T-Mobile said it's buying from Aureon the remaining parts of Iowa Wireless that it doesn't already own. T-Mobile previously took a stake in the carrier, known as iWireless. The provider has customers in Iowa, western Illinois and eastern Nebraska, with 103 full-service company stores and authorized dealers that have about 75,000 customers, T-Mobile said. “This will give customers of iWireless access to all of T-Mobile’s Un-carrier benefits,” T-Mobile said in a Tuesday news release. “The deal is subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approval and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017 or early 2018.” Meanwhile, as T-Mobile/Sprint merger rumors persist (see 1709260045), BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said Wednesday that T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom can wait to decide on a deal. “For the past four years, naysayers have been predicting the end of T-Mobile’s ‘hot streak,’” but that isn’t going to happen soon, Piecyk wrote. “T-Mobile is not on a hot streak,” he said. “It’s called a turnaround. They now have enough scale to generate free cash flow with just 33 million post-paid phone customers and 20 million pre-paid customers. Both subscriber bases will continue to rise based on market share gains. Verizon alone has 88 million post-paid phone customers that T-Mobile has barely dented.”

The FCC posted its new mobile wireless competition report Wednesday, which said the U.S. wireless industry is effectively competitive. Commissioners approved the report 3-2 Tuesday over dissents by Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel (see 1709260045). The final report appears to change little from the draft circulated by Chairman Ajit Pai three weeks earlier (see 1709070056). “Competition continues to play an essential role in the mobile wireless marketplace -- leading to lower prices, more innovation, and higher quality service for American consumers,” the report concluded. Also Wednesday, the agency released an NPRM, approved at the meeting, seeking comment on a proposal to reduce the “regulatory burden” on smaller carriers of complying with hearing-aid compatibility rules (see 1709260045). “While in many cases these reports have helped the Commission compile information for the public and monitor compliance with wireless hearing aid compatibility deployment benchmarks, we believe that, in light of various changes in the marketplace since these reporting requirements were adopted, the benefits of annual reporting by small, rural, and regional service providers may be outweighed by the burdens of this information collection on these entities,” the NPRM in docket 17-228 said.

Alexa users can now control Amazon Music by voice on Android and iOS devices in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Austria, Amazon announced Tuesday. Listeners press the push-to-talk function on their mobile device to request music or select functions from the Alexa app interface. They can request music for a road trip, the latest song by a band, a soundtrack for working out or a song list from a musical era, for instance, it said.

Adoption rates of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus -- the number of users who received the phones and have started using apps -- were 0.3 percent of the device market share for the 8 and 0.4 percent for the larger model in the first weekend of sales, said a Monday Localytics report. During the comparable weekend in 2016, the iPhone 7 had a 1 percent adoption rate, which compared with a 2 percent adoption rate for the iPhone 6 a year earlier. The iPhone 8 Plus, though, had a “slightly stronger” adoption rate in the first weekend vs. previous Plus models: 0.2 percent for the 7 Plus last year and 0.3 percent for the 6 Plus in 2015, said the app analytics company. “Apple is betting big on the iPhone X, and so far it looks like consumers may be doing the same,” said Localytics, noting the Nov. 3 on-sale date for the flagship model. The company examined more than 70 million iOS devices globally, looking at the relative percentage of iPhones in service after each device's release Sept. 22-24.

The FCC granted Motorola Solutions' application for special temporary authority to demonstrate prototype equipment at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia. The Office of Engineering and Technology Monday granted the application covering Oct. 20-25.

The 911 Location Technologies Test Bed, an independent entity established by CTIA, is inviting vendors of location-accuracy technologies to participate in Stage Z. The test bed was established to independently evaluate the ability of carriers to meet FCC indoor 911 location accuracy requirements through different technologies. The FCC approved an order in January 2015 requiring carriers to improve their performance in identifying the location of wireless calls to 911 (see 1501290066). “Stage Z testing focuses on emerging indoor technologies that determine the altitude, or z-axis, of the 9-1-1 caller,” said a Friday news release.

The FCC released instructions for filing 4G LTE coverage data under the Mobility Fund II challenge process order approved by commissioners last month (see 1708030026). The Office of Management and Budget still must sign off on the order. The data filing will be due 90 days after the FCC publishes notice of OMB’s approval in the Federal Register, the agency said: “The provider-specific information submitted as part of the data collection will be treated as confidential.” The document was released by the Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force working with the Wireline and Wireless bureaus.

The FCC should leave rules for priority access licenses (PAL) in the 3.5 GHz shared band largely unchanged, said Kalpak Gude, president of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA), in a meeting with Rachael Bender, aide to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Google said similar. “To the degree that the Commission sees the need to modify the term length for PAL licenses, DSA would support changes that were tied to economic recovery of investment,” Gude said in a filing in docket 17-183. “Claims that periods longer than that are necessary for investment are generally unpersuasive. Business investment decisions are made on the basis of recovery of investment.” Google officials told Wireless Bureau Chief Donald Stockdale and others the agency shouldn't make major changes. The rules are “attracting significant, diverse investment,” Google said. The company noted the commission has authorized more than 200 experiments since a 2015 order setting up the rules for the band. “Traditional and non-traditional use cases are being deployed,” Google said.

AT&T is “quietly” deploying a 10 MHz block of 700 MHz spectrum in New York and other markets to add capacity and increase download speeds, and that could be good for Dish Network, BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk wrote Friday. AT&T owns the D- and E-blocks in markets including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but in other markets only controls one of the blocks, he said. “Interestingly, Dish owns the adjacent block” in most other markets “which positions them well for a spectrum swap that would generate tangible value for AT&T,” Piecyk wrote. The band represents 4 percent of Dish’s considerable spectrum holdings and BTIG sets its value at $969 million, after tax.

Using a cellsite simulator without a warrant violated Fourth Amendment rights of a criminal, said the D.C. Court of Appeals last week. Judge Corinne Beckwith's opinion -- concurred in part by Judge Michael Farrell and dissented from by Judge Phyllis Thompson -- reversed Prince Jones' convictions, saying the evidence admitted at trial obtained from the unlawful search "was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt." The Electronic Frontier Foundation blogged Thursday that the majority decision should be "yet another warning to law enforcement that new technologies do not mean investigators can bypass the Constitution." D.C. police used a cellsite simulator -- popularly known as a StingRay -- to find and arrest Jones at a parked car although it was unclear whether the device pinpointed the unique identifier of his cellphone or one he allegedly robbed from a victim. Jones sought to suppress the evidence, but the trial court denied his motion. "The trial court agreed with the government's argument that regardless of whether there had been a Fourth Amendment violation, the inevitable-discovery doctrine rendered the exclusionary rule inapplicable," wrote Beckwith, meaning police would have located Jones with the device using either Jones' or the victim's phone. Beckwith said a cellsite simulator can expose a cellphone user's "intimate personal information," can be used to track and, more importantly, locate a person, and can exploit a security vulnerability. Use "invaded a reasonable expectation of privacy and was thus a search," she said. Farrell said a recent case said government acquisition of cellsite location information from a provider isn't a search under the Fourth Amendment (see 1708140064 and 1706050006), but in this case, direct government surveillance of a cellphone is a search with a cellsite simulator that intercepts such location data. Thompson believes people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in location information like in their home, but this case didn't involve a home, no long-term tracking, no physical intrusion or trespass and no search of a cellphone. Neither DOJ nor the Public Defender Service commented Friday.