The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Pierce Bainbridge filed a class-action status-seeking lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers in California to stop the carrier and two data location aggregators “from allowing numerous entities -- including bounty hunters, car dealerships, landlords, and stalkers -- to access wireless customers’ real-time locations without authorization.” The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. “AT&T and data aggregators have systematically violated the location privacy rights of tens of millions of AT&T customers,” said EFF Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey. “Consumers must stand up to protect their privacy and shut down this illegal market.” In May, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel sent letters to CEOs of the carriers asking what they're doing to make sure real-time location information they collect isn’t being sold to aggregators (see 1905010167). Commissioner Geoffrey Starks also complained about companies selling data (see 1902080056). “The facts don’t support this lawsuit and we will fight it,” an AT&T spokesperson said now. “Location-based services like roadside assistance, fraud protection, and medical device alerts have clear and even life-saving benefits. We only share location data with customer consent. We stopped sharing location data with aggregators after reports of misuse.”

One U.S. agency is at odds with the FTC having won its case against Qualcomm over the company's alleged mobile chip monopoly. "The district court’s ruling threatens competition, innovation, and national security," said the government's "statement of interest" on the chipmaker's motion for partial stay of injunction pending appeal. "Its liability determination misapplied Supreme Court precedent, and its remedy is unprecedented. Immediate implementation of the remedy could put our nation’s security at risk, potentially undermining U.S. leadership in 5G technology and standard-setting." Qualcomm likely would succeed on the merits of the appeal, said the filing (in Pacer). The case began at the end of the Obama administration over dissent of the then-sole Republican commissioner. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose had issued a permanent injunction over some of the company's IP licensing practices (see 1905220035), which the defendant appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That's where the government made its new request, and where also this week, stakeholders including Ericsson backed (in Pacer) Qualcomm's partial stay request pending appeal. An FTC spokesperson declined to "comment on DOJ’s views on the Qualcomm case."

Rural broadband providers will start receiving funding this month in the third wave of last year's Connect America Fund Phase II auction, the FCC said Monday. This wave allocates $524 million in USF spending to expand broadband to more than 200,000 homes and businesses in 23 states. In the latest wave, the FCC authorized $39.2 million for broadband deployment in 26 rural New York counties through winning bidders Gtel, MTC Cable, Ostego Electric Cooperative, Slic and Verizon, the agency said, all of which bid to deliver downstream speeds of at least 100 Mbps and upstream speeds of 20 Mbps. Over the next several months, the FCC is expected to approve additional applications of winning bidders from last fall's auctions and authorize remaining funding totaling $1.488 billion to support broadband expansion to more than 700,000 rural locations over 10 years. Eventually, CAF could be replaced by a new 10-year, $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund proposed earlier this year at the White House (see 1904120065). Commissioners are expected to vote at the Aug. 1 meeting whether to release an NPRM, currently in draft form, on the RDOF (see 1907110031).

The operational status of communications services improved Monday in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi tracked by the FCC disaster information reporting system, said Monday's report on areas impacted by Tropical Storm Barry. By 11:30 a.m. EDT, only 0.5 percent of wireless cell sites were out of service in the 72 counties in the DIRS disaster area, compared to 1.7 percent a day earlier. The agency noted cell site outages don't necessarily translate into a customer losing service because coverage from cell sites can overlap. For wired communications, 53,123 subscribers in Louisiana experienced outages of cable or wireline service, which include phone, internet, TV or a combination of those services, and 462 subscribers in Mississippi suffered a cable or wireline outage Monday. All 17 TV stations in the area reported being operational on Monday, up from 16 on Sunday. One FM station, W266CD, reported being out of service.

There's “widespread agreement” mid-band spectrum is needed for 5G and the C-Band Alliance’s plan to make available only 180 MHz is “inadequate to meet those requirements and promote a competitive environment,” T-Mobile representatives, accompanied by auction economists, told the FCC. Most also want an FCC-run auction, it said. “Bidders know and understand the rules, policies, and practices the Commission has developed over more than twenty years of conducting spectrum auctions,” T-Mobile said: “These rules, policies, and practices are not easily replicated and offer full transparency, including for any payment terms.” The carrier sees growing support for clearing the band “by deployment of alternative transmission mechanisms, such as fiber.” The reps met staff from the Wireless and International bureaus and offices of Economics and Analytics; Engineering and Technology; and General Counsel. The CBA didn’t comment on the filing posted Monday in docket 18-122. “Our market-based process with the … auction design offers the quickest way to free up C-band spectrum for wireless 5G while protecting a content distribution system that serves nearly 120 million American households every day,” a CBA spokesperson emailed: The auction design “developed by the world's leading auction design experts is fast, efficient, fair, effective and transparent, and, combined with FCC oversight, serves the public interest.” America's Communications Association said it answered staff questions on a proposal made with the Competitive Carriers Association and Charter Communications. “The transition to fiber can be accomplished within eighteen months in urban areas (Stage 1), within three years in the majority of the remaining areas (Stage 2), and within five years for a few hard-to-reach areas (Stage 3),” ACA estimated. “The staggering of the transition among different types of areas means that, for a limited period of time, urban areas where the lower 370 MHz of the band has been cleared will neighbor areas where that spectrum is still used to provide satellite service to earth stations.” The Wireless ISP Association said it filed a recent study that “shows that current C-band earth stations are vastly overprotected, and right-sizing those protections can result in gigabit fixed broadband services for more than 80 million Americans, particularly in underserved communities.” The study was co-sponsored by WISPA, Google and Microsoft. An FCC decision is expected by the end of the year (see 1907090064).

The FCC has activated disaster information reporting in anticipation of the Gulf's Tropical Storm Barry, it said Friday. The FCC Operations Center will be available around the clock over the weekend for telecom providers affected by Tropical Storm Barry, said a public notice Friday. It can be reached at (202) 418-1122 or at FCCOPCenter@fcc.gov. The Public Safety and Homeland Security, International, Media, Wireline and Wireless Bureaus in a separate PN announced methods for requesting emergency special temporary authority.

Relying on census block reporting for broadband availability is problematic, with 2011 census data for Missouri residential structures disagreeing with other census block data used for Connect America Fund modeling 64 percent of the time, USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter blogged. He said USTelecom's pilot broadband mapping effort in the state found more than 4,000 census blocks with 100 percent more structures than the 2011 census data, and more than 13,000 census blocks where the structure count was between 81 and 100 percent less than 2011 census data. The FCC's Aug. 1 vote on new broadband mapping data-collection methods (see 1907110071), along with the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act (S-1822), are progress toward more accurate broadband mapping, he said in a post the association emailed Friday. He said USTelecom still expects to deliver findings on its mapping pilot project to the FCC by month's end, as expected (see 1906200048). In a docket 11-10 posting Friday, Free Press urged "caution" on reforms to the Form 477 reporting process that could result in less understanding of the U.S. broadband market. It worried about the USTelecom pilot being used to eliminate or lessen public access to the underlying data sets. It said Form 477's heavily criticized deployment data shouldn't be confused with its capacity and adoption data. It said 477 deployment data is generally "highly accurate and very useful," though there needs to be better geographic granularity in rural areas and a less-vague definition of deployment. It said FCC mobile broadband deployment maps contain "an unacceptable level of overstated availability," which its fixed broadband deployment maps don't, due largely to the differences in determining where a mobile signal is available vs. where a wireline is located. The group said telecom companies might claim address-level deployment data is competitively sensitive, while finished maps aren't: Remember that companies have "a history of ... non-disclosure requests." The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said Friday the FCC should update Form 477 methodology specifically to ensure better measurement of broadband availability in underrepresented and marginalized communities where connectivity historically lagged. It said the form should include data on pricing, quality of service and actual speeds, race and other key demographics and usage and subscription rates.

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said he’s disappointed about responses to his June letter (see 1906100025) to 14 providers seeking details on their plans to offer free, default call blocking services to consumers aimed at curbing robocalls. Some were posted Thursday, as the FCC held a robocall summit (see 1907110023). “Despite historically clamoring for new tools, it does not appear that all providers have acted with haste to deploy opt-out robocall blocking Services,” Starks said Friday: “The Commission spoke clearly: we expect opt-out call blocking services to be offered to consumers for free. Reviewing the substance of these responses, by and large, carriers’ plans for these services are far from clear.” Among the new responses, T-Mobile said it has long been helping customers fight scam calls. “T-Mobile’s scam-fighting tools are updated every six minutes through machine learning and artificial intelligence that looks at the behavior of a call -- a capability not available through applications,” the carrier said: “T-Mobile was the first to adopt this network-based approach specifically because network solutions provide real-time decisions on incoming calls, intelligent analysis of phone call and network-wide data, and an adaptable machine-learning based framework to stop the next scammer tactic.” Verizon said “components needed to provide consumers with meaningful protections from robocalls … exist today.” Frontier is evaluating “whether we can feasibly offer default call blocking services on an informed opt-out basis.”

FCC current broadband mapping, relying on a model where all homes in a census block are considered covered if a single home has access, overstates availability by 3.3 points, meaning roughly 4 million homes nationwide don't have broadband but are counted as covered, said Phoenix Center Chief Economist George Ford Thursday. He said overstatement rates are higher for rural regions. The study looked at Form 477 data for California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. It said mapping indicates 95.7 percent of households have broadband service there under the all-in census block assumption, but his model predicts 92.4 percent nationwide. The FCC will vote in August on new broadband mapping data collection procedures (see 1907110071).

A 4-1 NPRM would make permanent a five-year budget approach to funding internal connections (including Wi-Fi) for schools and libraries under the USF E-rate program, the FCC said on docket 13-184 Tuesday. It follows a five-year test period due to expire this year (see 1906190019) that replaced a previous approach granting funds to individual schools and libraries two out of five years. The FCC will consider whether to move to a school-districtwide budget application process and a similar library-systemwide one, and how to address logistical challenges if it does. The agency wants comment on whether it needs to find a new way to calculate funding for small, rural schools and libraries. In a statement of partial dissent, Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said he "cannot endorse maintaining elements that I have always considered problematic, including the flatly absurd idea" to allocate libraries' E-rate support on a per square foot basis. O'Rielly, partially dissenting, hopes "our next action with respect to E-Rate will be laser-focused on eradicating USF-funded overbuilding" that use Category 1 E-rate funds. Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks issued statements endorsing the NPRM (see 1907080068). "In this rulemaking, the agency seeks to sustain and extend the impact of these Wi-Fi policies for future generations of students and library patrons," Rosenworcel said. Starks doesn't support reverting to the prior funding approach because "the lack of certainty of funding under the prior methodology discouraged schools and libraries from applying for funding for Wi-Fi networks." Comments are due 30 days after Federal Register publication, replies 15 days later. The NPRM was adopted June 28.