Incompas CEO Chip Pickering defended T-Mobile’s zero-rated Binge On program as within the spirit of net neutrality rules, in a letter Friday to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. T-Mobile is an Incompas member, and the letter said not all the group's members backed the filing. “INCOMPAS believes that Binge On supports and promotes your overriding policy objective -- the promotion of competition -- in the mobile broadband marketplace and the video marketplace as it allows consumers to explore more over-the-top video options on the go,” Pickering wrote. “Overwhelming consumer enthusiasm for Binge On shows just how much users benefit from the program.”

Sprint has expanded its “super-fast LTE Plus Network” to 204 markets, “including newly added markets such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Honolulu and San Juan, Puerto Rico,” it said Thursday in a news release. Sprint’s LTE network covers 300 million people, with about 70 percent covered by the company’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, Sprint said. “As coverage has improved, so has Sprint’s network reliability. In fact, Sprint’s reliability now beats T-Mobile’s and performs within 1 percent of AT&T and Verizon.”

ABI Research sees 5G as the “unifying connectivity technology" for future cars, the firm said in a Thursday report. By 2025, there will be 67 million active automotive 5G vehicle subscriptions, 3 million of which will be low-latency connections mainly deployed in autonomous cars, it said. Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2X) will be a “key requirement for the connected and autonomous vehicle of the future,” ABI said. “It is closely linked to the concept of cooperative mobility, allowing vehicles to exchange both status and event information with each other via reliable, low-latency communication technologies. With it, vehicles can be proactive and capture and share critical events happening locally with each other, ultimately ensuring safer driving practices.” But for V2X to become a reality, the automotive and transportation industries “must first expand the scope and relevance of 5G cellular connectivity,” it said. ABI expects this to dramatically increase through 2025, “allowing connectivity providers to bring more value-added services to the table and better position themselves in the automotive ecosystem,” it said. “From there, new business models will emerge and ultimately more closely align the automotive and telecom industries.”

IDC sees 2016 global tablet shipments declining for the second straight year, dropping 9.6 percent from 2015, the firm said in a Thursday report. The tablet market “has seen its peak,” and will face down years in 2016 and 2017, though detachable tablet growth will trigger “a slight rebound in 2018 and beyond,” it said. Detachable tablets are only 16 percent of the market, but their share will nearly double to 31 percent in 2020, it said. Tablet makers “are slowly shifting focus toward the detachable tablet market segment,” which has quickly resulted in increased product offerings, lower average selling prices and broadened consumer awareness for the category, it said. “Many traditional PC manufacturers have assumed the detachable category to be a natural extension of the PC market and perhaps assumed it would rightfully be theirs to capture. Now they find themselves in head-to-head competition with a slew of new manufacturers that have created their market off of smartphone and slate tablet growth.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau sought comment Thursday on a March AT&T petition outlining a smart grid solution that can be deployed in the unpaired C and D blocks of the wireless communications service band (see 1603300036). The petition asked the FCC to waive the interim performance requirement for the unpaired blocks owned by AT&T in the 2.3 GHz band, the bureau said. AT&T had complained it took the company some time to find a use for the C and D blocks that didn’t raise interference concerns. Comments are due June 22, replies July 5, the notice said.

The public should weigh in on the FCC NPRM on the text telephone technology to real-time text (RTT) transition, said Alison Cutler, chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, in a Thursday blog post. The FCC approved an NPRM on the transition at its April 28 meeting (see 1604280055) and initial comments are due July 11. “The recent NPRM is an outgrowth of input and feedback that we have received from industry, the deaf and hard of hearing community, and other consumer groups,” Cutler wrote. “Our goal is to address the needs of people with disabilities who use text to communicate as we transition from circuit-switched to IP services.” The transition is also a step forward for public safety communications, she said. “Public safety operators who use IP networks would be able to gather crucial information more quickly,” she said. “They say seconds count. RTT would enable you to communicate during those precious seconds.”

NTIA should keep the interests of competitive carriers in mind in its April request for comment on the government's role in encouraging the growth of the IoT (see 1604060030), the Competitive Carriers Association said in a Thursday news release. Comments were due Thursday. The IoT “is here and ever-growing, and to remain competitive in the marketplace and provide consumers with the services they want and demand, competitive carriers must incorporate IoT into their business plans,” said CCA President Steve Berry. “There is a lot NTIA, the FCC and Congress can do to make sure IoT technology is widely, competitively deployed. For example, there are several proceedings before the FCC, including the Spectrum Frontiers proceeding, the incentive auction, and the business data services proceeding, that will have a huge impact on IoT development and deployment, and I strongly encourage the Commission to consider the impact that these proceedings will have on competitive carriers’ abilities to provide IoT opportunities to their customers.” ACT|The App Association, which provided us its comments to NTIA, said the security and privacy of users’ data through end-to-end encryption is vital to maintain trust and rejected calls (see 1604180048) from law enforcement for back doors to such encrypted devices and data. The group also emphasized coordination among federal agencies as “essential” for IoT to progress. Such coordination will help “avoid duplicative or conflicting regulations and parallel efforts,” among other benefits, the group said.

Dish Network's move to use 2000-2020 MHz for downlink operations could make it, or at least its spectrum holdings, a more attractive Verizon takeover target, said analyst Michael Rollins of Citi in a note to investors Thursday. "Carriers will eventually place greater value on downlink spectrum to meet data traffic demands." Rollins said Verizon has particularly pressing long-term spectrum needs and Dish's spectrum would complement the carrier's existing AWS holdings, and "the mix of downlink-centric spectrum could further fuel Verizon's mobile video ambitions." In a filing Wednesday in FCC docket 13-225, Dish said it was electing to reverse the 20 megahertz of AWS-4 uplink spectrum to downlink. In a news release, it also said the Third Generation Partnership Project's RAN4 working group had agreed on LTE Band 70 specifications -- Band 70 covering Dish's AWS-4 spectrum and its H block downlink spectrum at 1995-2000 MHz, plus unpaired AWS-3 uplink spectrum at 1695-1710 MHz, and said formal 3GPP approval will open the door to development of devices and infrastructure supporting Band 70. When asked Thursday about the Verizon speculation, Dish didn't comment.

In a forecast update Wednesday, IDC cut 2016 worldwide smartphone shipment projections by 2.6 percentage points due to a “continued slowdown in mature markets and China.” IDC now projects smartphone shipments to rise 3.1 percent this year, compared with 10.5 percent growth in 2015 and 27.8 percent in 2014. Smartphone shipments will reach 1.48 billion this year and 1.84 billion in 2020, said IDC. It expects large markets -- the U.S., Western Europe and China -- to have low single-digit growth rates this year. "Consumers everywhere are getting savvy about how and where they buy their smartphones, and this is opening up new doors for OEMs and causing some traditional channels to lose some control of the hardware flow," said analyst Ryan Reith. Apple smartphone shipments are on track to experience their first annual decline in 2016.

Americans don't have any expectation of privacy over their historical cellphone location data, and the government can obtain such information without a warrant, said the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a Tuesday 12-3 ruling that overturned its three-judge panel opinion last year. In U.S. v. Graham, the majority opinion cited Supreme Court precedent in concluding that the government's acquisition of historical cellsite location information (CSLI) from the cellphone provider of a defendant in the case, Aaron Graham, didn't violate his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. "The Court has long held that an individual enjoys no Fourth Amendment protection 'in information he voluntarily turns over to [a] third part[y],'" said the majority's ruling, which said "all of our sister circuits" came to the same conclusion. While the Supreme Court may limit or even eliminate the third-party doctrine in the future and Congress may act to require a warrant for CSLI, the majority 4th Circuit opinion said "without a change in controlling law, we cannot conclude that the Government violated the Fourth Amendment in this case." Three judges who dissented said a cellphone customer "neither possesses the knowledge of his CSLI nor acts to disclose it" and hasn't voluntarily shared location data with a cellphone provider in any "meaningful" way. Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the case, wrote in a blog post that decisions from five appellate courts "means that now, in the vast majority of states, federal law enforcement agents don't need to get a warrant to get access to this data from cell service provider." She wrote the 4th Circuit majority opinion relied "on a wonky legal principle from two 1970s Supreme Court cases" on third-party doctrine but went further, saying "it didn’t matter if cell site location information could reveal sensitive information about our lives."