While most of the FCC’s new Broadband plan has been about, well, broadband, there’s also some great news for HDTV fans. We expected a few mentions about CableCARD and its future when the FCC requested comments and declared it a failure , but we’re still glad to see that the FCC listened to consumer electronics companies like TiVo and Sony — among others. The biggest news is that the FCC has asked the industry to come up with a residential IP gateway that is open and that will provide same abilities as your provider’s equipment, and most importantly, it should enable the very same gear to work no matter what type of service you prefer, whether it be satellite, cable or fiber — for example, via various gateways the same TiVo would work with either DirecTV or Comcast. But while the FCC has given the industry until December of 2012 to define and deploy these IP gateways before implementing an “appropriate enforcement mechanism,” in the meantime the FCC wants to see the biggest issues with CableCARDs resolved by this Fall. The list below of immediate fixes is pretty impressive, and other than the persistent lack of video on demand support, it’ll help make CableCARD a pretty respectable solution

In today’s Remainders: things lurking below the surface. Literally, a fuel cell-powered fish. Less literally, ISP’s seething contempt for the FCC’s new National Broadband Plan. Also: Samsung’s David Lee Roth tablet love and a helicopter with rocket-powered blades. Yikes.

Right on schedule, the FCC has submitted its National Broadband Plan. There’s a lot to go through — note the calls for broadband benchmarking and pricing reports — and we’re still combing, but here’s what we’ve noticed so far. The six goals set out for “the next decade” propose that every American have the affordable access (the key, oft-repeated phrase) to “robust broadband services,” and, more specifically, at least 100 million US homes with affordable access to at least 100MBps down / 50Mbps up speeds. All communities should have at their disposal 1Gbps service, every first responder should have “access to a nationwide, wireless interoperable broadband public safety network,” and here’s an interesting one: every citizen should be able to use broadband to “track and manage real-time [home] energy consumption .” The appeal to our taxpaying wallets comes in the form of the FCC expecting the “vast majority of recommendations [to] not require new government funding”, and that the 500MHz of spectrum going on auction is “likely to offset the potential costs.” The plan, as the paper itself says, is in beta and be perennially in flux.

We’ve known some of the major details about the FCC’s sweeping National Broadband Plan —namely 100Mbps broadband in 100 million homes —for a while now, but today they’ve made it official. It’s a sweeping proposal, with six main long-term goals: More

As the intertubes overtake boob tubes and telephone tubes as our primary mode of communication, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that access is available and affordable for all Americans. The FCC’s ambitious new plan looks to do just that. More

A pair of iPads was just revealed in the FCC’s system in perfect synchrony with that little pre-order sitch with which you may or may not already be familiar. Apple, of course, has a track record of timing its FCC filings perfectly so that virtually nothing is revealed before Cupertino wants it to be, and frankly, you’re not going to get much here that you didn’t already know — the photographs (both external and internal) and the user manual are all still under confidentiality. Both units were tested for WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth, while one — model number A1337 — adds in GSM 850 / 1900 and UMTS 850 / 1900, so it appears that Apple has bundled all of its 3G and non-3G models into just two filings regardless of storage capacity. We caught A1337 flipping through an old issue of 2600, so for all we know, it socially engineered its way to FCC approval — whatever it takes to make that late-April launch window, right? Apple iPad — model A1337 — phreaks the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:17:00 EST.

Feel like your broadband’s not living up to how they’re advertised? Here’s your chance to prove it: the FCC’s introduced a Consumer Broadband Test that’ll let you know exactly how good a connection you’ve got. More

We talk about the FCC a lot here, but usually the ways ye olde Commission affects our lives are indirect. A little extra spectrum here, a nice leaked image there, that kind of thing. Not this time, though, as the FCC is getting involved directly with its own Consumer Broadband Test app, designed to probe network latencies and download speeds on your home connection or mobile device. Part of the hallowed National Broadband Plan , this will furnish the FCC will useful data to show the discrepancy between advertised and real world broadband speeds, and will also — more importantly perhaps — serve as a neat way for users to directly compare network performance in particular areas. It’s available on the App Market and App Store right now, with versions for other operating systems coming up, so why not get with the program and give it a test drive

Call me a cynic, but I’m not sure this is ever going to happen: the FCC wants to dedicate a chunk of the wireless spectrum to providing free internet service. The FCC plans to make its recommendation under the National Broadband Plan set for release next week, which has the goal of making broadband more affordable for everyone in America. Of course, they didn’t, you know, say how they were going to do such a thing. And they’re going to have to claw that spectrum out of the cold, dead hands of telecom lobbyists.

Remember how we figured out that an AT&T 3G-equipped Nexus One had stumbled its way into FCC certification not long ago? Using the same logic — mainly label shape and model number — we can safely say that this latest version to get approval is the dual-band CDMA variant that’s almost certainly destined for Verizon within the next few months. There’s not terribly much to see in the filing, but hey, take solace in knowing they’ve cleared this crucial bureaucratic hurdle (of course, Verizon’s infamous internal testing is another bureaucratic hurdle altogether). [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Nexus One hits FCC again, this time in CDMA trim originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:53:00 EST.