Samsung teamed with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI on “the successful completion of a 5G field trial” in 30,000-seat professional baseball stadium in Okinawa, Japan, said Samsung Monday. The trial used Samsung's 5G “end-to-end solutions” to showcase a live feed of 4K video content downloaded and streamed simultaneously on 5G tablets, it said. Samsung’s 5G access units with beam-forming technology were installed on a light tower located beyond the left field fence “to create 5G coverage in the direction of home plate and first and third bases,” it said. The successful trial results reflect Samsung and KDDI efforts to use 5G technology in the 28 GHz band “to redefine user experiences in crowded environments and spotlight a new approach to viewing sports games,” said Samsung. The migration to 5G “holds the powerful potential to create new user experiences and business models that are more immersive and dynamic than ever before,” it said. Through the KDDI collaboration, Samsung “will stay committed to exploring 5G-driven business models that can be applied in diverse high-demand locations based on a wide range of methods,” it said.

The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee will hold an open meeting April 25, says a notice slated for Monday's Federal Register. The meeting will be at Morgan Lewis, Suite 201, 1111 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, starting at 9 a.m. NTIA said it plans to post a detailed agenda before the meeting.

High-end smartphones shown at Mobile World Congress with larger 4K displays, multiple high-resolution cameras and 4K HDR recording are boosting memory and storage "requirements,” said Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on an earnings call. OEMs are “building new artificial intelligence, augmented reality and lifelike virtual reality capabilities into high-end smartphones, including facial and voice recognition, real-time translation, fast image search and scene detection,” he said. Such products are migrating toward 6 GB of low-power DRAM components, he said. The average storage capacity of solid-state drives also is increasing “across all smartphone classes with new flagship models using 64 gigabytes of flash memory at a minimum,” he said.

AT&T officials discussed alternatives for “temporarily repacking the 37.6-40 GHz band" before an eventual auction of millimeter wave spectrum, said a filing in docket 14-177. In a meeting with FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Donald Stockdale, “AT&T also discussed the auction proposal it submitted previously in this docket; a clock auction, with generic, fungible spectrum blocks to be followed by an assignment phase,” the filing said. “AT&T advocated for an auction including all of the mmW bands at the earliest possible date.” The agency offered a plan for an auction of the spectrum in December (see 1712120010).

The text of an FCC Further NPRM on the 4.9 GHz public safety band clarifies that the regulator still hopes to find an alternative that would keep the band open for public safety agencies. “Our goal is to ensure that public safety continues to have priority in the band while opening up the band to additional uses that will facilitate increased usage, including more prominent mobile use, and encourage a more robust market for equipment and greater innovation, while protecting primary users from harmful interference,” the FNPRM stated. “With an appropriate sharing mechanism in place ... our proposed approach will promote more opportunistic use of the 4.9 GHz band without compromising the integrity and security of public safety operations.” Commissioners approved the FNPRM Thursday (see 1803220037).

The FCC released a notice of inquiry on ways to route wireless 911 calls directly to the appropriate public safety answering point. The commission is interested in ensuring such calls are routed to PSAPs based on the precise location of the caller rather than the cell tower handling the call, which can be in another jurisdiction, said the NOI issued Friday in docket 18-64 after being adopted Thursday (see Notebook at end of 1803220027).

The FCC released the latest lists of hearing aid compatible phones, indexed a number of ways, including by service provider, handset maker and air interface. The information is for 2017.

The new 64 GB Samsung Galaxy S9+ bill of materials is $43 higher than previous versions, IHS Markit reported Thursday, at $375.80. It's due mostly to higher prices for memory and a dual-lens mechanical aperture camera, said analyst Andrew Rassweiler. A Qualcomm processor is part of a bundled chipset estimated at $67.

High prices and a lack of compelling use cases will limit sales of 5G phones in the first few years, Strategy Analytics reported. Such sales will begin in the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea in 2019, but volume will be in the millions “and only barely in the tens of millions in 2020,” said analyst Ville-Petteri Ukonaho. By 2021, when 5G networks will cover many urban centers in Asia and North America, consumers will have a reason to buy 5G smartphones, expected to be 5 percent of handsets sold that year, said analyst Ken Hyers Thursday. Older generation wireless will “continue to flourish,” said analyst David Kerr, saying 2G and 4G handsets will have long lifespans carrying into the next decade “even as 3G devices fade away.” SA forecasts 2G feature phones will be one in 10 handsets sold in 2023 as new-to-mobile customers in emerging markets, particularly Africa, buy their first mobile phones, while 4G LTE handsets’ sales volume will continue to grow through 2020 when they will be 80 percent of handsets sold.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology said the agency played a role behind the scenes allowing for sharing of Navy spectrum in the 3.5 GHz communications broadband radio service band. “The development of standards, test procedures and certification tools ... will allow service providers and other potential users to prove that they can operate in the 3.5 GHz Band under FCC regulations and assure the Navy that the band can be successfully shared without RF interference,” it blogged Thursday. "The NIST model simulates 45,000 LTE smaller-size networks (known as small cells) using the 3.5 GHz Band in the northeastern United States. In response to a simulated need for the band by an offshore Navy vessel, the model calculates which small cells must be shut down and which can continue transmitting. These simulations, along with others modeling wireless networks in other U.S. coastal regions, will allow the FCC to test and evaluate how effectively a commercial LTE provider can share the band with the Navy.”