CTIA told the FCC Thursday nationwide wireless carriers, working with Apple and Google, can provide accurate vertical location information on wireless calls to 911, based on tests by the industry’s 911 Location Technologies Test Bed. CTIA said AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon also verified the results independently. “We are proud to report the testing validates that device-based hybrid (DBH) z-axis location technology solutions, Google’s Android Emergency Location Service (ELS) and Apple’s Hybridized Emergency Location (HELO), together achieve ± 3-meter accuracy for at least 80 percent of wireless 9-1-1 calls,” said a filing in docket 07-114. The companies faced a 2021 deadline to be able to deliver vertical location data in the top 25 cellular market areas. CTIA said the COVID-19 pandemic delayed testing. “Despite the challenges of the pandemic, including building access, delayed permissions to enter, a compressed testing schedule, and more, the 9-1-1 Location Technologies Test Bed completed testing across more than 1,000 test points,” CTIA Chief Technology Officer Tom Sawanobori blogged: “The tests were more extensive than any previous test campaign, including a greater variety of test regions -- from dense, urban environments to rural communities -- a broader diversity of test buildings (taking into account various heights, construction materials, and building uses), 15 test devices, and more test points per building.”

Three-quarters of the world’s population by the end of 2024 will have its personal data covered under “modern privacy regulations,” predicted Gartner Tuesday. Since most organizations lack a “dedicated privacy practice,” the responsibility for “operationalizing” these requirements will be passed onto chief information security officers, said Gartner: “With the expansion of privacy regulation efforts across dozens of jurisdictions in the next two years, many organizations will see the need to start their privacy program efforts now.” Gartner predicts that large organizations’ average annual budgets for privacy will exceed $2.5 million by 2024, it said

The Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board plans an open meeting July 13-14 at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, says a National Institute of Standards and Technology notice for Tuesday’s Federal Register. The agenda is expected to include an NIST briefing on updates to its cybersecurity framework and formal introduction to the board of newly confirmed NIST Director Laurie Locascio, says the notice. The final agenda will be posted on the board’s website, it says.

The FCC’s legacy version of the commission registration system (CORES) will be decommissioned July 15 at 6 p.m., said the Office of Managing Director in a public notice Friday. The current version of CORES -- which the PN calls CORES2 -- has been in use since 2016, the PN said. “Users should be aware that they will need to register in CORES2 to gain online access” and manage their FCC registration numbers, the PN said. The FCC “is in the process of transitioning its various online systems to CORES2,” the PN said, and some systems will still accept legacy CORES passwords as well as CORES2 passwords after the decommission date, until they are also shifted to solely using CORES2, the PN said. Payment of regulatory fees will transition to CORES2 July 15, checking red light status will transfer Aug. 5, Universal Licensing System payments Aug. 26 and application fee payments Nov. 18, the PN said.

Broadcom will finance $32 billion of its proposed $61 billion VMware buy for cash and stock with new, "fully committed" debt financing from a “consortium of banks,” said the buyer Thursday. Broadcom also agreed to assume $8 billion in VMware debt, it said. The transaction is expected to close during Broadcom’s fiscal year ending October 2023. The deal includes a 40-day “go shop” provision enabling VMware to solicit bids from other potential buyers, it said. VMware Chairman Michael Dell has agreed to vote in favor of the deal, “so long as the VMware board continues to recommend the proposed transaction,” Broadcom said. Dell controlled 97.4% of VMware’s voting power as of a May 2021 proxy filing at the SEC. The VMware buy will take Broadcom and its business “to the next level,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan on a Thursday call with investors. “By adding VMware, we will bring significant scale to Broadcom’s software business.” Broadcom’s “target” is for VMware to contribute EBITDA of $8.5 billion “once we have fully integrated the company onto our platform,” said Tan. VMware on Thursday reported 3% revenue growth in its fiscal Q1 ended April 28 to $3.09 billion but canceled its quarterly earnings call due to the Broadcom transaction.

Congressional discussions about regulating or breaking up Big Tech are focused heavily around antitrust issues and wrongly ignore national security implications, former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said Wednesday in a CCIA/Foreign Policy webinar Wednesday. Any such legislation needs a robust review of national security implications before it's adopted, said Klon Kitchen, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow. Those Big Tech discussions suffer from "a problem of process," with the Senate Judiciary Committee taking the lead with national security input being omitted from the discussion, said Negroponte, now vice chairman of international trade consultancy McLarty Associates. He was among former national security officials signatories last fall to a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., warning about national security implications of some antitrust bills aimed at Big Tech. Negroponte said talk of breaking up Big Tech ignores the utility of scale, with tech giants more able to put billions into research into developing capabilities like quantum computing, AI and robotics. Big Tech being big "is not ... ipso facto bad," and breaking up Big Tech would disadvantage U.S. companies versus their foreign company rivals, he said. Legislation that would bar self-preferencing by Big Tech could end up hurting consumers, Kitchen said, pointing to Google using user-base insights to help preempt phishing attacks on Gmail uses, Kitchen said. "That's precisely the type of unintended consequences that need to be considered," he said. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S-2992/HR-3816) would curb self-preferencing. The tech that drives both national economies and military capabilities is coming largely out of the private sector for commercial purposes, with the private sector disrupting the national security burden born by governments, Kitchen said. While the U.S. response is for government to work collaboratively with industry, nations like China have fused their private sector and government together, directing both at state aims, he said. He said breaking up companies puts limits on their ability to innovate. He said it's not coincidental the companies operating at the greatest scale are driving emerging tech like AI. He said startups are able to be agile because of underlying capabilities and datasets that come from big incumbents and pointed to Google's TensorFlow machine learning platform.

Multi-gigabit broadband speeds "are the future and any service providers that haven’t already begun offering multi-gigabit speeds should be making plans now for offering them," broadband engineering consultancy Finley said Monday in a white paper looking at the state of cable and telecom 10G initiatives. While 10G "is still in its infancy," standards bodies have defined tech for supporting 25G speeds, it said.

The FCC deactivated the disaster information reporting system for the New Mexico wildfires, said a public notice in Friday’s Daily Digest. The FCC will "continue to monitor the status of communications services and work with providers and government partners as needed to support remaining restoration efforts," said the PN.

RS Access submitted a new engineering study on the use of the 12 GHz band for 5G to the FCC, which it said refuted interference concerns raised by SpaceX on an engineering analysis submitted a year ago (see 2109280059). RKF Engineering Solutions, which wrote the earlier report, performed the study. “RKF has considered comments addressing its May 2021 report and, in a study filed today, has again found that terrestrial 5G wireless broadband in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band can readily coexist with non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) fixed satellite service deployments, which use 10.7-12.7 GHz for downlink,” said a filing posted Friday in docket 20-443. “The probability of any harmful interference to NGSO operations is no greater than 0.15 … and the probability of any impact on actual users is likely to be substantially less,” the filing said. SpaceX didn’t comment Friday. The FCC is considering revamped rules for the band, with the Office of Engineering and Technology still evaluating the engineering analysis (see 2203210056).

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr criticized some policy calls the Commerce Department made in its notices of funding opportunity (NOFO) on grant programs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, saying they seem to favor fiber. Wireless industry officials expressed similar concerns (see 2205130054). Congress was “very clear about not having preferences for any one technology or one type of provider,” he said. The department’s rules “effectively negate that bipartisan decision by picking winners and losers in the extent that it puts a very strong thumb on the scale in favor of … fiber,” he said in a Thursday news conference. “Without the thumb on the scale, fiber would naturally prove its value and merit and win out in the lion’s share of cases,” he said. The NOFO takes decision-making away from the states, he said. Fiber also takes longer to build than wireless or satellite connections, he said. “That’s a mistake that will end up leaving people of the wrong side of the digital divide” longer than necessary, he said. “While the Infrastructure Act made clear that the law does not permit any rate regulation, the Commerce Department’s implementing rules head down that path anyways,” he said in a statement: The rules “also pursue a melange of extraneous political objectives that are unrelated to connecting Americans today. They include undue preferences for labor unions, government-run networks, and a Byzantine application process that will invite the imposition of additional conditions unrelated to quickly delivering high-speed service.” The rules also raise overbuilding concerns, he said.