Boomerang Wireless told the FCC it's updating its planned Lifeline offering, reporting on a call with agency staff. The company "is updating the description of two of its top-up plans available to its Lifeline customers,” Boomerang said. “The $30 top-up plan will provide 3000 anytime voice minutes or texts and 5 MB of data; the $50 top-up plan will provide 3000 anytime voice minutes or texts and 4 GB of data.” The carrier previously asked the FCC to designate it as an eligible telecom carrier in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The filing was posted Monday in docket 09-197.

4G Americas released an executive summary on 3rd Generation Partnership Project Release 13, describing the key technical features designed to further move the industry toward 5G. Monday's release comes “just as the mobile industry begins discussion and development of another generation … of mobile technology to face unprecedented challenges: accommodating skyrocketing traffic growth amid a spectrum shortage, escalation of the Internet of Things and a vision for network transformation that will create an all-IP environment,” 4G Americas said. The summary provides a broad overview the various features under development for HSPA+ and LTE-Advanced, the group said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation presented evidence in two NSA-related cases last week that it said confirms the participation of Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T in the NSA’s mass telephone records collection under the PATRIOT Act, and asked the court to consider the new evidence, wrote EFF Frank Stanton Legal Fellow Aaron Mackey in a blog post Friday. “Despite broad public acknowledgement, the government is still claiming that it can dismiss our cases because it has never confirmed that anyone other than Verizon Business participated and that disclosing which providers assist the agency is a state secret,” Mackey said. In EFF’s two lawsuits, Smith v. Obama and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, EFF asked the courts to consider Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court filings that were recently made public as evidence proving the phone companies' participation in the NSA’s programs.

T-Mobile fired back at Sirius XM, which questioned earlier T-Mobile arguments that the administrative law judge process is the best alternative for resolving interference disputes. T-Mobile filed comments in July on a Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic proposal (see 1505110031) seeking a “fact-based, transparent, and timely adjudication process for spectrum interference disputes.” Sirius "misrepresents the record and the numerous parties that agree with T-Mobile, makes baseless claims, and fails to provide an adequate explanation of why the ALJ Option is the better approach to resolving interference disputes,” T-Mobile said in a filing posted Friday to RM-11750. “Sirius’ own actions abusing the Commission’s processes -- by injecting an engineering problem of its own creation into a transactional proceeding -- makes T-Mobile’s point. Creating a complicated trial-type process is exactly the wrong way to resolve engineering-based issues and would only open the door to further abuse.” Sirius said in an August filing that existing procedures for handling complaints fall short and the need for improved procedures is driven by ever complex interference scenarios. A Sirius spokesman declined to comment.

There appears to be little interest at the FCC in a phase two of the Mobility Fund, Commissioner Mike O’Rielly warned a Rural Wireless Association meeting at CTIA Friday. “There is little discussion regarding a special technology-specific fund for wireless providers,” O’Rielly said. “In fact, the commission already proposed to reduce the scope of previous outlines for a Mobility Fund Phase II and reallocate some funding to CAF [Connect America Fund] Phase II or the Remote Areas Fund, which signaled the waning interest in the program.” O’Rielly said the FCC should do more to simplify infrastructure build-out in rural America and elsewhere. The 2014 infrastructure order aimed at small-cell deployment was a “good start,” he said. “But we must expand upon the environmental and historic preservation exclusion to include small cell equipment that is installed on any structure, including those with no pre-existing antennas.” The FCC must also address “twilight towers,” built between March 2001 and March 2005, which weren't specifically required to go through the historic preservation review process, O'Rielly said. “We cannot afford to have these towers remain in regulatory purgatory any longer.” The FCC also needs to re-examine its technical rules in such areas as antenna height and power limits to see if the rules can be further liberalized to promote build-out in rural areas, O’Rielly said. He said the agency “gravely erred” when it decided to abandon the longstanding policy that designated entities must be facilities-based providers. “This is the only way to ensure that the bidding credits would go to small and rural businesses that would actually build and provide service using these licenses,” he said. “We are enabling DEs that act as mere ‘pass-throughs,’ leasing or flipping their spectrum to existing wireless providers. We are allowing a select few to get rich while large communications providers -- ineligible for the credit -- access spectrum at a reduced cost at the expense of the American taxpayer and legitimate providers seeking to use the spectrum to provide service to their subscribers.” O’Rielly’s remarks were posted by the FCC.

The Land Mobile Communications Council received more public-safety support for its proposal for interstitial channel interference contours in the 800 MHz band (809-817/854-862 MHz), this time from the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council. "The matrix developed by the LMCC incorporates protection contour values to be applied to and from all known technologies operating in the 800 MHz band," the NPSTC said in comments filed in FCC docket 15-32. "NPSTC believes the LMCC recommendations will serve public safety and the overall land mobile community well to protect systems on existing channels and allow implementation of new interstitial channels that provide more spectrum opportunities." APCO had tentatively supported LMCC's proposal and Mobile Relay Associates had supported most of it (see 1509100075).

FirstNet released a draft of its operational architecture, it said in a blog post Friday. The draft is based on an analysis of more than 10,000 comments from across industry, states, tribes, local governments and agencies, the post said. In the draft, FirstNet identified areas of general consensus and significant disagreement, the post said. It said it did a diligent review of each function, weighing the benefits and costs from each point of view, including public safety, industry and FirstNet. The network said it also took into consideration the expertise that resides in states and industry, as well as the technical, financial, programmatic and contracting expertise that resides within FirstNet. The operational architecture lets FirstNet communicate the scope of the functions it believes are required to meet its 16 objectives, the network said.

Motorola Solutions introduced the Talkabout T480 radio, its first two-way radio specifically designed to help families during emergencies, said Motorola in a news release. The radio features a special alert button, safety whistle, weather alerts, flashlight and always-charged capability in a single device, the release said.

The growth in the number of smartphones will continue, AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie told the CTIA conference Thursday in a keynote. “There’s tons of gas in smartphones,” he said here in Las Vegas. “We have tons of opportunity to continue to grow.” Mobile video, the connected home and the IoT will all be part of the growth, he said. “Our future in this industry in our opinion is about mobility and video -- people having the ability to take their content, view it anywhere, anytime, on any device they want.” AT&T earlier this year said 50 percent of the usage on its network is video, he said. Smartphones aren't the entire market, Lurie said. “I want you to think about tablets, I want you to think about cars, I want you to also think about the enterprise marketplace.” AT&T’s buy of DirecTV is just part of the story as the company looks at video, he said. The connected home is the first thing many customers want to talk about, he said. But it's unclear what the connected home will look like, he said. “If I would have asked all of you in 2000 what do you want your smartphone, what would you have told me?” Lurie asked. “You didn’t know. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what an app store would do.” The IoT is “very, very hard to define because it’s everything,” he said. “Every single thing in our lives is going to be connected.” Some estimates are that the IoT market could be made of 50 billion devices, using a wide variety of protocols. “We have really entered a new era in our business,” said Lurie. “The smartphone has taken us to a new place.” No one leaves their home without their smartphone and it doesn't matter what it will be called. "There's going to be a device that runs your life," said Lurie.

FCC designated entity bidding credits in spectrum auctions should be scrapped, said Doug Brake, telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in a blog post emailed to us Wednesday. Brake said the DE program to foster small business wireless entry hadn't worked well and he questioned whether it even made sense in today's mobile market, where size matters. He said the DE program was a good example of a dynamic described in "The Miasma of Regulation," a 1987 essay by Robert Reich (who later became U.S. labor secretary), which laid out "the cat-and-mouse game" in which regulators write rules and the regulated push the envelope, with the back-and-forth generating more complicated rules that confound American business. Brake said the recent controversy over Dish Network's relationship with two entities in the AWS-3 auction is just the latest controversy. The DE program may have made sense in the 1990s when it started, Brake said, but small businesses today face bigger challenges in launching a network and competing with entrenched national wireless carriers. "I have a hard time seeing a small business breaking into this market in a meaningful way, even with steeply discounted spectrum," which is "just a small fraction of the cost" of building a network, he said. "New entrants to the broadband access business will be the ones with radically disruptive technology, not a discount on one input. The DE program has a history of either being manipulated by large companies, or heaping largess on individual insiders who reap the upside with large profits and incomes."