T-Mobile last year canceled more than 500 millimeter-wave spectrum licenses it won in auctions, and all appear to be in the 28 GHz band, Spektrum Sense said Wednesday. “It would seem that the 28 GHz licenses would be more difficult to meet the covered population criteria for substantial service since each of the licenses are for individual counties,” the firm said. The other millimeter wave licenses that T-Mobile has cover the much larger partial economic areas, “providing at least one population dense county where a significant portion of the PEA population can be served.”

Michael Calabrese, representing the Open Technology Institute at New America, spoke with an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on some of the group’s priorities at the new FCC. Calabrese urged “a rapid resolution” of remaining issues in the FCC’s 2020 6 GHz Further NPRM. He explained “why the authorization of a somewhat higher maximum power level,” 8 dBm/MHz power spectral density level for indoor-only use, is “important for continued U.S. leadership in next generation Wi-Fi, and to ensure affordable high-capacity Wi-Fi 6/7 connectivity for virtually all consumers, businesses and community anchor institutions,” according to a filing this week in docket 18-295. Calabrese encouraged the FCC to complete work on mobile handset unlocking rules teed up in the last administration (see 2407180037). Moreover, he asked about the status of FCC work on the lower 12 GHz band (see 2411270046). In 12 GHz, “coordinated sharing is clearly feasible between the fixed satellite incumbents and proposed fixed terrestrial point-to-point and point-to-multipoint services” in the band, the filing said.

The Wi-Fi Alliance disputed the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition's arguments against an FCC waiver allowing automated frequency coordination systems in the 6 GHz band to take building entry loss (BEL) into account for “composite” standard-power and low-power devices that are restricted to operating indoors (see 2501060060). FWCC claims that the waiver “conflicts with established Commission policy because [the Office of Engineering and Technology] failed to articulate ‘special circumstances beyond those considered during regular rulemaking,’” the alliance said in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 23-107. FWCC also “claims that this established Commission policy was violated because (i) the circumstances were already considered during a rulemaking proceeding; and (ii) the circumstances were insufficiently different from those considered during the rulemaking proceeding,” the alliance said. “Neither claim is accurate and, therefore, does not support granting FWCC’s requested relief.”

Responsible Enterprises Against Consumer Harassment (REACH) filed an emergency petition at the FCC Monday asking the agency to stay implementation of its one-to-one robotext consent rules, which commissioners approved in December 2023 (see 2312130019). The petition cites President Donald Trump's order on Monday (see 2501210070) requiring that agencies review all orders issued under the Biden administration. “The FCC’s one-to-one consent ruling was published in the Federal Registrar with an effective date of January 27 … but has not yet taken effect,” the petition said. Consistent with the regulatory freeze, REACH asked the commission to “immediately stay the effective date of the one-to-one rule until March 18, 2025, and re-open a comment period to consider issues of fact, law, and policy raised by the rule.” While the group “generally supports the one-to-one rule it has filed comments suggesting important modifications to help small businesses better comply with the rule,” said attorney Eric Troutman of Troutman Amin.

Don't count on ubiquitous connectivity from space to replace the need for terrestrial wireless networks anytime soon, given the technical, economic and regulatory challenges, analyst Kim Kyllesbech Larsen wrote Monday. Providing service comparable to terrestrial cellular networks means addressing such hurdles as the difficulty of uplink signals reaching satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) due to cellular devices transmitting at low power, and those uplink signals interfering with one another, he said. There still needs to be development of advanced phased-array antennas for satellites, as well as dynamic beam management, he said. Another challenge is addressing bandwidth limitations and efficiently reusing spectrum while minimizing interference with terrestrial or other satellite networks. He said frequency allocations varying across countries and regions means that scaling globally requires dealing with diverse and complex spectrum licensing agreements, which can slow deployment. The high density of base stations in terrestrial networks lets them handle much greater traffic volumes than LEO, especially for data-intensive applications, he said.

Public interest groups filed in support of the FCC’s 3-2 April decision (see 2404290044) fining T-Mobile $80 million for allegedly failing to safeguard data related to customers' real-time locations. T-Mobile was also fined $12.2 million for violations by Sprint, which it later acquired. In the Telecom Act, “Congress entrusted [the FCC] with the responsibility of holding the nation’s largest telecommunications providers accountable when those carriers violate the privacy of their subscribers,” the groups said in an amicus brief. Congress intended that Section 222 "ensure that telecommunications providers would protect personal data collected from their customers, and intentionally included broad definitions and gave the Commission clear authority to interpret them as technologies evolved,” they added: “Decades later, it has become clear that one of the most sensitive categories of data that telecommunications providers collect about their customers is mobile location data.” The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Public Knowledge filed the brief. They urged the D.C. Circuit to "reject T-Mobile’s arguments and hold that the text and purpose of Section 222 clearly authorize the FCC orders under review.” If carriers prevail, “they will have successfully evaded virtually all means of legal accountability for violating their customers’ privacy, including data sold to bounty hunters.” Letting carriers avoid FCC authority “will mean that there is essentially no backstop to enforcing the privacy rights Congress guaranteed consumers under the Communications Act.”

NTIA on Friday awarded more than $19 million in the final batch of grants from the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund’s second notice of funding opportunity. Nearly $10 million went to DeepSig for a project enabling open radio unit and chipset vendors “to implement advanced AI functions to engender a healthy and cost competitive massive multiple input, multiple output Open Radio Unit ecosystem,” the announcement said. Another $9.5 million went to Recon RF, which is developing “Ultra-Efficient Front-End-Modules” for 5G and 6G open radio units, NTIA said.

Georouting of texts to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline -- like calls to the hotline -- won't use a caller's exact physical location but be based on broader geographic data, preserving privacy, according to Lifeline administrator Vibrant Emotional Health. In a filing posted Friday (docket 18-336), Vibrant said georouting of texts would likely use identical or similar boundaries to those developed during proof of concept for voice calls, minimizing user-specific data.

Velocity Communications asked the FCC to extend by six months the deadline to remove Chinese components from its networks to comply with the agency's rip-and-replace program. The company warned that its future is at stake and it needs more funding to proceed. Congress recently allocated an additional $3.08 billion to close the funding shortfall in the FCC’s Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program (see 2412240036). “What started as a 1-year project timeline to complete the network overhaul has turned into a multi-year effort to save the business from becoming insolvent,” a filing posted Friday in docket 18-89 said.

Axon Networks told the FCC that because it agreed to use the common testing portal, the Office of Engineering and Technology was justified in allowing the company to conduct a 20-day public test of its 6 GHz automated frequency coordination (AFC) system. Axon responded to the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition, which said the usual 45-day period should have been required (see 2501140078). Axon noted that OET also allowed a 20-day period for tests by C3Spectra last year and no one objected. “Lack of prior objections notwithstanding, OET’s decision to give the affected applicants the option of a shortened public testing period where a common testing portal would be leveraged was both ‘reasonable and reasonably explained,’” said a filing posted Friday in docket 21-352. In the 2023 testing procedures public notice, “OET highlighted the expected benefits of a single point of entry for testing all AFCs, and it gave applicants the option of using a common Internet-based test portal with other AFC systems in lieu of setting up their own public trial test portal,” Axon said.