Los Angeles County supports the Safer Buildings Coalition's request that the FCC launch a rulemaking on guidelines for getting consent from licensees to install signal boosters (see 2511130025), it said in comments filed Thursday in docket RM-12009. The county is “experiencing dynamic, wave-like rolling patterns on our public safety frequency spectrum,” the filing said. Interference is due to multiple public safety radios and bidirectional amplifier systems “interacting and adjusting their bandwidth usage in real-time, affecting over 500 known devices on our licensed spectrum.”
Airlines for America CEO Chris Sununu met with an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr last week about his industry’s work with wireless carriers on protecting radio altimeters in the upper C band. Sununu asked the agency to allow more time for comments than is proposed in a draft NPRM, set for a vote Thursday.
EchoStar’s Dish Wireless filed at the FCC a third amended petition for designation as an eligible telecommunications carrier in the federal default states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire and North Carolina, as well as the District of Columbia and all federally recognized tribal areas. The petition, posted Friday in docket 09-197, “amends and replaces in its entirety” a petition from April 2024, Dish said. Granting the ETC designation “serves the public interest because the Company is well-positioned to make wireless broadband services more robust and more affordable to low-income consumers.”
Service providers should file comments at the FCC opposing proposals to increase power levels in the citizens broadband radio service band or to reallocate the band, NCTA board member Sandra Howe urged Thursday in a blog post. The future of CBRS is “at risk,” she wrote. “CBRS democratizes mid-band spectrum” and “enables [wireless ISPs,] cable operators, schools, hospitals, utilities, farms, and local governments to build private and localized LTE/5G networks.” With county-level licenses, a three-tier sharing model “and a mature device ecosystem, CBRS has lowered the barrier to entry for operators who’ve historically lacked access to prime spectrum.”
The Augmented Reality Alliance, which is dedicated to “advancing” an “open and interoperable” AR ecosystem and supply chains, is now a division of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, said a news release Thursday. The alliance “provides a supportive and neutral environment for organizations of all sizes to take an active role in advancing and strengthening the augmented reality hardware development ecosystem,” the release said.
Reallocating spectrum in the U.S. often takes years, which is too long in an era of rapid change, said Iain Gillott, vice president of technology and innovation at the Wireless Infrastructure Association, in a blog post Thursday. 4G LTE could use a 20 MHz channel and was often deployed in 5 or 10 MHz channels, Gillott said, but “5G Advanced and 6G require much larger channel sizes to deliver the benefits promised.” The U.S. needs large and clean “lanes” of midband spectrum, “not leftover fragments.”
Communications platform company Infobip forecast that more than 3.9 billion messages will be exchanged worldwide between brands and customers during the upcoming holiday season, a 15% increase year over year. Rich communication services will be “the fastest-growing channel” this year, with volumes increasing 161% on Black Friday and 269% on Cyber Monday worldwide, the report said. SMS will remain the leading retail channel with almost 2.7 billion interactions.
Representatives for the Association of American Railroads raised concerns during a meeting with FCC Wireless Bureau staff about a proposed voluntary, negotiation-based process to transition 10 MHz in the 900 MHz band to broadband, with 5/5 MHz channels. In 2020, the FCC approved use of 3/3 MHz channels in the band for broadband while retaining 4 MHz for narrowband operations (see 2005130057).
AST SpaceMobile's direct-to-device commercial service agreement with Verizon (see 2510080001) gives AST a formal path to provide D2D cellular broadband to Verizon customers next year, CEO Abel Avellan told analysts in a call this week as the company announced its latest quarterly earnings. A broader commercial rollout of service with Bell Canada also is forthcoming, he said. AST remains on track for intermittent nationwide service in the U.S. in early 2026 and continued service later in the year. Avellan also noted that AST has more than $1 billion in contracted revenue commitments from its commercial partners. The company should finish 2025 with a manufacturing cadence of six satellites a month, he said, adding that its BlueBird 6 satellite should launch in the first half of December and BlueBird 7 "shortly thereafter." AST expects five orbital launches by the end of Q1 2026 and additional launches every month or two to get to 45-60 satellites by the end of 2026.
SpaceX and EchoStar on Wednesday submitted to the FCC updated license purchase agreements and public interest statements regarding SpaceX's proposed spectrum license purchases from EchoStar. The original public interest statements in docket 25-302 covered SpaceX's planned purchase of AWS-4 and AWS-H block spectrum and of EchoStar's authorizations for U.S. market access for 2 GHz mobile satellite service. The updated EchoStar and SpaceX filings also incorporate SpaceX's purchase of EchoStar's unpaired AWS-3 spectrum, a deal that was announced last week (see 2511060004).