Wireless Telecommunications

As 2018 comes to a close, Sprint said it has much to show for the roughly $5 billion it spent upgrading its network throughout the course of this year. “We are celebrating a banner year for the Sprint network,” wrote CTO John Saw. “We made a massive investment to drive strong improvements in our network performance today and prepare to launch mobile 5G starting in the first half of next year.

AT&T says its 5G network went live in parts of 12 cities Dec 18, making it the first wireless carrier to launch a mobile network based on the 5G standard. A small number of customers will be able to use the network starting on Dec 21, when AT&T will begin distributing its first 5G device: a mobile hot spot that can connect to the network’s much faster airwaves. But it’ll be a slow launch; you won’t be able to go out to a store and buy AT&T’s 5G hot spot for several more months.

Apparently, T-Mobile won approval from US national-security officials for its planned takeover of Sprint, bringing the two rivals a step closer to closing their roughly $26 billion combination. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or Cfius, told the companies that it had cleared the union of the No 3 and No 4 carriers by subscribers after several months of negotiations with company representatives.

Sen Joe Manchin (D-wV) has placed a hold on Commissioner Brendan Carr's renomination to the Federal Communications Commission in response to the FCC’s decision to pause a program that would fund wireless internet expansion in rural areas. Sen Manchin announced the hold on Carr's renomination a week after FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the agency’s Mobility Fund Phase II program would be suspended temporarily while regulators investigate whether major wireless carriers submitted false data on their coverage maps.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted its first Communications Marketplace Report, which provides a comprehensive evaluation of the state of the communications marketplace. As required by Title IV of RAY BAUM’S Act of 2018, the report consolidates several separate reports to address the state of the broader communications marketplace in one place. And as mandated by Congress, this report will be issued every two years.

California state regulators have been ginning up a scheme to charge a fee for text messaging on mobile phones to help support programs that make phone service accessible to the poor. The wireless industry and business groups have been working to defeat the proposal, now scheduled for a vote in January by the California Public Utilities Commission. It’s unclear how much individual consumers would be asked to pay their wireless carrier for texting services under the proposal.

While wireless operators generally and wholeheartedly support the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to classify SMS and MMS texting services as “information services” rather than “telecommunications services” or “commercial mobile services,” Verizon is urging the commission to go a step further and include Rich Communication Services (RCS) as well. In a draft of the declaratory ruling that the FCC will consider at its Dec 12 meeting, the FCC acknowledged that RCS is the next-generation SMS and is an IP-based asynchronous messaging protocol.

On Sept 13, 2018, Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to encourage the FCC to improve the National Broadband Map "by using consumer-reported data to increase the accuracy of the FCC's mobile coverage maps." On Sept 7, all six of Oklahoma's congressional delegates wrote to Chairman Pai to concerning the Mobility Fund PHase II (MF-II) challenge process, writing that, "it is important that that (sic) any funding allocation decisions are based on accurate data." 

The Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into whether one or more major carriers violated the Mobility Fund Phase II (MF-II) reverse auction’s mapping rules and submitted incorrect coverage maps. The investigation comes after a preliminary review of the 20,809,503 speed tests filed with the agency in connection with the MF-II challenge process; the window for initial challenges closed on November 26. The FCC has suspended the next step of the challenge process—the opening of a response window—pending the conclusion of this investigation