Representatives of TracFone met with FCC Wireline Bureau staff to explain the company’s push to get the FCC to stay or voluntarily defer the Dec. 1 effective date of a rule reducing from 60 to 30 days the period for de-enrolling Lifeline customers who don't use the service. The change would mean higher costs for Lifeline providers and Universal Service Administrative Co., “and, most importantly, would disrupt service to many low-income Lifeline-eligible households who are enrolled in the Lifeline program and who intend to remain,” TracFone said in a filing in docket 11-42. “The most common reasons for non-usage include temporary absence from the country, illness or incapacity and misplaced or broken handsets,” the carrier said. TracFone said about 25 percent of those de-enrolled after 60 days of non-usage re-enroll the following month and that number is likely to “increase dramatically” if the non-usage period is reduced to 30 days.

CTIA took on some recent filings urging the FCC to impose tough privacy rules on ISPs, in a document at the agency. Among the arguments countered were those by Paul Ohm, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, who said in a June filing that if the final rules follow the proposed rules, “they will help give consumers what they have repeatedly asked for and deserve: a modicum of choice and control over the way information about them is collected and used online.” The arguments “fail to resolve gating questions that have plagued this proceeding from the beginning,” CTIA said. Ohm’s arguments, for example, ignore “Congress’s decision to require opt-in consent in only two very specific cases: in connection with (1) the use or disclosure of call location information concerning the user of a CMRS device or IP-enabled voice service for non-specified purposes, and (2) the use of automatic crash notification data for purposes other than such notification,” CTIA said. The FCC should stick instead with the FTC’s “effective, technology-neutral, sensitivity-based” approach to privacy, CTIA said in docket 16-106.

​Social media is increasingly important to public safety agencies, FirstNet said in a Friday blog post. “These days, you probably use social media to update your audience on what you are doing, share an interesting article or two, and catch up on the day’s news,” the authority said. “Government agencies -- federal, tribal, state, and local -- are using social media in many ways to keep the public informed and hopefully safer.” FirstNet cited the use of Twitter by many government agencies. “When a natural disaster such as a tornado, wildfire, or hurricane hits,” the National Weather Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Guard “are among many agencies who are communicating key info to the public on social media platforms,” FirstNet said. “Just check out the hashtags #SMEM, #LESM, etc., and you’ll see,” he said, referring to the hashtags for social media emergency management and law enforcement in social media.

Ford sees autonomous vehicles accounting for one in 10 miles traveled in the U.S. by 2030, CEO Mark Fields told the company's Analyst Day conference Thursday at its Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters. Ford’s intent is to introduce a “Level 4" fully autonomous vehicle in 2021, Fields said. A Society of Automotive Engineers standard published in January 2014 defines Level 4 as “high automation” in a vehicle, meaning it will have an automated system capable of handling “all aspects” of driving tasks, “even if a human driver does not respond appropriately to a request to intervene.” The first Level 4 vehicle Ford introduces will be “specifically designed” for “commercial mobility services” such as ride-sharing and ride-hailing, and won’t have a steering wheel, brake pedal or gas pedal, said Raj Nair, chief technical officer. “I love driving, but I hate my commute,” he said. If he had the opportunity for a vehicle to pick him up from home every day and drive him to work in a manner that would be cheaper than personally owning a vehicle, “I would jump on it,” he said. “I think that’s true for a lot of our customers. And so this is why we think this could really be a game changing aspect of how personal mobility is viewed in the future.” Ford projects that autonomous vehicle sales could account for up to 20 percent of total vehicle sales by 2030, Nair said. “Couple that along with the opportunity of not just manufacturing and selling the vehicles, but participating in the transportation of the service opportunity, participating in the vehicle management as the service opportunity, you could see why this is such a large opportunity for Ford Motor Company.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau circulated an order on the 896-901/935-940 MHz band, addressing a realignment of the band to create a private enterprise broadband allocation, according to the agency’s list of items on circulation. The Enterprise Wireless Alliance and pdvWireless asked for a rule change last year (see 1505040042). “The realignment would create an allocation to address the broadband needs of critical infrastructure and private enterprise entities, including priority access,” the two said in a May 2015 news release.

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, CTIA and the National Emergency Number Association jointly warned the FCC against mandating backward compatibility for text telephone devices, for nonemergency calls, as it pushes forward on the TTY to real-time text (RTT) transition. Representatives of the groups reported on a meeting with FCC staff working on the issue. The FCC approved an NPRM in April on the transition (see 1604280055). Transcoder overloading is a real threat, the groups said. “Representatives from ATIS explained that, when RTT-enabled phones are configured to accommodate all incoming calls from the circuit switched network as TTY calls, the network must reserve an RTT to TTY transcoder in case it may be needed for the call (i.e., a party activates an RTT session),” the filing said. “Otherwise, a transcoder may not be assigned and calls that begin as voice calls will not be able to transition to an RTT session. However, if an RTT call is initiated as RTT, ATIS noted that the transcoder overloading issue is less of a problem as normal traffic engineering practices can be applied.” ATIS said the backward compatibility requirement proposed by the FCC “could have a significant impact on the industry and could require the industry to upgrade all transcoders to support RTT, or to develop more specific transcoding resourcing with the ability to assign instantaneously.” The filing was in docket 16-145.

The FCC should consider rules for high-frequency spectrum that require licensees to make their frequencies available for unlicensed use when they’re not using what they buy at auction, Public Knowledge said in a filing in 14-177 and other dockets. PK officials met with Wireless Bureau Chief Jon Wilkins. “Performance obligations are a means to an end, not an end in themselves,” PK said. Traditional performance measures won’t work, but a “private commons” rule makes sense, the group said. “The physical propagation characteristics of microwave bands make traditional performance obligations difficult to enforce, and considerably less efficient than sharing,” PK said. “The spectrum has multiple uses, but any given operator will want to construct its network for a specific subset of these uses -- and that subset may not suit a particular geographic area of market. It is not merely costly and inefficient for the licensee to build out network operations to geographic areas or populations where those network operations are unsuited, it does no good to the population now ‘served’ by a wireless network they neither want nor need.”

A year after the Apple Watch set a “new benchmark” for the global smartwatch market, new smartwatch shipments will grow only 3.9 percent this year to 20.1 million units, IDC said in a Thursday tracker report. "To date, smartwatches have remained in the realm of brand loyalists and tech cognoscenti, but we expect that to change over the next few years," said the research firm. It sees smartwatches getting a market boost when more models “will look and feel like traditional watches, appealing to those who put a premium on design and style,” it said. Once more smartwatches get cellular connectivity, “they’ll disconnect from the smartphone, making them more useful,” it said. It also sees smartwatch pricing coming down, “making them more affordable to a broader market," it said. IDC sees global smartwatch shipments increasing at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate in the next four years, reaching 54.6 million units in 2020, it said. It’s becoming increasingly “obvious” that consumers are not willing to deal with poor battery life and the other “technical pain points” that are associated with smartwatches, IDC said.

Fake 911 calls to public safety answering points remain a major problem, said National Emergency Number Association officials in a meeting with FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson and others from the bureau. The FCC sought comment last year on whether to drop a 1996 requirement that cellphones that are no longer in service must still be able to make calls to 911 (see 1504020047). The FCC refers to these nonconnected devices as non-service-initialized (NSI) phones. “NENA’s representatives reiterated the extreme importance of solving the NSI problem quickly, and urged the Bureau to work with carriers and other stakeholders to develop novel and viable solutions to this ongoing crisis,” said a filing in docket 08-51.

Competitive Carriers Association President Steve Berry and others from the group met with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to press for action on a new mobility fund. “Provide sufficient and predictable funding that can sustain mobile wireless operations and avoids flash cuts for legacy funding. Mobility is essential for next generation technology including 5G and the Internet of Things to flourish throughout the country,” CCA said. “The Commission must not strand currently served consumers without mobile networks -- consumers’ preferred choice -- particularly in rural and disadvantaged areas.” CCA also pressed for business data services reform. “CCA encouraged the FCC to adopt a presumption that low-capacity BDS are not competitive and apply a competitive market test to high-capacity BDS above-50 or -100 Mbps,” said the filing in dockets including 10-208. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said last week she hopes the FCC will approve Phase II of a mobility fund in coming months (see 1609090016).