Wireless Week

T-Mobile refuted charges by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it had bilked customers for hundreds of millions of dollars in erroneous SMS charges. CEO John Legere called the complaints “unfounded and without merit.”

The FTC claims that T-Mobile took in 35 to 45 percent of the revenue from SMS services like “flirting tips, horoscope information or celebrity gossip” that typically charge $10 monthly. The Commission also alleges that T-Mobile continued collecting money off these charges even after it had reason to believe the charges were fraudulent.

Legere noted that T-Mobile has been fighting to add more transparency to the industry. “We exited this business in late 2013, and announced an aggressive program to take care of customers and we are disappointed that the FTC has instead chosen to file this sensationalized legal action,” Legere wrote. “We are the first to take action for the consumer and I am calling for the entire industry to do the same.”

The Federal Communications Commission gave its blessing to T-Mobile's acquisition of a swatch of 700 MHz A Block spectrum from Verizon.

T-Mobile Vice President of Federal Regulatory Affairs Kathleen Ham thanked the FCC for approving the deal.

“T-Mobile is pleased by the FCC’s prompt approval of our acquisition of 700 MHz A-Block spectrum, which will provide the company with low-band spectrum in a number of key markets across the country," Ham said.

AT&T is coming along with its voluntary commitment to deploy text-to-911 service on its networks. But the carrier won’t be bringing that technology to Cricket Wireless, at least while AT&T’s newly acquired prepaid carrier still runs on code division multiple access (CDMA).

In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T said both Cricket and Aio Wireless -- AT&T’s existing prepaid brand which the carrier intends to merge with Cricket -- are exempt from the carrier’s voluntary commitment to roll out text-to-911 by May 15, 2014.

Sprint and T-Mobile are calling into question AT&T's recently announced IP-network trials in Florida and Alabama, saying the initiative is holding back the rest of the industry's move to develop cross-carrier IP interconnections.

"AT&T’s proposed experiment is putting the cart before the horse," Sprint wrote in a filing at the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that many of the benefits of AT&T's transition to an all-IP infrastructure will be lost if carriers do not first migrate their wholesale and inter-carrier interconnections to IP. Calling AT&T's experiment "isolated" and "complicated", Sprint argued that "carriers should not have to wait for this experiment to finish before migrating their networks from Time Division Multiplex (TDM) to IP or to interconnect in IP format with other carriers.

T-Mobile expressed similar reservations in a separate filing, urging the commission not to let trials such as AT&T’s distract it from ensuring interconnection amongst all carriers. T-Mobile suggested that the commission ensure AT&T’s trials do not involve "unnecessary, inefficient, and consumer-impacting TDM-IP conversions or needlessly inefficient" Points of Interconnection (POI).