Turkey satellite operator Turksat will use Hughes Network Systems' Jupiter high-throughput satellite ground system to enhance Turksat services in Turkey and surrounding countries in Europe and the Middle East, Hughes Europe said in a news release Tuesday. Turksat will provide high-speed Ka-band satellite services with the Jupiter ground system after it launches the Turksat 4B satellite, scheduled for early next year, Hughes said.

ViaSat again asked the FCC to reverse its summary rejection (see 1501060026) of the company’s application for the rural broadband experiments (RBE) auction and its summary denial of the company’s waiver request, ViaSat said in a reply comment filed in docket 10-90 Monday. The Wireline Bureau denied its application on Dec. 5 and denied 16 other petitions in a Friday order. ViaSat's bid was rejected because it "allegedly did not satisfy the 100 millisecond latency standard," but the company’s application stated that it would fulfill the RBE program requirements, it said. ViaSat said the bureau didn’t conduct the RBE reverse auction in a fair manner by failing to give its application a "hard look" and seeking comment for other waiver requests, but not its own. ViaSat argued against NTCA’s assertion that the company submitted its application improperly and ignored the legal significance of voice telephony service. The FCC declined to comment.

Dish Network began carrying El Rey Network, an English-language network founded by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, on channel 253, the direct broadcast satellite company said in a news release Thursday.

Dish Network customers will be able to use the Reverse AutoHop feature on the Hopper DVR Monday to watch only the commercials from Sunday’s Super Bowl, Dish said in a news release Thursday. This requires customers to have the PrimeTime Anytime feature for NBC, it said.

DirecTV created a Severe Weather Mix channel solely for coverage of winter storm Juno, it said in a news release Tuesday. The channel, available on 205, 362-1 and 600, was to show customers nationwide national storm coverage on one screen from CNN, Fox News, HLN, MSNBC, WeatherNation and The Weather Channel, and was to remain until the storm passed, it said.

There's a bipartisan consensus that the FCC "should move promptly with actions to reallocate the 1675-1680 MHz band to commercial use," said LightSquared counsel Covington & Burling in an ex parte letter filed Monday that has not yet appeared in docket 12-340. "LightSquared would like to have the FCC issue a notice of proposed rulemaking that says, 'we should auction the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spectrum. Does anyone have any reactions to that?'" said former chairman of the FCC Reed Hundt, now at the Coalition for Green Capital. "LightSquared is filing a question to the FCC." The letter included a Wall Street Journalcolumn by Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Megan Smith, the U.S. chief technology officer, about NOAA freeing up this spectrum and moving its system of satellites. "Here’s the White House giving its views in a public way, saying let’s do it," Hundt said. The Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015 requested the commission to reallocate this band, the letter said. The letter also included a NOAA filing at the FCC that details plans to transition the spectrum band to commercial use. In 2012, LightSquared filed a petition to reallocate to commercial use spectrum NOAA currently uses for weather balloon communications. The FCC declined to comment.

Hughes Network Systems will begin offering HughesNet Gen4 service plans with SmartTechnologies, it said in a news release Wednesday. The new plans improve data compression, website loading, download speeds and raise Bonus Bytes to 50 GB a month, which gives customers extra data allowance that they can use during off-peak hours, it said.

SES picked Arianespace to launch its new communications satellite, SES-12, on the Ariane 5 booster in Q4 of 2017, SES said in a news release Thursday. The booster will be launched from the European Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, it said. SES-12, which is being built by Airbus Defence and Space to replace the company’s NSS-6 satellite, will expand direct-to-home broadcasting, very small aperture terminal and high throughput satellite data connectivity in the Asia-Pacific region, it said.

Fox Networks emphasized that the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled (see 1501210056) that Dish Network breached its contract with Fox Networks with its Sling and Hopper Transfers features. Fox said in a statement Tuesday that Dish also was found to have infringed Fox’s copyrights and breached its contract by making unauthorized copies of Fox programming with its AutoHop feature, which lets customers skip commercials on programming they record. “While we are still disappointed the court felt that PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop do not violate our copyrights or contract, Dish has been largely disabling AutoHop anyway,” said Fox. This case doesn’t involve consumer rights or new technology, but “protecting creative works from being exploited without permission,” Fox said. Dish didn’t have an immediate comment.

The FTC won a partial summary judgment against Dish Network for “tens of millions of calls” violating the commission’s telemarketing rules, said the FTC in a news release Wednesday. The FTC was a co-plaintiff along with Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina in the case, which was filed in 2009, the agency said. A U.S. District Court judge in Springfield, Illinois, said Dish and its vendors were responsible for more than 4.09 million calls made to numbers on the Do Not Call registry, and Dish retailers were responsible for another 2.73 million calls to numbers on the registry. The court also said Dish was responsible for more than 1.04 million calls to consumers who had already told Dish they didn’t want to receives such calls and whose phone numbers were on a Dish internal do-not-call list. “The court left the issue of whether Dish is liable for any entity-specific violations relating to its retailers to be determined at trial,” the FTC said. Dish and three of its retailers also were found to be responsible for nearly 49.74 million “abandoned calls" -- outbound calls where the person answering is not connected with a sales person within two seconds. Prerecorded telemarketing messages violate the abandoned call rule because the telemarketer is not connecting the call to a sales representative within two seconds, the FTC said. Because the FTC won only a partial summary judgment, other aspects of the case, such as Dish’s responsibility for its retailers in some instances, remain to be litigated at trial, the FTC said. Dish "respectfully disagrees with the bulk of the decision by the Court," a company spokesman told us. The FTC has "outsourced the management of the National Do Not Call Registry to contractors, with minimal oversight, resulting in a Registry that is inaccurate and that the U.S. Government itself characterizes as ‘a mess,’" Dish said. "While the FTC acknowledges its own failures regarding the maintenance of the Registry, it nonetheless attempts to hold American businesses to a different standard."