The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau in separate orders this week conditionally certified Nagish and InnoCaption to receive compensation from the interstate telecommunications relay services fund for providing IP relay service. However, the companies must demonstrate that their service “meets or exceeds” the commission’s minimum TRS standards. The authorizations run through Dec. 23, 2026, “or the date of grant or denial of full certification, whichever occurs earlier,” the orders said. “Nagish proposes to provide IP Relay on a fully automatic basis, i.e., using text-to-speech technology to deliver the IP Relay users’ communications to hearing call participants and using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to deliver hearing parties’ communications to IP Relay users, without any reliance on communications assistants (CAs),” the bureau said: “Nagish states that it has contracts with various vendors to render speech into text using ASR and can incorporate new ASR vendors as needed.” InnoCaption “proposes to provide IP Relay using either ASR-only or human stenographers, at the IP Relay user’s option, to transcribe the other party’s communications for the IP Relay user,” said the second order. “InnoCaption additionally proposes to use a text-to-speech engine in lieu of a CA to relay the IP Relay user’s text communications to the hearing party.”

Reduced capability (RedCap) technology is a feature of 3rd Generation Partnership Project 5G Release 17 and will likely transform the IoT, an Ericsson blog post said. “RedCap is specifically designed for devices like industrial sensors, wearables, and video streaming equipment, prioritizing simplicity and efficiency,” the post said: “RedCap achieves this by reducing device complexity through fewer antennas, narrower bandwidth, and lower power consumption. This simplification allows RedCap-enabled devices to have a smaller processing footprint and longer battery life.” Nearly 4 billion IoT devices are in use worldwide and “RedCap's simplified 5G solution is expected to accelerate" that growth. Somnath Dutta, Ericsson solution architect, and Bandit Sundaramani, 5G senior technical expert at MediaTek, were the post's authors.

New Year’s Eve 2023 put a heavy demand on networks of major carriers worldwide that resulted in degradation as the world greeted 2024, Ookla Research said this week. “What is clear is that the New Year presents network operators with the challenge of serving sufficient bandwidth to customers attending major New Year celebrations, allowing them to share the moment, but also to support the mass wishing of ‘Happy New Year’ across a variety of channels.” For example, Belgian carrier Proximus saw a 95% increase in mobile data traffic on New Year’s Eve in 2023 compared with a year earlier. Ookla focused on speeds from the worst 10% of connections in several markets. Berlin, London, New York and Paris “saw 5G download speeds for 10th percentile drop by between 1.13 Mbps and 6.88 Mbps,” while Bangkok, Hong Kong and Sydney “saw performance drop by between 15.13 Mbps and 21.44 Mbps.”

President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration “promises to make deregulation cool again” and deepen the focus on network security, John Strand of Strand Consult blogged this week. “Network security policy is essentially bipartisan and will continue, if not strengthen, and indeed, it spans many years across both parties,” Strand wrote. Mobile telecom networks “are critical infrastructure on which every nation’s digital economy and information society depends.” China won’t change its ways and “foreign actors will shift production and investment away from China and [move] to other parts of the world.” However, China will continue making "financial and geopolitical offers to nations which are difficult to refuse ... [and] defend itself more aggressively." Beijing will do this “by building on the narrative that it is a peaceful nation that wants enterprise and that the US and others should not meddle in what they sell to who[m].” Strand said the second Trump administration will distance itself from the focus on open radio access networks. “OpenRAN has failed as a commercial and security solution,” he said: “Its interoperable interfaces and software are not 1:1 substitutes for classic network technologies, and the effort includes participation of Chinese government companies, making it insecure.”

Verizon updated the FCC in a required semi-annual report on the company’s compliance with regulatory requirements approved as part of Verizon's Tracfone acquisition three years ago (see 2111220069). The carrier noted that Q3 saw the strongest results from the subsidiary since it became part of the company. “Most significantly, the Verizon Value Operations organization has undergone a number of changes over the past six months to more effectively and efficiently deliver results to customers, which is driving positive performance results,” said the report, posted Monday in docket 22-210. “Over the past three years, Verizon has continually enhanced its compliance program to adjust for changing organizational structures and business environments, with an overarching goal of continuous improvement with all aspects of its compliance program.” Parts of the report were redacted.

LG Electronics USA withdrew its August request for a waiver of FCC cellular vehicle-to-everything rules (see 2408150044). In a filing posted last week in docket 19-138, the company said the request is no longer necessary following the FCC’s recent order (see 2411210054) updating rules for the 5.9 GHz band.

NTIA's request for comments regarding L-band direct-to-device operations (see 2412200060) refers to out-of-band-emission limits on mobile devices that might be able to connect to a terrestrial base station.

ARIA Sensing announced on Monday the launch of what it says is a “groundbreaking” ultra-wideband radar system-on-chip (SoC) offering 3D beamforming with programmable bandwidth up to 1.8 GHz. “The ‘Hydrogen’ SoC introduces advanced waveforms supporting both single-pulse and pulse-compression capabilities, delivering unparalleled precision in radar sensing application,” the Italian company said. Beamforming is a technology that improves the signal-to-noise ratio of received signals, more accurately directing a wireless signal toward a specific receiving device.

The FCC Wireless Bureau last week granted nine additional licenses in the 900 MHz broadband segment to PDV Spectrum. Six licenses are in Texas, two in Missouri and one in Iowa. The FCC approved an order in 2020 reallocating a 6 MHz swath in the band for broadband, while maintaining 4 MHz for narrowband operations (see 2005130057).

NTIA is investigating possible L-band direct-to-device (D2D) service impacts on GPS. In a notice Thursday, it said that given the growing deployments of consumer equipment that could operate on mobile satellite service (MSS) networks near the L-1 GPS signal at 1575.42 MHz, it is requesting public comments on the risk of interference into GPS by those D2D L-band services and potential routes for mitigation. It said the L band's MSS rules contain "substantially more relaxed" out-of-band emission (OOBE) limits than are placed on fixed satellite service operations in the band. "The wide deployment of devices subject to the MSS limit thus presents an unexpected increase in the risk of interference to nearby GPS receivers." It added that it is seeking input from D2D providers about actual OOBE of the devices and the potential for limiting these further, as well as from GPS manufacturers and users about documented instances of harmful interference from MSS L-band devices and ways of mitigating that while minimizing the impact on MSS service. NTIA's notice hasn't yet been published in the Federal Register.