New America's Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge urged the FCC to make more use of use “use-it-or- share-it” rules to encourage carriers to make spectrum available on the secondary market. Industry groups instead backed rule liberalization to encourage more secondary market deals. Comments in docket 19-38 posted through Tuesday. In March, commissioners approved 5-0 an NPRM (see 1903150067) on how changes to spectrum partitioning, disaggregation and leasing rules “might further the agency’s goals of closing the digital divide and increasing spectrum access for small carriers and in rural areas.”

Industry commenters continued to push for tweaks to proposed competitive bidding rules for the upper 37, 39 and 47 GHz auction, slated to start Dec. 10 (see 1904120058). In initial comments, the Rural Wireless Association and Wireless ISP Association pressed for a more significant change -- smaller license sizes than the partial economic area licenses already agreed to by the FCC (see 1905170014). Replies were posted through Friday in docket 19-59.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere still expects the FCC and DOJ to approve the company’s buy of Sprint by the end of June. The FCC’s unofficial 180-day shot clock expires June 4, he said Thursday. “We remain optimistic and confident,” Legere said on a Q1 call. The company reported it spent $93 million advocating for the deal in the quarter.

The FCC is under increasing pressure to open more mid-band spectrum as 5G deployments start. Most agree none will be available before next year and the auction of the licensed tier of the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band. The other two main bands in focus at the FCC, 2.5 GHz and the C band, are expected to be opened after the 3.5 GHz auction. Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks are leading the effort.

With a federal decision on T-Mobile/Sprint likely close, the deal's fate is anything but certain. T-Mobile/Sprint also must pass state review, which some analysts see as a potential sticking point. Both stocks were down Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that DOJ staffers told the two companies the deal's unlikely to be approved as structured (see 1904160036). T-Mobile closed at $72.46, down 2.2 percent; Sprint at $5.64, down 6.16 percent. Analysts said the transaction's still alive, even if it’s in trouble.

Tower companies are reporting a general slowdown in carrier investment, Wells Fargo’s Jennifer Fritzsche told investors Thursday. Fritzsche cited discussion at a recent dinner she hosted for tower and wireless executives. AT&T is investing but not at the same level as the end of 2018, she said: T-Mobile is still building out its 600 MHz licenses, but there's “somewhat of a pause of lighting up new capacity sites until it sees how the [Sprint] merger plays out” (see 1904110026). Verizon is “taking a breath” on macro towers, she said. It seems "Q1 is not as robust as we hoped earlier the year in terms of carrier activity,” Fritzsche said. “All executives were positive as to the long term outlook on the business but our sense is muted expectations should be in place for the March quarter.”

Some changes are possible to the draft order on the 37 GHz band, teed up for a Friday vote by FCC members. The agency proposes rules for coordinating with DOD on future use of the upper 37 GHz band beyond current DOD sites located there. FCC and NTIA officials met to discuss the order Monday and a few tweaks are possible, government officials said.

Some wireless industry officials came away disappointed from CTIA’s 5G Summit Thursday (see 1904040048) that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai didn’t offer new details or make a more explicit commitment on the C band. CTIA President Meredith Baker said at the event the band offers the best opportunity for making more mid-band spectrum available quickly. Pai, who spoke at the end, said the FCC is looking closely at the band and repeated earlier comments that it’s unusually complicated. Pai said he was still “sitting down with engineers, economists and lawyers” working through the future of the band.

T-Mobile promised to continue to offer Lifeline service, should it get the OK to buy Sprint. “New T-Mobile has no contemplated end date to its participation in the Lifeline program, and the company has no intention to stop offering Lifeline in any state where T-Mobile and Assurance currently offer it,” the buyer wrote Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif. T-Mobile also countered Communications Workers of America complaints the company's buy of Iowa Wireless last year was bad for broadband in that state. CWA raised the issue in the context of the T-Mobile/Sprint deal. “IWireless’s 2G and 3G service was vastly inferior to the quality of T-Mobile’s mobile broadband,” T-Mobile told an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, said a filing posted Monday in docket 18-197. “IWireless had no low-band spectrum and relatively limited 4G LTE coverage. T-Mobile is already investing more than $70 million to transform the network by building out its 600 MHz spectrum and introducing 5G-ready sites throughout Iowa.” T-Mobile and Sprint engineering staff told the FCC team reviewing the deal the companies' "three-year network migration process was designed to minimize customer disruption and provide superior user experience at all stages of the migration.” They said their combination "would drive down the cost of capacity and coverage by making more efficient use of existing spectrum and other network assets.”

Despite all of the buzz about 5G, American Tower’s “view” is 4G “will continue to serve as the primary network for most of us for quite some time,” Senior Director-Investor Relations Igor Khislavsky told a Raymond James investment conference Monday. For the next five to 10 years, “if not longer, 4G is still going to be the underlying foundation of most mobile networks,” he said. Expect 4G “to be enhanced with 5G applications over time, especially when you get into new types of use cases for 5G,” including edge computing, autonomous driving and augmented reality, he said. As new spectrum gets deployed in the 600 MHz and 2.5 GHz bands, “equipment that's utilizing that spectrum gets placed on our towers incrementally, and that's where we benefit,” he said. The year 2021 seems a “reasonable” forecast for when the industry will “start seeing some meaningful deployments” of 5G, said Khislavsky. “The standard-setting process for 5G actually isn't complete yet,” he said. “Once you see some 5G handsets in the marketplace, once you obviously see those standards being set," it will be "a fairly rapid deployment,” he said.