, but a federal court shot it down as likely unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama earlier this month. Lawmakers and the White House have reexamined the program and announced intentions to change it.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo released style4.5 million in broadband grants Thursday. The Democrat issued a statement emphasizing the significance of high-speed Internet connections. Nine projects will receive money, including Clarity Connect, Slic Network Solutions, MTC Cable and New Visions Communications. “Together, these nine projects will deliver broadband services to 29,117 households, 2,052 businesses, and 236 community anchor institutions, and will provide 614 miles of new fiber,” Cuomo’s office said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1llG3eP). Much of the money will go to support last-mile service, it said.

The FCC is seeking comment on several requested exemptions from its closed captioning rules, the commission said in a public notice Thursday (http://bit.ly/JxrFUx). Comments and oppositions are due within 30 days. “Petitioners claim that compliance would be ‘economically burdensome,'” said the PN. The entities requesting exemptions are Curtis Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga.; Gerald Bryant TV in Chicago; First Lutheran Church in Albert Lea, Minn.; Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham; Gray Publishing in Soldotna, Alaska; and First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Ark.

Netflix probably won’t boost its support for 3D movies, the company said Friday, but wouldn’t immediately say whether it will abandon 3D content altogether. It launched 3D streaming in January and has a “few dozen” such titles now, said spokesman Joris Evers. But 3D streaming “isn’t something we will look to expand as it is used very little,” he said. The company “experimented” with Blu-ray 3D offerings earlier, but “only shipped very few units” to subscribers, said spokeswoman Karen Barragan. Netflix wouldn’t say if it plans to offer Blu-ray 3D titles again or reconsider its plans for streamed 3D movies, especially in light of the strong theatrical 3D showing of the movies Gravity and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Separately, Netflix had an outage Thursday night that lasted about 40 minutes and “impacted streaming on most devices” in parts of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, said Barrigan. The outage started at 6:45 p.m. PST, and affected about 30 percent of streaming “starts across devices” used by subscribers, said spokesman Jonathan Friedland.

CaptionCall -- a subsidiary of Sorenson -- wrote to the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Friday to explain the measures it will take to comply with new IP Captioned Telephone Service rules (http://bit.ly/K9V9Ix). CaptionCall noticed many “conflicts” between the text of the final order and the codified rules, it said, such as when users must be registered. The rules are also “ambiguous” as to the permitted and excluded categories of third-party professional certifications, CaptionCall said, or what is meant by “business relationships,” “family relationships,” or “social relationships.” CaptionCall detailed a meeting with bureau staffers in July to seek clarification, but has not received guidance, it said. “Should the Commission disagree with any of the compliance measures CaptionCall intends to implement, CaptionCall requests immediate guidance and clarification."

The rebanding of a final group of 800 MHz public safety agencies, those located along the Mexican border, is under way and about 195 licensees there are expected to have to retune their systems, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator said in a report filed Friday at the FCC. The U.S. and Mexico agreed last year to an amended protocol, which takes into account the FCC’s landmark 2004 800 MHz rebanding order (CD June 7/12 p7). “With most non-border licensees and Canadian border licensees having completed physical retuning, the TA’s focus is on those licensees that have not finished,” the TA said (http://bit.ly/1cFRG0S). “Licensees that have not completed physical retuning should expeditiously complete their implementation activities,” the TA said. “A delay in the completion of an implementation task by a licensee that has a downstream impact on other licensees (i.e., by blocking another licensee’s replacement frequencies or because the first touch of its subscriber units needs to be completed before an interoperable licensee can retune its infrastructure) can have a cascading effect and cause delays for other dependent licensees and, in some cases, for an entire region."

Comcast petitioned to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices for seven communities in Virginia, said a filing posted in FCC docket 12-1 (http://bit.ly/KamafB). The petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The proposed deregulation would affect about 23,000 households, including the communities of Bridgewater, Harrisonburg and Elkton.

An FCC order approved last February requiring a redesign of cellphone signal boosters has booster-makers scrambling to bring products up to spec in time for CES, which opens Jan. 7 for a four-day run. Among the changes required by the order are threefold reductions in power limits and automatic shutoff features to avoid interference with cellular towers and wireless networks, John Crook, marketing communications manager of booster-maker Cellphone-Mate, told us. Cellphone-Mate is redesigning its SureCall line of cell signal boosters to comply with FCC specs set to go into effect March 1, Crook said, and four products are undergoing the testing process required by the FCC. The company supplies cell signal boosters for residential, automotive and commercial applications. Prices for 2014 SureCall products haven’t been set because the company hasn’t factored in re-engineering costs in the “thousands of dollars” along with $10,000-per-product testing fees, he said. Costs required to make boosters compliant could shrink the number of U.S. booster suppliers, Crook said. “It will be interesting to see how many companies remain in the U.S.,” he said, citing the “huge costs” involved in making existing product compliant. The ruling could deliver more booster sales for Cellphone-Mate because at a lower wattage, more boosters will be required to serve a large space, he said. Long term, the ruling is positive for booster makers that can weather the costs because as more customers cut out landlines in favor of cell services, marginal coverage areas will require signal boosters, Crook said. Those aren’t just in rural areas, he noted. Customers in large cities such as San Francisco struggle to receive a good cell signal due to large buildings and hilly terrain. Current SureCall residential booster kits -- including indoor and outdoor antennas, cables and the booster itself -- run in the $900-$1,000 range, he said. At that price, “you really have to want it,” he said.

A New York state senator told the FCC she’s “greatly concerned” with the impact the FCC’s prison calling order will have on county jails in her district (http://bit.ly/K9W6Rl). Elizabeth Little asked that the implementation date be postponed from Feb. 11 to “a later date,” because county governments “have acted on their budgets for the year and have not accounted for the loss of funding that will be incurred due to this rule change.” She said the order is “especially worrisome for smaller county jails that experience high turnover rates of inmate populations.”