The FCC approved a complicated deal in which Sprint affiliate Shentel will acquire Sprint wholesale partner nTelos Wireless and spin off some of its assets to Sprint, including spectrum. In return, Sprint agreed to pay Shentel up to $252 million over five to six years. The FCC ordered Sprint to sell off some of the spectrum in markets in Virginia. The companies unveiled the deal in August (see 1508100063). The order was handed down Friday by the chiefs of the Wireless and International bureaus.
The U.S. in 2015 “extended its long-standing position as the top source of international patent applications,” the World Intellectual Property Organization said in a Wednesday report. International patent applications filed under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system grew 1.7 percent to 218,000 in 2015, setting a new annual record, WIPO said. “Innovators based in the U.S. have filed the largest annual number of international patent applications for 38 years running,” it said. “Still, large increases in patent-filing activity by China-based innovators accounted for much of the overall growth.” The U.S., with 57,385 international patent applications, remained the largest user of the PCT system last year, despite a 6.7 percent decline in the number of applications from a year earlier, it said. WIPO attributes the 2015 U.S. decline to “an unusually large number of filings in 2014" spurred by changes in the U.S. patent system under the America Invents Act, it said. In 2015, the U.S. was followed by Japan (44,235 PCT filings) and China (29,846) among the top international patent filers, WIPO said. Asia more than doubled its share of all PCT applications filed since 2005, reaching 43 percent of the total, it said.
AT&T said CLECs want the FCC to reregulate ILEC fiber-based ethernet services in addition to legacy copper-based “TDM” services, as part of its special access business broadband review. Ethernet regulation would require a new proceeding but still would make no sense, said an AT&T blog post Wednesday by Caroline Van Wie, assistant vice president-federal regulatory. Incompas, which represents CLECs, Sprint and others, said ethernet has been part of special access proceedings for years and incumbent telcos still have "market power" in dedicated connections to most business customers, justifying further regulation. The FCC had no comment.
Industry can work out solutions to pave the way for sharing the 28 GHz and other bands that the FCC is considering for 5G, said Joan Marsh, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory, at the agency's spectrum frontiers workshop Thursday. AT&T contacted the Satellite Industry Association about the 28 GHz band after the FCC released an NPRM in October, Marsh said. The panel offered an industry perspective on the kind of sharing proposed by the FCC in the NPRM (see 1510220057).
Business professionals in many industries see IoT making a big shift toward “mainstream adoption” in 2016, Gartner said Thursday in a survey report. The research firm canvassed 465 firms in 18 business sectors globally in November and found 29 percent using IoT products or services, it said. An additional 14 percent are planning to implement IoT in the coming 12 months, with 21 percent more planning to implement IoT after 2016, it said. “The number of organizations adopting IoT will grow 50 percent in 2016, reaching 43 percent of organizations overall.” In the “aggregate,” 64 percent “plan to eventually implement IoT,” it said. “It is also important to note that another 38 percent have no plans to implement IoT, including 9 percent that see no relevance whatsoever in the technologies.” IoT adoption remains low because “many organizations have yet to establish a clear picture of what benefits the IoT can deliver, or have not yet invested the time to develop ideas for how to apply IoT to their business,” Gartner said. "However, we are poised for a marked shift in focus toward customer-facing benefits for planned IoT implementations, positioning IoT as a key competitive marketplace weapon going forward."
Windstream plans to invest $38 million this year to improve Internet speeds, said a Wednesday news release from the company. Throughout the year, Windstream will deploy technology with new capabilities, including software that extends faster speeds further in the network, the telco said. In addition to improved network reliability and speeds, about 20 percent of customers in Georgia can get Internet speeds of up to 100 Mbps, it said.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau and EchoStar are in a disagreement over security issues for satellite communications terminals. The bureau, in a filing Tuesday in RM-11664, said it was supplementing a previous EchoStar ex parte filing on a meeting between EchoStar and FCC staff over proposed uses of the 28 GHz and 38 GHz bands. At the meeting, FCC staff questioned fixed satellite service security readiness and provided an IOActive presentation describing numerous security vulnerabilities in terminals, such as back doors, hard-coded credentials, insecure protocols and weak password resets. According to the FCC, EchoStar "stated that it was familiar with the IOActive research paper but indicated it contained some inaccuracies, without elaborating." The FCC, in a footnote in Monday's filing, said its staff "is not aware of any inaccuracies associated with this research."
Windstream CEO Tony Thomas sought to reassure Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., about his company’s commitment to serving north Georgia. Collins had written to Windstream complaining of the “hundreds upon hundreds” of complaints his office gets about the company (see 1602160064). Since Thomas took over as CEO in December 2014, “we have worked tirelessly on a comprehensive overhaul of the entire company’s network and processes,” Thomas told Collins in a letter Monday. “Windstream is on a different strategic path today and we have already made significant progress in Georgia and the Ninth Congressional District. This progress comes despite the rural nature of the area, which makes it physically and economically challenging to deliver high-speed Internet and voice services.” He included tables showing Windstream’s “strong record of investment” in Georgia and specifically Collins' 9th district. The tables include projected 2016 figures of $38 million going to Georgia, with 95 percent of funds going toward speed capabilities listed at 3 Mbps-plus, 84 percent to 10 Mbps-plus and 48 percent going to 20 Mbps-plus. Those percentages are all higher than the breakdown for 2015’s $63 million. “In recent years in the Ninth District and Georgia as a whole, we have converted nearly all of our middle mile plant to fiber and upgraded the electronics to work with these new fiber facilities,” said Thomas. “As a result, 97 percent of the customers in your district are now served by a fiber-fed node for their broadband, which will eliminate back-haul congestion. With this investment and our upgraded plant, we now offer faster speeds (10-100 Mbps) to 77 percent of the locations we serve in the Ninth Congressional District.” Thomas cited work on 53 more sites in the first 56 days of 2016 in Georgia’s 9th district. “As these efforts continue, we will end 2016 with fewer than two percent of our customers served by middle mile copper facilities and 86 percent of households in your district capable of receiving 10 Mbps or faster high-speed Internet service,” Thomas said. He cited three initiatives for north Georgia, focused on better communication to customers, local leadership and a rapid response team. “I will establish a team, based in Cornelia, to respond specifically to any Ninth District customers who contact your office,” Thomas assured Collins, repeating an earlier invitation for a meeting by phone or in person. Collins dismissed Windstream's response as "more of the same," in a statement Monday. "I appreciate the establishment of a ‘rapid response team’ in Cornelia, but this isn’t simply an issue of poor customer service," Collins said. "As a recipient of federal funding, and preferred tax status, Windstream is accountable to Congress, and their customers in Northeast Georgia, for their business practices. Customer service is not the problem -- I’ve talked to many qualified professionals who work for the company, who understand that the real problems are with woefully inadequate infrastructure. Windstream can establish all the hotline phone numbers they want, but until they take their responsibility to rural communities seriously, I will continue to hold them accountable for how they spend federal funding."
The FCC released information Tuesday on the number of handsets, by air interface, that individual carriers offered last year, as well as data on whether they satisfy hearing aid compatibility (HAC) requirements. The data show wide variations. AT&T, for example, offered 125 different handset models for GSM service and all but six were usable with hearing aids. All of the models offered by Verizon Wireless complied with the HAC rules. Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, in comparison, offered 48 GSM handsets and 22 weren't HAC compliant. Docomo Pacific offered 98 GSM handsets and 38 were noncompliant. Puerto Rico Telephone had 300 handsets on its rolls and 200 were noncompliant.
A year after launching its Sling TV over-the-top service, Dish Network continues to look for additional channels, and plans a user interface upgrade. "Twenty channels was pretty easy," CEO Charlie Ergen said in a conference call on Q4 results replayed Thursday. "When you're looking through 80 or 90, you need something better." Ergen said Dish "would still like to have two to three other content providers participating" on Sling and is "working closely" to find them -- the pitch being incremental customer and advertising growth.