Two female former employees of AT&T Mobility complained the company’s attendance policy discriminates against pregnant women, said the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Project and law firm Cohen Milstein in a Tuesday news release. The women filed a class-action suit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, it said. They alleged AT&T Mobility’s “no fault” attendance policy, which assigns point-based demerits for late arrivals, early departures or absences, violates the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Family and the Medical Leave Act. AT&T fired the retail employees after they accrued points for missing work due to pregnancy and child-related care, ACLU and the lawyers said. AT&T is reviewing the complaint, a spokesman said: “We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”

Verizon plans to launch 5G services in Los Angeles by Q4, CEO Lowell McAdam said Tuesday on CNBC, which the company later confirmed. Verizon earlier announced Sacramento as one of three to five cities to get 5G later this year (see 1804240059). The carrier will deploy more than 1,000 cellsites for the launch in California cities, McAdam said. He also noted a strong Verizon partnership with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D). Verizon has been “plowing money” into 5G for the past three years and expects it to be more disruptive than previous wireless generations, he said. The carrier is busting myths about 5G, including that millimeter-wave spectrum requires line of sight and doesn’t go through foliage, he said. The technology will bring a different pricing model, with the old model of charging $90-100 per subscriber per month going “out the window” with 5G, said McAdam. The company is focused on digital content and has “no interest in [acquiring] a linear content company,” he said.

NTIA will be responsive to industry calls for government action to promote 5G deployment, Administrator David Redl said in a speech at a Commerce Department export conference. The U.S. wireless industry “is already making significant investments in preparation,” and is looking for government action, Redl said: “We need to heed their call.” Redl noted he has been passionate about spectrum policy. “Advances in technology are enabling innovations that we couldn’t even imagine just 10 years ago,” he said in the Monday speech. “Yet there’s still so much we don’t know about how spectrum is actually used.” The 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band is likely to be a key component of 5G and NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, is “working hard with our Office of Spectrum Management to put forward an exciting sharing model” in the band, he said. “To ensure America’s 5G leadership, the entire government must work in a coordinated fashion to support the industry’s 5G push,” Redl said. “From our perspective at NTIA, this support will take four forms: making spectrum available, removing obstacles to deploying infrastructure, ensuring we have a collective strategy to secure 5G networks, and collaborating on the global standards.”

AT&T’s build of FirstNet and 5G go “hand in hand,” CEO Randall Stephenson said Tuesday at a JPMorgan financial conference. “We're in deployment mode” on FirstNet, Stephenson said. “When we won the FirstNet bid, we were given a charge by the U.S. government to extend our network, to densify our network, more cellsite coverage throughout rural America to harden our network, meaning making it resilient in storms and so forth, especially in the hurricane corridor, the earthquake corridors,” Stephenson said. “The government is compensating us to go and do this to our network.” Every time AT&T works on a cellsite, it’s doing two things, he said. “First is 5G,” he said. “All of the technical work is being done at the cellsite. So when 5G is out, we literally have a software upgrade to move to true 5G, but then also working our 5G evolution.” With the 20 MHz of 700 MHz FirstNet spectrum, AT&T has 60 MHz of “fallow” spectrum it’s using for 5G, he said. AT&T’s top priority for 2018 is closing on buying Time Warner (see 1805150002), Stephenson said. “We are now at that place where … all of the arguing and explaining is done,” he said. “It's now in the hands of [U.S. District] Judge [Richard] Leon and he has committed to having a ruling … out on June 12.”

Cities need multimedia messages to make the wireless emergency alert system “a strong and adaptable tool,” said Houston Public Safety and Homeland Security Director George Buenik in a letter to FCC commissioners posted Monday in docket 15-91. After Hurricane Harvey, Houston couldn’t use WEA multimedia messaging to issue evacuation notices, Buenik said. “We could have better targeted those in the evacuation area and delivered precise instructions to those who needed the information the most.” Pictures can be more direct than text alone, and also would improve accessibility to the deaf and hard of hearing, he said.

A group of companies pursuing unlicensed use of the 6 GHz band filed a letter at the FCC in support of a report by RKF Engineering Solutions the companies say shows the band can be opened without harmful interference to incumbents (see 1801260043). “By demonstrating that potential interference between RLAN [radio local area network] devices and FS [fixed service] is confined to only specific, rare situations, and ruling out the possibility of widespread aggregate interference to FS, the RKF Study has narrowed the appropriate technical discussion to two discrete issues,” said Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Ruckus Networks. “Under what circumstances will RLAN operation within the main beam of an FS link pose a substantial risk of harmful interference?” and “What are the most appropriate mitigation measures to effectively address that risk?” the filing said. The answer to the first concern is “RKF demonstrated that even in the case of main-beam RLAN operations, RLAN devices are very unlikely to cause harmful interference to FS by materially degrading overall link reliability,” the tech companies said. On the second, “the undersigned companies have provided a framework for interference-protection rules that would segment the 6 GHz band and would allow the FCC to apply specific mitigation measures tailored to each sub-band,” said the filing, posted Monday in docket 17-183.

Ericsson encouraged the FCC to provide certainty for high-frequency bands other than 28 and 24 GHz, the two bands now set for auction. “In support of a rapid launch of 5G services, Ericsson has invested heavily in product development efforts” in high-frequency bands, the company said in docket 14-177. “While the recent announcement of the 24 & 28 GHz auction has created momentum in 28 GHz deployments, it has created uncertainty elsewhere: 24 GHz investments are now prioritized over investments in the 37-40 GHz bands, although 24 GHz has not yet been developed for 5G.” No auction has been announced for the 37 and 39 GHz bands, Ericsson said. “Meanwhile, products developed for these frequency bands must adapt to the existing band rules that are not very suitable for some 5G use cases or deployment scenarios. Ericsson and other industry members must develop an interim ecosystem instead of the envisioned bandplan with 200 MHz channels.”

The American Petroleum Institute can't support a proposal last week by the Wireless ISP Association and others on the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band because it would allow only two census-tract-sized priority access licenses (PALs) in each market (see 1805100062). The better proposal would provide four census-tract licenses in each market and four wide-area licenses, API said. “This would not only achieve a fair compromise with the large wireless carriers, but would allow at least 40 megahertz of CBRS spectrum for oil and gas industry entities and other industrial and critical-infrastructure operators to self-provision their own geographically-targeted private wireless … networks at their facilities throughout the United States,” API said Monday in docket 17-258. Meanwhile, Key Bridge Wireless and Fairspectrum, two prospective spectrum access system (SAS) administrators in the band, said census-tract PALs shouldn't be a concern. “Large mobile carriers now complain that licensing PALs according to census tracts is unworkable,” the two said. “While others have forcefully corrected these claims, we write to emphasize that no SAS administrator has claimed that incorporating census tracts into the SAS is too difficult and no SAS administrator has asked the Commission to change the size of PAL areas.”

Six conditionally OK'd spectrum access system administrators seek, "as expeditiously as possible, commercial SAS service" under FCC SAS certification, they told DOD, FCC Wireless Bureau and NTIA staff, one of the companies, Google, reported in a filing posted in commission docket 15-319 Friday. Others represented in the "preliminary discussion regarding SAS field testing" methods were Amdocs, CommScope, Federated Wireless, Key Bridge and Sony.

A Wi-Fi group backing more unlicensed spectrum thinks the FCC "can achieve a win-win solution for auto safety, Wi-Fi, and the wireless economy" and agrees Friday with the previous day's letter (see 1805100062) from Commissioners Mike O'Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel to Toyota Motor North America CEO James Lentz. The FCC members wrote on the automaker's plans to begin deploying dedicated short-range communications systems (DSRC) in some 2021 models. It's "the perfect time for the Commission to take a fresh look at the rules for the 5.9 GHz band," said WifiForward, with partners including Arris, Best Buy, Comcast, CTA, Google, Microsoft, Public Knowledge and R Street. "Adjacent bands are now home to billions of innovative unlicensed devices, and a variety of vehicle safety technologies have overtaken DSRC." Toyota believes DSRC can help save lives and is "confident the FCC shares this goal and will preserve the spectrum that has been allocated for this," a company spokesman said Friday. "Toyota is now encouraging all automakers and transportation infrastructure owner/operators to quickly commit to DSRC technologies in the U.S. to realize the full safety and traffic flow benefits." The representative noted that as of March, the company had more than 100,000 such equipped Toyota and Lexus vehicles on Japanese roads.