Wireless Telecommunications

Google is spending $1.1 billion to hire a team of engineers from the smartphone business of the struggling Taiwanese manufacturer HTC in a bid to bring more hardware expertise to its own mobile technology operations.

HTC said many of its estimated 2,000 employees affected by the deal were already working with the search giant on smartphones. Google leaned on HTC to manufacture its first Pixel smartphone, which was released last year, and is working with the company to produce the next version of the phone, which is expected to be announced on Oct. 4. Bringing on the team from HTC is a sign that Google is doubling down on plans to produce its own hardware. Company executives have said it is important to tightly couple its artificial intelligence software, like the voice-controlled Google Assistant, with a range of devices. The two sides did not disclose how many engineers and other key employees would head to Google as part of the deal. But Peter Shen, HTC’s chief financial officer, said the remaining company would still have more than 2,000 research and design staffers, down from about 4,000. As part of the agreement, Google will also secure a nonexclusive licensing deal for some of HTC’s intellectual property.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in a Federal Trade Commission throttling case against AT&T that has major implications for the agency’s reach over telecommunications companies. An 11-judge panel is taking a second look at the case, which centers on whether a carve-out in the FTC’s jurisdiction for "common carriers" should be based on a company’s activities or its status. A three-judge panel from the court sided with AT&T in 2016 and knocked down the FTC’s case against the telecom giant, ruling that the agency did not have the authority to bring the lawsuit against the company because of its status as a common carrier. The FTC asked the court to re-hear the case, and got support from the Federal Communications Commission and internet service providers including Comcast, Charter, Cox Communications and Verizon.

Verizon is disconnecting another 8,500 rural customers from its wireless network, saying that roaming charges have made certain customer accounts unprofitable for the carrier. The 8,500 customers have 19,000 lines and live in 13 states (Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin), a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. They received notices of disconnection this month and will lose access to Verizon service on October 17.

"These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network," Verizon said. "Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month." "We sent these notices in advance so customers have plenty of time to choose another wireless provider," Verizon also said. We wrote about an earlier wave of disconnections in June. The affected customers are supported by Verizon’s LTE in Rural America (LRA) program, which relies on a partnership between Verizon and small rural carriers who lease Verizon spectrum in order to build their own networks.

In a filing to the Federal Communications Commission, the AWARN Alliance blasted T-Mobile for disparaging its efforts to developed an advanced emergency alerting system based on the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast system. T-Mobile has called ATSC 3.0 “an inferior platform” compared to the "well-established wireless network.” On the contrary, AWARN charged, it is the wireless network that is inferior and that T-Mobile. What’s more, it said, T-Mobile and other wireless carriers are actively resisting current FCC efforts to improve their emergency alerting.

Two bureaucrats, FCC Commissioners Michael O'Rielly and Mignon Clyburn, tangling over the intricacies of wireless networks may not seem like the stuff of headlines, but this week’s debate at Mobile World Congress Americas could shape the future of how we use our smartphones for decades to come. Having battled over topics like network neutrality and cable boxes, they now groused about the FCC’s latest dull-but-important controversy: the placement of transmitters for the new 5G wireless networks arriving in two or three years.

Installing up to 300,000 cellular antennas—double what the US currently has—in so little time is leading to a clash between overwhelmed local zoning officials and impatient industry and Trump administration officials, with Clyburn and O’Rielly fighting for each side. With 5G, the isolated fights that pop up over an individual cell tower site will multiply and merge into a national phenomenon, especially in urban areas where small cells wind up encrusted all over the landscape. Whether they get installed quickly or extra carefully some constituency will get angry. In fact, the same people may get angry whichever way it goes.

Proponents and opponents of data caps make conflicting claims about the effect of data caps on prices, network capacity and speeds, subscription, congestion, and consumer surplus. In this paper, we survey the academic literature on data caps and analyze the relationship between the characteristics of each paper's model or data and the paper's results.

We find that model or data assumptions about service differentiation, purpose of the data cap, and amount of competition strongly influence each paper's results. Consequently, conclusions about the effect of data caps are often limited to certain types of service providers (fixed or mobile) and/or to certain types of data caps (heavy-users or profit-maximizing). We find that most proponents' claims about data caps in fixed broadband service are incorrect, and that most proponents' claims about data caps in mobile broadband service are likely to be correct if and only if data caps increase competition. We also discuss how data caps may be evaluated under the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. We find that heavy-users caps on mobile broadband service are likely to satisfy the Order's rules, that profit-maximizing caps on mobile broadband service may or may not satisfy the rules, and that caps on fixed broadband service are unlikely to satisfy the rules.

[Scott Jordan is associated with the University of California, Irvine]

What kind of spectrum is AT&T looking to as it plots it 5G strategies? “All of it,’’ according to Hank Hultquist, AT&T’s vice president of federal regulatory. And AT&T isn’t alone in taking a holistic view of the role spectrum will play as carriers roll out 5G services and technologies in the coming years.

Indeed, that was the overriding theme during a round table discussion Sept 13 at Mobile World Congress Americas focusing on airwaves and next-generation networks. 5G “is not a particular band; it’s more a weaving together,” said Julie Knapp, chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology. Rather, it will see carriers use a wide variety of wavelengths as they build next-generation networks, using the most appropriate spectrum and antennas in specific areas based on multiple factors.

In many ways, the release of the first iPhone 10 years ago launched the smartphone era. Since then, mobile data consumption has skyrocketed and, in the process, helped turn wireless companies into digital media conglomerates. By the numbers:
Mobile data traffic has experienced a nine-fold increase since 2012 in North America, and it has the highest smartphone and 4G network adoption rates of any region worldwide, according to GSMA.
In 2016, there were 291 million unique wireless subscribers in North America, representing 80% of the region's population.
There are now more mobile subscriptions in the U.S. than people

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the federal government in hopes of curbing the wide-ranging ability of federal agents to search and seize the smartphones and computers of travelers — including US citizens — as they arrive on American soil but have not yet formally entered the country.

The practice, which remains rare but has grown more frequent in recent years, allows agents in border zones such as the arrivals areas of international airports to sidestep the Supreme Court’s landmark Riley decision in 2014 requiring that law enforcement officers get search warrants before examining the contents of digital devices.That ruling grew from the long-running contention by civil rights groups that modern digital devices carry such massive amounts of data and such sensitive records — including photographs, location data, e-mails, videos and Web browsing histories — that they should be afforded full Fourth Amendment protections against searches and seizures without warrants.

Sept 13's suit demands stricter legal standards for device searches in border areas. They argue that relatively lax rules established for searching luggage or goods bought in duty-free shops should not apply to modern smartphones, tablets and laptop computers routinely carried across borders. The suit says that the number of such searches — conducted by Customs and Border Protection agents, sometimes with the assistance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has grown sharply in recent years and is on track to hit about 30,000 in the current fiscal year. That remains a tiny fraction of the several hundred million travelers who enter the nation every year.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has put the 20th Wireless Competition Report on the agenda for the FCC’s September Open Meeting. Technically, the Wireless Competition Report is a non-rulemaking agency report to Congress, similar to the many reports the FCC does on everything from the prices paid for cable services to the state of the Satellite industry. But the Wireless Competition Report has become something of a big deal in recent years, owing to the refusal of the FCC since 2010 to find whether or not there is “effective competition” in the wireless industry.

Chairman Pai is now putting it back at the Commission level and the Report is once again finding that we have “effective competition” — whatever that means. So it seems like a good time to run through the Wireless Competition Report, what it is, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and how it gets used and/or abused. And, of course, how it relates to network neutrality, since everything in the world relates to net neutrality these days.