Bid commitments reached $145.1 million in the 28 GHz band auction Tuesday, with provisionally winning bids on 2,367 of 3,072 licenses, said the FCC dashboard. The auction shut down for a Thanksgiving break. Bidding is to resume Monday with four more rounds.

It’s false for C Spire to claim T-Mobile refused to meet to discuss roaming and wholesale agreements, or that the combined company plans to accelerate the timeline to decommission Sprint’s CDMA network, T-Mobile wrote the FCC, posted Tuesday in docket 18-197. C Spire opposed the deal (see 1811080062). The companies have a “successful existing roaming agreement,” and had talks about future agreements with C Spire before and after T-Mobile/Sprint's unveiling, the buyer responded. C Spire is a top-five T-Mobile roaming customer by traffic, confirming "T-Mobile offers fair and competitive rates,” the bigger company said: C Spire may choose T-Mobile or Sprint rates post-transaction. The new company’s CDMA transition “provides a substantially longer transition" than Verizon,” T-Mobile said. C Spire didn't "make false or misleading statements," but "T-Mobile once again twisted the truth," emailed a C Spire spokesperson. T-Mobile has refused to meet since the smaller firm filed in opposition and "refuses to agree to reasonable, enforceable roaming and MVNO commitments" or "commit to a CDMA transition that will not harm rural customers," he said.

T-Mobile added an app to fight rising robocalls that reached 5.1 billion during October. The feature identifies who’s calling and their organization, including those not in a customer’s address book, for more than 600 million numbers, it announced Monday. The company told the FCC it's the first carrier to deploy an "industry-developed call-authentication system" and peer with others adopting similar industry-model tactics. Filings were being posted Monday in docket 17-97 on such efforts.

The top three smartphone makers will likely see market share decline in the 5G era, Strategy Analytics reported. “Every new generation of mobile technology has resulted in huge disruption with market leaders stumbling, losing position and in most cases never recovering their former glory.” Nokia peaked during 2G, lost a third of its share in 3G and “disappeared in the 4G world,” SA said: Motorola lost 80 percent of its global handset market share 2G peak-3G peak. Samsung doubled its share amid 3G, said SA. Analysts identified two main groups of vendors vying for 5G share: adaptive local players such as Sharp, ZTE and Sony, and global scale seekers Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo. “Competition on the basis of technology advantage will be extremely challenging and inevitably short lived without a healthy portfolio" of IP, said analyst Ken Hyers.

The FCC issued a wireless handset hearing-aid compatibility order that contains tweaks to a draft, some of which weren't flagged Thursday when commissioners unanimously adopted the item (see 1811150033). Noting the agency separately is considering broader HAC rule changes that may be appropriate if it requires 100 percent of covered handsets to be HAC-compatible, the order added language in paragraph 15 that said: "Per the schedule established in that proceeding, which we have no current plan to deviate from, the process through which the Commission would make a determination whether a 100 percent requirement is achievable would conclude at the end of 2022." The order in docket 17-228 and Monday's Daily Digest replaces annual service provider reporting with certification and enhanced website disclosure duties.

A 3-0 court panel upheld FCC denial of Worldcall Interconnect's (WCX) appeal of an Enforcement Bureau decision AT&T didn't violate data roaming rules. The denial wasn't flawed under "highly deferential" Supreme Court Auer v. Robbins and circuit precedent. WCX "sought and AT&T offered to provide" its commercial mobile data service (CMDS), wrote Judge Carolyn King, of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thursday in Worldcall v. FCC, No. 17-60736, making minor corrections to her Oct. 24 opinion. She noted CMDS providers "are required only to provide roaming agreements on commercially reasonable terms; they can discriminate in the terms." Judges reviewed the "determination of the commercial reasonableness of the rates," deferring to the agency. Assessing "the full weight of the evidence" to the FCC," we cannot say that the Commission’s decision was not supported by substantial evidence," King wrote for herself and Catharina Haynes. Concurring, Judge Jennifer Elrod would have concluded the data roaming rule applied "through a straightforward application of the regulation's text," not "through the labyrinth of Auer deference." Worldcall said it's "disappointed" but doesn't intend to appeal. "It is undisputed that under the rates approved in the agreement it is not feasible to roam on AT&T and offer a traditional competitive retail cellphone service," it emailed Friday. "You simply cannot pay a roaming partner more in roaming fees than you can charge a customer even when the roaming partner’s network is used well under 1/3rd of the time. ... This ruling means we must change how we negotiate with other carriers and it will limit our use of AT&T’s network when our customers and their devices roam."

The FCC should reconsider its wireless deployment declaratory ruling and order, said the Government Wireless and Technical Association, state municipal leagues from Mississippi, Alabama and others, New Orleans, and Middleburg, Virginia, in a petition for reconsideration posted Thursday in docket 17-79. They alleged the FCC “has manufactured a massive shift of corporate costs from carriers to municipal governments by exaggerating the number of abuses by a limited number of municipalities, while at the same time ignoring abuses by wireless providers.” The agency should “eliminate the maximum fees imposed in the Report and Order, eliminate the ill-conceived changes to the Shot Clock, and permit municipalities which have made significant efforts to reach agreements with telecommunications companies to deploy facilities to make decisions on truly local issues.” Some commissioners and industry officials have defended the rules.

The Air Line Pilots Association supported a petition by Aviation Spectrum Resources asking the FCC for a ruling that aeronautical operational control communications (CPDLC) be allowed in the lower 136 MHz band (see 1810170021). “Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications is a key capability being fielded by the Federal Aviation Administration as part of the NextGen program to modernize the nation’s air transportation system,” the association said in RM-11818, posted Wednesday. “As with many other data services including safety services, demand for messaging services has increased substantially in the recent past and will continue to do so with the deployment of the CPDLC capability.”

The Communications Workers of America slammed a new economic analysis of T-Mobile’s proposed deal with Sprint filed by the companies. The FCC sought comment Tuesday (see 1811130051). “Why is T-Mobile hitting the reset button and making a completely different argument than they have advanced up until now?” asked CWA Research and Telecommunications Policy Director Debbie Goldman. “This shift in strategy suggests that the company’s earlier economic arguments and analysis were not persuasive -- something we pointed out in our comments to the FCC.”

Verizon expects the first 5G handsets to be available in the first half of 2019 and this week completed the first call on a Motorola prototype, said Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis Wednesday at a Morgan Stanley European technology conference. “It's now nice to say we are officially in the 5G era.” The carrier expects to see the global standard version of 5G residential broadband equipment next year and at that point will expand its 5G launch, he said. In October, Verizon went live in parts of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento with fixed 5G (see 1810010028). The carrier is learning a lot from the pilot, Ellis said. “We're not just doing the install and leaving them, we're staying in touch with those customers and getting a lot of good feedback in terms of they like the significant increase in speed they're getting versus their prior broadband that they were getting from another third party.” Ellis praised the FCC's September small-cells order (see 1809260029). “The FCC understands that the industry is going to need incremental spectrum so that the ecosystem fully develops to 5G,” he said. “They've done a good job over the past couple of years identifying where that additional spectrum will come from and then trying to find ways to bring it to market as quickly as possible within the other rules.” Ellis credits the 5G Technology Forum, which Verizon formed with carriers in South Korea and Japan and equipment makers, with accelerating the move. Last December, the first 5G standard was approved, he noted. “Without that pressure from the coalition we formed, that wouldn't have happened … and we'd probably still be talking about 5G as 2020 technology.”