AT&T formally sought permission to buy T-Mobile in a filing Thursday afternoon at the FCC. AT&T said it’s increasing its projections for how much of the U.S. it will be able to cover with wireless broadband if the deal is approved, from 95 percent to 97.3 percent, closer to the Obama administration’s goal of covering 98 percent of U.S. households within five years. The filing stresses the growing competition in the wireless market, from other carriers ranging from Sprint Nextel to LightSquared. AT&T also emphasized the spectrum that will be freed up as a result of efficiencies if AT&T and T-Mobile are allowed to merge.

Helped by wireless gains, Verizon’s Q1 profit was $1.44 billion, up almost 70 percent from the year-ago quarter. Chief Financial Officer Francis Shammo affirmed the carrier’s spectrum position during a conference call Thursday. Meanwhile, the carrier will stay on the sidelines on the AT&T/T-Mobile merger for now, he said.

The FCC said it’s collecting data for the first time about how online video distributors operate and the extent to which they compete with or complement traditional pay-TV service. The questions are in a further notice of inquiry about the state of video competition released Thursday. The commission is required to submit a video competition report to Congress each year, but hasn’t produced one since January 2009. The forthcoming report, the FCC’s 14th, will look at the state of video competition from 2007 through June 30, 2010, the notice said. It also seeks comment on developments in the traditional pay-TV sector, and the prospects for broadcasters to build new businesses around delivering video on their digital spectrum.

Lawmakers are asking Apple for answers following the discovery that its iPod and iPad devices are regularly storing a list of its users’ locations. The findings were revealed Wednesday by Alasdair Allan, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, and Pete Warden, a former Apple programmer and founder of OpenHeatMap.com. The researchers claim “there’s no immediate harm” from the data records, but lawmakers are up in arms about the privacy implications of the discovery.

Public safety spending on 700 MHz D-block lobbying more than quadrupled in Q1 2011 compared to the same quarter last year, according to Q1 lobbying reports. The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials spent $80,563, 303 percent more than what the group spent in Q1 2010 and 66 percent more than Q4 2010. Meanwhile, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association spent nearly five times what it did last year, and NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield said she expects the association of small rural telcos to continue spending at that level.

AT&T’s Q1 profit jumped 39 percent year-over-year to $3.4 billion though the company’s postpaid net additions plummeted 88 percent from a year earlier to 62,000. Executives insisted that customers stayed with AT&T despite Verizon’s iPhone launch. AT&T remains concerned about long-term capacity constraints as it relates to spectrum, “and that’s one of the things that will hopefully be relieved with the T-Mobile transaction,” Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s mobility and consumer markets, said on a conference call Wednesday.

A federal appeal court ruling that EchoStar violated an injunction barring it from continuing to sell satellite receivers/DVRs that infringed a TiVo patent leaves EchoStar with a range of options, analysts said. EchoStar said it will likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s finding that it’s in contempt of the injunction. But the ruling could also represent table stakes for a possible settlement, analysts said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski reiterated the importance of holding voluntary, incentive auctions as an available tool to free up more spectrum, during a Q-and-A with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, at the Washington Economics Club Wednesday. The FCC is focused on tackling two big spectrum issues: How to free up more spectrum and how to reduce barriers to deploy infrastructure, Genachowski said.

The Federal Trade Commission will complete its analysis of the news business within “the next month or so” and the tone of the report may not be as bleak as it first appeared, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said at a Federal Communications Bar Association luncheon Wednesday. “I'm not so worried about that,” Leibowitz said. “There are a lot of great stories about new start-ups.” The report will likely suggest that the government help the news industry by putting more information online and may look at competition rules, Leibowitz said.

Sprint Nextel and Cellular South turned up the heat on federal regulators to reject AT&T’s $39 billion buy of T-Mobile, a deal announced one month ago on March 20. Critics and supporters of the deal told us they expect to see opposition intensify, especially after AT&T formally seeks approval of the transaction in a filing at the FCC expected to be made Thursday.