The Rural Wireless Association urged the FCC to approve an annual mobility fund, providing “specific, predictable, and sufficient support to sustain and advance the availability of mobile voice and broadband services in high-cost areas.” Much work remains for rural America to see wireless connections comparable to those in other parts of the country, said RWA General Counsel Carri Bennet in a Tuesday news release. “Dedicated support to sustain and expand mobile voice and broadband services remains as critical as ever,” Bennet said. “Mobile voice and broadband services are critical to public safety communications and rural economic development, and can help address problems such as the ‘digital divide’ and ‘homework gap’ that remain present in rural America disadvantaging rural youth and degrading the quality of life for rural Americans.” The per customer capital and operating expenditures of rural carriers remain much higher than those of nationwide and regional carriers, RWA said.

Six wireless technology companies launched the CBRS Alliance to “develop, market and promote LTE-based solutions” in the new 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service band, they said Tuesday. The six companies are Access Technologies, Federated Wireless, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ruckus Wireless. “In February, the companies announced their commitment to build an ecosystem of industry participants and make LTE-based solutions in the CBRS band widely available,” said an alliance news release. “The Alliance will work towards LTE CBRS field trials in the second half of this year and is developing an official certification process towards successful deployments of CBRS infrastructure.” The FCC approved an experimental three-tiered access and sharing model made up of federal and nonfederal incumbents, priority access licenses and general authorized access users for the shared band (see 1608120057). The FCC still must approve the first spectrum access system administrators and environmental sensing capability operators that will make the complex sharing arrangement work.

Voxx will exclusively distribute the Striiv line of fitness and activity trackers in North America and Europe under a “strategic partnership” with the Redwood City, California, wearables supplier, the companies said in a Monday announcement. The agreement marks Voxx’s entry into the wearables space, estimated to be worth $34 billion globally by 2020, the announcement said. Striiv wearables, priced under $100, have sold through Striiv’s online store and through Amazon and Best Buy.

The FCC Wireless Bureau approved a rule change requested by the U.S. Coast Guard that passenger-carrying vessels required to carry VHF radiotelephone equipment with digital selective calling (DSC) capability be permitted to carry Class D VHF-DSC radios instead of Class A equipment. The bureau sought comment in May (see 1605190023). “The Coast Guard and the commenters agree that Class A and Class D radios provide an equivalent level of safety,” the bureau said in a notice. “Continuing to require vessels to request individual exemptions to permit use of a Class D VHF-DSC radio in lieu of a Class A radio imposes an undue administrative and financial burden.”

A federal appeals court sided with Verizon Wireless in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuit that Craig and Belen Schultz of Iowa filed against the carrier. The sides consented to arbitrate the case, said a decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. When the parties were unable to agree on a written settlement, each filed a motion to enforce its version with a U.S. District Court in Iowa. “The magistrate judge denied the cross motions,” the 6th Circuit said Friday. Verizon next renewed its motion to compel arbitration, which was granted by the lower court, the 6th Circuit said. The appeals court affirmed that decision. “We agree with the district court that Craig Schultz agreed to arbitration when the Schultzes stated in an October 25, 2014, pleading: ‘Plaintiffs consent to this matter being sent to arbitration,’” the 6th Circuit said. “The court did not clearly err in finding that Craig Schultz, as an ‘Account Manager’ who used one of the phone lines to which the Customer Agreement applied, had activated phone service and thus accepted the Verizon contract, including an agreement to arbitrate this billing dispute.” Judge James Loken wrote the decision for a unanimous three-judge panel.

FCC commissioners gave the Telecommunications Industry Association partial relief from an October 2014 700 MHz narrowband transition order. In January 2015, TIA sought revisions, saying it may not be feasible for a manufacturer to complete all the requirements for the Project 25 Compliance Assessment Program certification at the time it submits a device to the FCC for approval (see 1501060055). “We agree and modify our rules to allow CAP compliance or the equivalent to be completed after equipment certification but prior to the marketing or sale of that equipment,” the FCC said in the Monday order. “Thus, we ensure that potential users will have the benefit of CAP testing or the equivalent, and compliance with P25 interoperability standards without disadvantaging radio manufacturers. We find our decision correctly balances manufacturers’ need for flexibility against the public’s interest in interoperability.” Responding to a request for clarification by the National Regional Planning Council, the FCC also clarified that states may delegate administration of the air-ground channels to the 700 MHz Regional Planning Committees. The FCC also raises further issues for comment, including on the amendment of its trunking rules, in an accompanying Further NPRM.

The Wi-Fi Alliance recently announced it's “finally” closing in on an approved LTE-unlicensed coexistence test plan, said Joan Marsh, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory. The alliance also determined in a not-so-pleasant surprise that the test plan should include LTE-U’s cousin, licensed assisted access (LAA), Marsh said in a Monday blog post. Part 15 of FCC rules “has always stood for the principle of permission-less innovation,” Marsh wrote. “Any device consistent with the Part 15 rules was promptly authorized. It was a clear regulatory paradigm that led to an explosion of unlicensed devices. With LTE-U, that paradigm was subject to a tectonic shift toward a ‘mother-may-I’ standard, with the role of mother being played by an ever-changing number of actors.” This oversight must be rejected for LAA, she said. “AT&T has no interest in undermining the vibrant Wi-Fi ecosystem that exists today,” she said. “But with LTE-LAA, the ‘mother-may-I’ paradigm must be rejected so the wireless industry can move forward. Make no mistake, the rest of the world is not waiting for permission -- Deutsche Telecom conducted the first LTE-LAA over-the-air trials last November in Germany.” The LTE-U tests in the U.S. have been controversial, with industry groups clashing over whether the alliance is moving quickly enough to open a path for LTE-U (see 1608020054). Some LTE-U advocates urged the FCC to step in and force resolution (see 1606300052).

Intel’s collaboration with Mobileye to bring “highly and fully automated driving” to BMW vehicles within five years (see 1607010052) is “a significant strategic relationship” among the companies, Doug Davis, senior vice president-general manager of Intel’s IoT Group, told the Intel Developer Forum Thursday in San Francisco. In that three-company alliance, Intel plays “a significant role in the compute capability” of autonomous vehicles, and Mobileye “obviously plays an important role in all of that camera and sensor data” for self-driving cars, “and then we fuse it all together to create that solution,” Davis said. What’s also important in the collaboration is “the focus on creating an open standard for interfaces within the industry,” he said. “We see that this technology needs to move very rapidly and we share that vision” promoting an “open platform that can be built upon by others” and commercialized in short order, he said. “At the network level, Intel’s leadership in accelerating 5G is critical” to the future of autonomous vehicles, Davis said. “This is really important, because 5G is the only network technology capable of delivering a latency of a millisecond or less with speeds that can peak at 10 gigabits per second.”

Analysis of the latest global smartphone sales trends spurred GfK to upgrade its forecast for the year, the research firm said in a Friday report. GfK now thinks 2016 smartphone sales will approach $426 billion in value, which would be a 5 percent increase from 2015, the company said. GfK’s previous forecast was for 2016 sales to approach $401 billion. The company cited strong Q2 sales of mid-range to high-end smartphones and a reversal of the “previous trend” in which low-end handsets priced on average below $100 had been gaining significant global share. But the North American smartphone market keeps trending downward, GfK said. It estimates Q2 smartphone demand there totaled 42 million units, down 5 percent sequentially from Q1 and 6 percent lower than shipments in Q2 of 2015. “Previous drivers of demand” in North America, such as the migration from 3G to 4G, “are having less of an impact now that the high growth phase is over, the company said. North America “will need to wait” until Q4 for “the next incremental driver of growth” to take hold, it said. “It is in the last quarter of the year that major product launches are expected to have a higher impact, compared to 2015. Consumers that have been waiting for big launches will be ready to invest in upgrades.”

Google fashioned a way of remote-controlling devices through gestures using radar and sensors instead of video cameras with no need for line of sight between users and sensors, Patent and Trademark Office records show. Details are in applications (US 20160098089, US 20160055201, US 20160054792, US 20160041618, US 20160041617 and US 20150346820) the company filed two years ago at the PTO, now being published for open access. The gigahertz frequencies used for the radar fields, and the power at which they operate, are chosen to suit the devices and location, the patents said. The radar field may be generated by in-building fixed transmitters, by a smartphone or smartwatch, they said. If someone enters “Best Italian restaurant?” as a search term on a mobile device, the device will return much more useful results if the user can assist by sweeping the device over the immediate surroundings, the patents said: Gesture commands aren't blocked by objects. By combining biometric sensing with gesture recognition, multiple appliances also can be controlled by multiple people, from almost anywhere in the vicinity, they said. Google didn’t comment Friday.