Jimm Phillips

Members of the Communications Workers of America formally accepted contracts with two AT&T divisions and are considering “tentative” contracts with three others, CWA announced Friday. AT&T wireline employees represented by CWA have voted to accept three-year contracts with AT&T Midwest and AT&T Corp., AT&T said. The CWA reached a tentative agreement on the contracts July 21, the carrier said. The AT&T Midwest agreement covers more than 13,000 employees in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. The AT&T Corp. agreement covers 5,700 employees across the country, AT&T said.

AT&T’s expected buildout of its 4G LTE network may spark another wave of data usage growth -- and the carrier stands to benefit from that investment, said Chief Financial Officer John Stephens. “We expect that when the LTE buildout is complete for us next year, and devices catch up with our buildout, that we're going to see another step up,” he said at an Oppenheimer investor conference in Boston Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnkue5): “Will it grow at the same rate it’s grown in the past five years? Possibly.” Overall mobile data consumption in the U.S. will reach 2 exabytes this year, said Chetan Sharma Consulting, a wireless consulting firm (http://xrl.us/bnkt4z).

Last week’s Asia-Pacific Telecommunity meeting did not end with a formal set of proposals for the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), potentially damaging the region’s influence in the lead-up to the conference, said David Gross, former State Department international communications and information coordinator. But the general consensus coming out of the meeting bodes well for the U.S. position on whether the conference, led by the ITU, should adopt controversial proposals to change how the Internet is regulated, he said. Gross said he attended the Asia-Pacific meeting in Bangkok as chair of the Ad Hoc World Conference on International Telecommunications Working Group, which represents 15 major multinational telecom and Internet companies.

ISPs participating in the FCC’s Broadband Measurement Group will study and report back on how often broadband subscribers continue to use legacy equipment after they have upgraded to a faster broadband service, an agency official told us. ISP representatives had raised concerns about the issue when the group met Wednesday to plan out the next speed test report (CD Aug 9 p4). The representatives claimed legacy equipment could cause a subscriber’s broadband connection to run slower than it normally would, and could thus affect speed test results. The ISPs plan to report back on the issue at the next meeting, and will discuss policies for addressing the problem, the agency official said. The group will discuss the issue and will determine what steps they will need to take to respond to those concerns, the official said.

As the FCC’s Broadband Measurement Group met Wednesday to plan the production of their next annual broadband speed measurement report, the commission made clear the group will produce the next report under the same data collection process that was used the first two times. “We have some disputes, some issues, between the people here in terms of the process and the policies,” said Walter Johnston, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology’s Electromagnetic Compatibility Division. “We're not going to let that get in the way of the next report,” he said.

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s gold medal win Sunday in the 100-meter final has become a highlight moment of the London Olympics. It’s one that Comcast and NBCUniversal officials used to demonstrate the power of NHK’s Super Hi-Vision ultra-HD technology during a demonstration at Comcast’s Washington headquarters Monday night. Reporters crowded around an 85-inch LCD screen as video showed Bolt and his rivals lined up to start the race. The technology that was shown is in early stages of development and takes many gigabytes to be sent from London to the U.S., executives at Comcast’s NBCUniversal said at the demo.

The U.S. formally opposed attempts to wrest control of the Internet away from its current governing organizations in favor of the United Nations’ ITU, the U.S. delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) said in documents filed Friday. The Dec. 3-4 meeting in Dubai will focus on revising the ITU’s treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), last revised in 1988. The U.S. State Department released the documents to the public after the filing (http://xrl.us/bnjbef).

Proposed rules by the NTIA on a technical panel and dispute resolution boards mandated by Congress to speed the conversion of federal spectrum to commercial use, and spectrum sharing “will bring needed clarity” to the process, but need to do more to ensure the transition occurs as Congress intended, T-Mobile said in comments at the agency. The rules the NTIA proposed in mid-July would define terminology for the transition regulations, lay out how the transition’s technical panel would work and establish resolution boards to solve transition-related disputes (http://xrl.us/bni6f6). NTIA posted the comments Thursday, a day after the submission deadline. The changes on which NTIA sought comment were part of spectrum bill enacted in February.

The U.S. will attempt to block controversial Internet regulatory proposals, which the government believes would threaten the Web’s free flow of information, ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), U.S. delegation head Terry Kramer said Wednesday, in remarks at the Information Technology Industry Council. The U.S. plans to release a key document Friday, when it will submit its initial set of proposals for WCIT to the ITU, which is hosting WCIT in Dubai Dec. 3-4 to revise the treaty-level International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs).

Android remained the top operating system in the U.S. smartphone market in Q2, but its numbers were on the decline, Strategy Analytics said in a report released Monday. The number of shipped Android-powered phones dropped to 13.4 million, from 15.3 million in the same period last year. The company’s market share stood at 56.3 percent -- a drop of more than four percentage points from its 60.6 percent last year, the report said. Apple’s shipping numbers rose to 7.9 million smartphones, up two million from last year. Its market share rose to 33.2 percent -- 10 percentage points up from last year, the report said. “Apple is rumored to be launching a new iPhone in the coming weeks, and that event, if it takes place, is going to heap even more pressure on Android in its home market,” said Strategy Analytics Executive Director Neil Mawston. BlackBerry’s market share dropped to 6.5 percent, with its smartphone shipping numbers dropping by more than a million units to 1.6 million. “Consumers, businesses and operators continue to be frustrated by BlackBerry’s limited touchscreen smartphone portfolio and repeated delays to its new BB10 operating system,” said Scott Bicheno of Strategy Analytics. Overall smartphone shipments in the U.S. fell 5 percent year-over-year, to 23.8 million units, the report said. Alex Spektor of Strategy Analytics called the quarter “one of the slowest growth rates ever experienced” by the U.S. smartphone market (http://xrl.us/bniqa5).