The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology approved special temporary authority for Wireless Systems Solutions for tests using FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum. “We are conducting trials to test LTE in tactical environments,” said the application. “We will be testing on a military training area, radiating at relatively low power between 16-22, and 26-28 June 2018.” The tests will be in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Technology venture-capital firm SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2.25 billion for 19.6 percent of GM Cruise, the General Motors autonomous-vehicle subsidiary, “further strengthening the company’s plans to commercialize AV technology at large scale,” said the automaker Thursday. GM also will invest $1.1 billion in GM Cruise when the SoftBank transaction closes, it said. SoftBank will invest its first $900 million when the deal closes and pay the remaining $1.35 billion when Cruise AVs are “ready for commercial deployment,” said GM. GM Cruise is testing AVs in Arizona, California and Michigan, including in San Francisco, where the subsidiary is headquartered (see 1707260030 and 1707250067). GM is on track toward achieving AV “commercialization at scale in the dense urban environment” beginning in 2019, and “safety has been and will continue to be paramount in our commercialization effort,” said CEO Mary Barra on an April earnings call.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau proposed a fine of $590,380 against Bear Down Brands, dba Pure Enrichment, for allegedly selling 14 models of consumer-grade electronic personal hygiene and wellness devices that were “apparently noncompliant because they lacked proper equipment authorization, user manual disclosures, and/or FCC labels.” The bureau said 13 models complied with rules as of Feb. 15, and the company “continues to market one noncompliant model that lacks the proper user manual disclosures and FCC labeling in apparent violation of the Commission’s rules.” Pure didn’t comment. Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the penalty wasn’t tough enough. “While forfeitures can be upwardly adjusted to account for the severity of the violation, as is done here, it still does not excuse the totally inadequate base forfeiture of $98,000 for the serious violations revealed in this item,” he said. “Compare this proposed forfeiture to robocall violations where the Commission assesses penalties per phone call, resulting in multi-million-dollar fines.”

The global IoT market will generate $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 “as market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services,” GSMA reported Wednesday. At that point, there will be more than 25 billion IoT connections, driven by growth in the industrial IoT market, with Asia-Pacific poised to become the largest global IoT region in connections and revenue, GSMA said. Carriers need to figure out how to monetize the growth in the IoT, GSMA said. “Although connectivity revenue will grow over the period, it will only account for 5 per cent of the total IoT revenue opportunity by 2025, underscoring the need for operators to expand their capabilities beyond connectivity in order to capture a greater share of market value,” said a release. “This is a challenge already being addressed by a number of operators, which are creating dedicated IoT business units and service lines.”

T-Mobile appears to be spending more than expected to build out its 600 MHz incentive auction licenses, Oppenheimer said in a Wednesday research note. “We spoke with [T-Mobile] management, who appeared to be focused on building out its 600 MHz spectrum for increased coverage/capacity, the correct route in our opinion, but this will require more capex and we increase our estimates,” Oppenheimer said. The analyst raised its capital expenditure estimates by $200 million for T-Mobile’s Q2 to $1.55 billion.

Analog Devices is participating in “virtually all” the 5G “field trials" that are taking place "across the globe,” said CEO Vincent Roche on a Wednesday earnings call. Roche's "sense" is that the U.S. and China will take the lead in “trialing” some 5G “particular applications” in the 2019-2020 “time frame,” he said. “China will get faster to mass market, I think, with what they call 5G, which is really to me 4-and-a-half-G with massive MIMO.” Roche sees “pure 5G” taking shape commercially in the 2024-2025 time frame, he said. That’s when “the core network gets changed,” he said. With 5G, “an entirely new wireless and wireline network architecture will ultimately be needed to meet the demands for orders-of-magnitude increases in bandwidth-hungry areas,” such as HD video streaming, said Roche. Though 5G will provide “revolutionary capabilities,” the transition “will be evolutionary,” he said. Adding massive MIMO will be the “first phase” and will “provide a significant increase to the capacity of the current 4G wireless network,” he said. A massive MIMO system “can deliver a greater than 3X data capacity increase in the same spectrum of a current 4G base station,” he said.

Overall smartphone shipments will slip this year, but the average selling price will rise to $345 from $313 a year ago due to strength in the “ultra-high-end” segment, said IDC analyst Anthony Scarsella. By 2022, the ASP will be $362, he said Wednesday. This year's 0.2 percent decline to 1.462 billion units, on lagging sales in China, will reverse next year, with 3 percent growth, the research firm reported. Smartphone sales dropped 4.9 percent in China last year and “tough times” are expected to continue in 2018 as IDC forecasts consumption in China to decline 7.1 percent before flattening in 2019. China has 30 percent of global smartphone sales, said analyst Ryan Reith. A growth catalyst will be the introduction of 5G smartphones, said IDC, predicting the first commercially ready 5G smartphones (see 1805300034) will arrive in second half 2019, ramping up to most regions in 2020. IDC projects sales of 5G smartphones will reach 212 million in 2020 -- at roughly 7 percent of all category sales -- growing to 18 percent by 2022. Android's share of the global smartphone is expected to remain relatively stable at 85 percent of shipments.

The FCC should correct a "flaw" in Universal Service Administrative Co. implementation of a Lifeline national verifier (NV) that will "effectively deny" millions of rural low-income Americans access to mobile broadband services, said a Q Link Wireless filing posted Tuesday in docket 17-287 on a meeting with aides to Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, and a Wireless Bureau official. The Lifeline provider said "plans for machine-to-machine interfaces (i.e. application programming interfaces, or APIs) that would have permitted carrier-assisted, online verification and enrollment of Lifeline consumers" were mysteriously removed from USAC's design: "No one with whom we have spoken at USAC or at the Commission seems to know who decided to remove APIs or why that was done." The planned NV "would permit consumer online eligibility verification if the consumer can navigate that process without the carrier, and it would permit carriers using agents to have the agents assist consumers with eligibility verification and enrollment, but it will not support both online eligibility verification and carrier assistance to consumers at the same time," Q Link said. "This is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be based on any discernable [sic] technical or network security grounds." Many rural Americans, "who have far less access to in-person assistance and disproportionately depend on web-based enrollment," will be "abandoned," it said, urging the FCC to direct USAC to restore APIs before the NV's "hard launch" later this year: "The good news is that there are technical solutions that would make it relatively easy, with a minimum amount of additional development time (Q Link estimates 20 hours), to develop these APIs to permit online, carrier-assisted eligibility verification and enrollment in a single, non-mandatory carrier process." The FCC didn't comment Wednesday. Meanwhile, NARUC pressed its arguments opposing an FCC proposal to exclude pure resellers from Lifeline and supporting a proposal to restore state Lifeline carrier designation authority, said a filing on a meeting with an aide to Commissioner Mike O'Rielly. The National Lifeline Association filed comments objecting to new FCC tribal Lifeline subscriber notice requirements, saying the agency "has not taken seriously" its Paperwork Reduction Act duties to minimize provider burdens.

AT&T is unlikely to have much to say on T-Mobile buying Sprint (see 1804300055), AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said Wednesday at a Cowen financial conference. “I don’t think you’ll see us opposing the transaction,” he said. “We’re really going to stay away from commenting other than that and kind of leave it to the regulators.” AT&T dropped its bid for T-Mobile in 2011 after running into regulatory roadblocks. Stephens said AT&T is poised to finalize its buy of Time Warner after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rules on DOJ’s challenge of the acquisition (see 1805300011), a decision expected June 12. “We’re ready to close” after the decision, Stephens said. “Everything is lined up with financing and so forth.” Stephens also said AT&T has sold FirstNet services to more than 600 public safety entities across 48 states. The carrier sees a potential market of 10 million devices on FirstNet, which doesn’t include service to power companies and other critical infrastructure companies, he said. “The ability to raise the quality of our network and the quality of our services to our existing 100 million customer base is really important.”

The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, a joint program by the National Science Foundation and a 28-company wireless industry consortium, reminded interested parties comments are due Thursday on a request for information on city-scale testing platforms designed to speed fundamental research on wireless communications. To inform a request for proposals, the group is seeking “input from the research community, local communities, and industry on potential applications or use-cases providing community benefit AND the transformative wireless technologies needed to enable those applications,” said a Tuesday notice. The program said it's seeking a “diversity of platforms across technology areas, topology, demography, and geography.”