T-Mobile got the licenses it needed in the 3.45 GHz auction, CEO Mike Sievert said on a call with analysts Wednesday as the company reported Q4 results. “We continue to add to our mid-band portfolio,” he said. “We concentrated on supplementing our mid-band spectrum holdings in major urban and suburban areas, mostly aligned with our C-band purchases, and … in places where these frequencies are well suited to the density of our network grid,” he said. T-Mobile will have limited capital expenditures to deploy the new bands and will mostly use existing towers, he said. T-Mobile bid $2.9 billion in the 3.45 GHz auction, which was below expectations (see 2201140065). The carrier reported service revenue of $15 billion in Q4 and net income of $422 million. It earlier reported 844,000 postpaid phone net adds and 244,000 adds to its new home internet service in Q4 (see 2201060063). “AT&T and Verizon have finally started rolling out mid-band 5G and hope to soon be where we were almost two years ago,” Sievert said: “Two years from now, we’ll still be two years ahead.”

Aura and FAA launched a four-year research project to develop performance standards for air traffic control voice communications supporting drones, Aura said Tuesday. “The project is essential to eventual regulations empowering applications ranging from cargo flights to infrastructure inspections and first-responder operations.” It will look at “latency and evaluate voice quality/speech intelligibility of air-to-ground radio-path transmissions between [drone] pilots and FAA voice-switch air traffic controller positions,” Aura said.

Increasing network efficiency is critical to keeping up with 5G, with a need for more sensitive receivers in base stations and user equipment, said Rob Maunder, chief technology officer of semiconductor company AccelerComm, during a Mobile World Live webinar Tuesday. Installing more-efficient equipment is often cheaper than buying spectrum licenses or installing towers or small cells, he said. “By building better receivers, more sensitive receivers, we can get more bang for our buck in the wireless network … and this creates more capacity.” Maunder predicted “exponential growth” of 5G traffic worldwide, to 178 billion GB monthly by 2027, at which point 5G will be 62% of mobile traffic. “No longer is a one size-fits-all solution suitable,” he said: “What’s needed in the industry is an ecosystem around available [technology] that addresses these challenges so that the whole industry can build solutions.” With 5G, the biggest efficiency gains compared with 4G will come through more use of multiple-input, multiple-output technologies, he said. Anastasios Karousos, Real Wireless managing consultant, said the savings will vary by carrier, but even a slight increase in spectrum efficiency means lower cell utilization and reduced capital costs.

The FirstNet board and committees will meet Feb. 9, starting at 10:30 a.m. MST at the Marriott Albuquerque Hotel, 2101 Louisiana Blvd. NE, says a Tuesday Federal Register notice. The meeting is available to the public online only because of COVID-19 restrictions.

IPhone revenue grew 9% year on year to a record $71.6 billion, CEO Tim Cook told a call on fiscal Q1 ended Dec. 25. Total revenue jumped 11% to $123.9 billion. Services grew 24% to $19.5 billion on strength in Apple Music, Apple TV+, advertising and payments; the App Store had a record December quarter, said Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri. Paid subscriptions totaled 785 million, with 165 million added, he said Thursday. The stock closed 7% higher Friday at $170.33.

The Wireline Bureau approved a limited, temporary waiver of service authorization requirements in FCC numbering rules sought by UScellular. The carrier said the waiver is needed to provide mobile data services to some 50,000 fleet devices through Aeris, an IoT mobile virtual network operator. UScellular “seeks to maintain service to this limited number of IoT devices for a limited time by becoming the temporary assignee of the numbers that Aeris currently uses to provide service,” said an order in Thursday’s Daily Digest. The carrier “has committed to return the numbering resources” to the North American numbering plan administrator “no later than 24 months after any waiver is granted, and we condition our grant on US Cellular’s compliance with this commitment (and, as possible, returning individual blocks of numbers prior to such date as they are no longer in service),” the bureau said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology plans a virtual workshop March 8-9 on the development of standards and performance metrics for on-road autonomous vehicles, said Thursday's Federal Register. The event starts at 9 a.m. EST. "On-road autonomous vehicles are projected to influence key aspects of everyday life including transportation, goods delivery, manufacturing, public safety, and security," said the notice. "However, autonomous vehicles can pose a risk in the event of unexpected system performance."

Wireless issues top APCO's 2022 regulatory priorities, the group posted Thursday. Improving location accuracy for wireless calls to 911 leads the list, followed by protecting public safety use of the 6 GHz band and revising rules for 4.9 GHz, said Chief Counsel Jeff Cohen. Securing “major federal funding to implement Next Generation 9-1-1 nationwide” topped legislative priorities.

The FCC is seeking comment on rules for how often narrowband white spaces devices must check a database to operate, as expected (see 2201260016). The order, approved before Thursday’s commissioners' meeting, requires other devices operating in the TV bands to check the database at least once hourly. The main changes to the draft item come in a new Further NPRM exploring an issue on which Microsoft and NAB took opposing sides (see 2201210069). “Microsoft argues that requiring narrowband fixed white space devices used for IoT applications to comply with an hourly database recheck would negatively impact battery life, limit potential form factors, and increase the costs of those devices,” the FNPRM said. It asked how often check-ins should be required and the impact on licensed wireless mics that use the spectrum. “Should we require mobile devices to comply with the same hourly re-check interval as fixed devices operating in the TV bands, or would a different interval be more appropriate?” the FNPRM asked: “If so, what is the appropriate re-check interval?” Comment deadlines will follow in a Federal Register notice. No commissioners commented. The item rejected NAB’s reconsideration petition of 2018 approval of Nominet UK as a white space database administrator.

The Environmental Health Trust said the FCC should be required to pay the group’s legal fees after last year’s U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision remanding a 2019 RF safety action for further work (see 2108130073). “The FCC does not deny the … Petitioners are eligible to recover fees or are prevailing parties,” EHT said in a Tuesday brief in docket 20-1025: “Rather, it maintains that fees should not be awarded because the FCC’s position was substantially justified in issuing the challenged Order.” An "award of fees is not authorized in this case because the government’s position was ‘substantially justified,’” the FCC said: “Even if a fee award were available, the amounts claimed by petitioners (totaling about $358,000) are excessive and should be reduced" at least 50%.