Cable

摘要

The FCC Media Bureau should deny Adams Cable Equipment’s petition to expand the scope of itsnrecently granted CableCARD waiver, said CEA in an opposition filing Monday (http://bit.ly/15gH2V4).nThe current waiver — granted in July (CD July 30 p11) — lets ACE offer its existing inventory of 50,000nset-top boxes directly to subscribers. ACE petitioned the bureau last week (CD Aug 20 p16) to expandnthe limit to 200,000, allowing it to buy and refurbish older, obsolete models from large cable operators.nThe petition suggests that ACE’s business plan all along has been to buy boxes from larger cable operatorsnand sell them to smaller ones, said CEA. “Adams’s Reconsideration Petition says that it ‘may not havenbeen apparent’ to the Bureau that 200,000 boxes could be wholesaled on this basis, but does not claim thatnthis figure was unknown to Adams when it filed and lobbied for its Petition.” ACE’s reconsideration filingnis “actually a new petition seeking a much broader waiver than Adams initially purported to seek, butnit provides no new factual or legal basis and no new arguments,” CEA said. Since the waiver already requiresnACE to update the bureau on its set-top box sales, ACE should use the record established by thosenfuture updates to file a new waiver request if its sales justify it, CEA said.