Fierce

The Federal Communications Commission announced a settlement with AT&T’s FiberTower that involves the company returning hundreds of millimeter wave spectrum licenses to the agency. The settlement essentially means AT&T won’t get access to those spectrum licenses, and it paves the way for the agency to reauction those licenses at some point in the future.  Specifically, as part of the agreement, FiberTower is abandoning all of its 24 GHz spectrum licenses (around 121 total) and roughly the same number of 39 GHz spectrum licenses.

[Commentary] Last week, Forbes contributor Rosyln Layton was fed up with what she saw as a lack of journalistic stridency in reports by FierceCable, DSL Reports, as well as numerous tech media publications, on a study (PDF) published by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society concluding that municipal broadband was generally a better deal for consumers. Layton went on to accuse FierceCable of “blindly” accepting the Berkman study.

AT&T has asked the Federal Communications Commission to realign the way it regulates how service providers shut down Time-division multiplexing (TDM)-based data and retirement services with the hope of creating incentives for service providers to invest in next-gen services. 

CenturyLink has inched closer to meeting its Federal Communications Commission CAF-II program commitments, reaching over 600,000 rural homes and businesses with broadband over the past two years. In August 2015, CenturyLink accepted $500 million in CAF-II funding. This money, combined with its own capital, will ultimately enable the telco to deliver broadband services to about 1.2 million rural households and businesses in 33 states over the next six years.

Sprint renewed a promotion that offers a free year of unlimited service to customers who switch to the carrier and bring their own phone. The promotion is available to anyone who owns any one of roughly three dozen phones, including those from Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Google and others, but it appears mostly slanted toward unhappy Verizon customers. The new promotion is similar to the one Sprint unveiled in the summer of 2017. That promotion, described at the time by Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett as the “most aggressive promotion in the history of the U.S.