Crown Castle said it installed a record number of small cells in 2018 and expects to double that to 10,000-15,000 nodes in 2019. “We have a line of sight into meaningful small cell revenue growth beyond 2019,” CEO Jay Brown said Thursday on an earnings call. “Our customers continue to invest heavily in their 4G networks to keep pace with data demand growth from existing technologies, while the deployment of 5G is just getting started.” The scale of data growth is “staggering” with mobile data traffic in 2022 expected to be five times the volume of all internet traffic in the U.S. in 2005, Brown said. “I get even more excited when I consider how early we are in the digital transformation of the U.S. economy and the critical role mobile infrastructure will play. I think we’re just scratching the surface.” The tower owner reported earning $213 million for Q4, compared with $98 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue rose 15 percent to $1.21 billion. The revised outlook for 2019 "reflects a consistent march toward small cell densification with a growing pipeline of ~25k nodes over the next 18-24 months," Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong wrote investors Thursday. "Though municipality/FCC approvals can create a bottleneck, it appears to be easing. T-Mobile/Verizon-insourced small cells also present a threat." Crown Castle "continues to ramp small cell volumes and revenue, but again, higher costs ate into returns because colocation economics are much worse on small cells than on towers," wrote New Street Research's Spencer Kurn Wednesday night.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit it shouldn’t delay the Feb. 25 deadline for the FCC to file a final brief in the tribal challenges to a March wireless infrastructure order, in United Keetoowah Band v. FCC, No. 18-1129. Other tribes, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and the National Trust for Historic Preservation supported that argument (in Pacer). The FCC Wednesday asked for additional time citing the partial federal shutdown (see 1901230047). Other tribal interests led by the Blackfeet Tribe filed in support of the FCC (in Pacer): “The Blackfeet Petitioners themselves are enduring extreme hardships in the shutdown, with federal and tribal workers furloughed and services like healthcare, law enforcement, and schools closed and unavailable.”

Public safety will see more wearables for dispatch and hardened LTE handsets in 2019, Public Safety Network co-founder Jason Karp blogged Wednesday. Other predictions: consolidation in the land-mobile radio market. “Significant strides being made in public safety LTE are putting pressure on LMR providers to innovate and rethink their legacy business models,” he said. There will be an “uptick in public safety technology startups” and public safety broadband networks will be offered in at least three other countries this year based on FirstNet's success, he said.

Verizon is likely to be “the big winner” in the 28 GHz auction (see 1901220041), which is nearing an end, Wells Fargo’s Jennifer Fritzsche said in a Wednesday note to investors. Verizon is likely to further its big lead over competitors in high-band holdings, she said: It has five times as much as AT&T and 11 times that of T-Mobile. AT&T likely will be a major player in the upcoming 24 GHz auction, she said. There, “the FCC is essentially offering nationwide spectrum with larger swaths of markets,” Fritzsche said. “This auction should bring in more interest from the carriers … as it offers more of a clean slate of size vs. more ‘fill in’ opportunities.” The pricing in the auction is about .0111 cent per MHz/POP, a “slight discount” to the .017 cent paid by Verizon for Straight Path in 2017, but still above expectations, Fritzsche said.

T-Mobile's C-band clearing plan leaves unresolved critical issues that will likely result in long delays in reassigning spectrum in the band, Auctionomics said in an FCC docket 18-122 filing dated Monday. Auctionomics said it was hired by the C-Band Alliance. It said T-Mobile's idea of requiring satellite operators to participate in an auction and give up some C-band capacity would encourage them "to resist in every way they can," resulting in "a 'Disincentive Auction.'" Auctionomics criticized the plan as not weighing bids by buyers and sellers to find the most efficient quantity or timing of spectrum reassignments. It said T-Mobile's plan tries to make all the satellite operators join a consortium that would make decisions about cost and revenue sharing without providing any incentives for joining. T-Mobile's plan -- "merely a sketch" -- doesn't justify such decisions as the portion of auction revenue that would go to satellite operators or spell out how the revenue would be shared among those operators. It said the T-Mobile plan to try to encourage the satellite operators to give up 500 MHz of C band in exchange for 80 percent of the auction revenue "would eliminate the C-band satellite business entirely." T-Mobile didn't comment Wednesday.

The FCC asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to delay the Feb. 25 deadline for the final brief in the tribal challenges to a March wireless infrastructure order, in United Keetoowah Band v. FCC, No. 18-1129, "until seven days after the Commission receives funding and resumes normal operations." The agency "contacted petitioners about this motion" but was "unable to ascertain their position,” it said Wednesday (in Pacer). During the shutdown, FCC attorneys are “prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances,” the commission said.

The FCC’s 28 GHz auction hit $701.8 million Tuesday, after 160 bidding rounds. The FCC sped up the auction to eight rounds per day from six, starting Friday. Eight more 20-minute rounds are scheduled for Wednesday.

The Citizens Broadband Radio Service Alliance is adding members like the Wireless ISP Association, working with ATIS, and released a certification tool developed with Radisys, the CBRS alliance said Monday. “Now with more than 120 members, the Alliance is seeing a new set of organizations beginning to engage in the OnGo ecosystem,” it said. Cisco Wireless Chief Technology Officer Matthew MacPherson joined the alliance’s board, the group said.

The FCC is doing what it can to speed the deployment of 5G in the U.S., FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in taped remarks to the European 5G Conference in Brussels. Carr wasn’t able to travel because of the partial federal government shutdown and sent the taped remarks, which he also posted on YouTube Tuesday. “The question for regulators like me is what can we do to make sure that this transition to 5G happens quickly and happens ubiquitously,” Carr said. “There’s no question that 5G is going to be transformative, both from a technological perspective, but also an economic perspective,” Carr said. While 4G “ushered in this app economy that transformed the way that we live, we work and we play, 5G is going to be even more transformative,” he said. “Everything that you do on your smartphone today is going to be better and faster.” Carr said the FCC has updated its rules on infrastructure for a 5G world and is focused on making “large blocks of contiguous spectrum” available. Currently, the FCC is “finishing” its first auction of high-band spectrum in the 28 GHz band, with the 24 GHz auction set to start "right after that," he said. Carr also emphasized the importance of workforce development. Deploying next-generation networks “is tough work,” he said. “It’s a lot of hardhats and bucket trucks, excavators and harnesses.”

It's estimated $1,500 cost will be a major “stumbling block” for Motorola’s Razr foldable smartphone, expected to debut in the U.S. this year exclusively through Verizon, blogged Strategy Analytics. “The price may end up looking cheap,” as SA speculates Samsung’s first foldable phone “will likely have a retail price of at least $2,000." The Razr “will be entering a crowded field,” SA said Thursday. Besides Samsung, Huawei, LG and others have announced foldable smartphones for 2019, it said. That “actual volumes” available for sale this year “will be extremely small” makes it likely that foldable smartphones will become “the ultimate device status symbol in 2019,” it said.