Representatives of the Rural Wireless Association urged the FCC to approve a second phase of the USF Mobility Fund at $500 million per year. RWA met with aides to Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel. “RWA discussed its continued support for the creation of a Mobility Fund Phase II mechanism that will provide specific, predictable, and sufficient support to sustain and advance the availability of mobile services in high-cost areas,” said a filing by the group in docket 05-265. A proposal to reduce the program to a $400 million annual amount “was predicated on estimated disbursement figures that were frozen and ratcheted down to 60 percent of the 2011 baseline,” RWA said, adding that “$400 million was not reflective of carriers’ costs then, and certainly isn’t reflective of carriers’ costs now.” Clyburn told an RWA meeting last year that the FCC should wrap up an order creating a dedicated USF mobility fund (see 1509100059).

The Social Security Administration is now requiring that people have a cellphone number to use the “my Social Security” website. “We’ve added an extra layer of security for our customers when they interact with us online,” the SSA said in a blog post. “This extra layer of security is called ‘multifactor authentication’ and complies with an executive order requiring federal agencies to provide more secure authentication for their online services. Any agency that provides online access to a customer’s personal information must now use multifactor authentication.”

The value of contactless point-of-sale (POS) terminal transactions conducted in stores via cards, mobile devices and wearables will approach $500 billion worldwide by 2017, up from $321 billion this year, said a Juniper Research study Monday. The surge will be tied to retailer obligations to card companies in many markets to ensure all terminals will be “contactless”-ready by 2020, it said. Contactless will represent half of payment cards issued by 2020, while smartphone and tablet-based POS terminals will handle 20 percent of all retail POS transaction value by 2021, it said.

The Competitive Carriers Association brought Brian Gelfand, general manager of Blue Wireless, to the FCC to discuss problems small carriers face in getting reasonably priced backhaul service. CCA officials and Gelfand met with an aide to Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on the association’s proposal for overhauling the business data services (BDS) market, said a Friday filing in 16-143. “Market power abuses by incumbent BDS providers impact Blue Wireless’s bottom line expenses, and ... anticompetitive backhaul rates and contract terms may frustrate Blue Wireless’s ability to make a business case for deploying 5G networks.”

AT&T officials offered the FCC advice on repacking after the TV incentive auction, said a filing in docket 12-268. The AT&T officials met with Gary Epstein, chairman of the Incentive Auction Task Force, and other officials. “The purpose of the meeting was to ... recommend that the Commission take a regional approach to a nationwide repack that takes advantage of lessons learned in previous spectrum relocations and provides visibility to the spectrum purchasers to facilitate the new deployment process,” said a filing on the meeting.

CTIA urged the FCC to grant the relief it seeks in a petition for reconsideration of the FCC Lifeline order and reconsider its decision to set long-term minimum capacity standards for mobile broadband at 70 percent of the average mobile data usage per household (see 1606240077). Most commenters supported CTIA’s complaint about the order, the group said in reply comments. “Only two filers opposed the Petition, and they failed to rebut CTIA’s legal and policy objections to the rule,” the wireless association said. “The record clearly supports the Petition’s grant.” Most commenters “generally” agreed “the long-term minimum standard for mobile broadband could present affordability challenges and should consequently be reconsidered,” CTIA said. Only the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates and a coalition led by the Greenlining Institute opposed the petition, CTIA said. NASUCA, meanwhile, noted in its comments the need for the FCC to address “affordability” of service, CTIA said. FCC “failure to address affordability … was one of the major factors in CTIA’s Petition,” the wireless association said. Greenlining “expresses general opposition to any reduction in minimum service standards, but fails to address the challenge to affordability in the current long-term standard formula,” CTIA said. Comments were filed Monday in docket 11-42.

The American Petroleum Institute filed a letter at the FCC supporting the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council’s October 2013 4.9 GHz national plan. NPSTC said critical infrastructure industries (CII) should be allowed to use the band on a shared co-primary basis with public-safety agencies and frequency coordination in the band. API represents oil and gas producers and associated industries. The NPSTC plan “includes frequency coordination to help minimize interference, bandwidth limits to increase spectral efficiency, provisions for new airborne and robotic applications to enhance incident response and opportunities for spectrum access by critical infrastructure,” API said. “Allowing CII to share 4.9 GHz spectrum with public safety would provide an efficient use of the spectrum and would provide for a migration point for those applications currently grandfathered in the 3.65 GHz band.” The filing was posted Friday in docket 07-100.

Sprint is putting new emphasis on pursuing business customers and hired a former executive from Vodafone to do so, it said Friday. Jan Geldmacher, who formerly led Vodafone Global Enterprise, is joining Sprint as president-enterprise, reporting directly to CEO Marcelo Claure. “Sprint’s network, now performing at its highest levels, is prepared to serve national business clients with many lines, devices and mobility issues,” Sprint said in a news release. “Under Geldmacher’s leadership, Sprint will begin aggressively targeting and serving enterprise companies of all sizes.”

The 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA) said the 800 MHz rebanding continues to progress, now focused on some of the last licensees to retune, along the border with Mexico. “The primary focus” during Q1 “continued to be the reconfiguration of Mexican border licensees,” the TA said in a quarterly report. As of March 31, all of the 127 frequency reconfiguration agreements expected for Mexican border licensees had been submitted to the TA, the report said. Mexican border licensees “retuned, reflashed, or replaced approximately 24,900 radios (first touches) in the first quarter … raising the total number complete to approximately 119,300 radios as of March 31,” the TA said. The administrator said all retunings must proceed on schedule. “A delay in the completion of an implementation task by a licensee that has a downstream impact on other licensees (i.e., by blocking another licensee’s replacement frequencies or because the first touch of its subscriber units needs to be completed before an interoperable licensee can retune its infrastructure) can have a cascading effect and cause delays for other dependent licensees and, in some cases, for an entire region,” the report said. The 800 MHz rebanding has been underway for almost 12 years, since the FCC approved its 800 MHz rebanding order, aimed at addressing interference to public safety radios in the band by Nextel, which later merged with Sprint. This month is the order's 12th anniversary. The rebanding initially was expected to be completed in June 2008. Sprint had paid out $1.95 billion as of March 31, to cover the cost of the rebanding, the TA said.

Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri believes 4G as a business “is far from finished,” he said on a Thursday earnings call. The “underlying demand” for 4G for capacity and speed “remains strong and is not simply on hold waiting for 5G to happen,” Suri said. “Thus, 4G will have to continue to develop even as the focus starts to move towards 5G.” Nokia’s view “at a high level” is that 5G will be rolled out “relatively quickly in a small number of countries,” such as the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, Suri said. In other countries, "4G and evolutions of 4.5G, in particular, will prevail for some time,” he said. Even in countries that move more quickly than others toward 5G adoption, “4G is not going anywhere just yet,” he said. Long term, Nokia sees 5G being a “complement” to 4G “for some time,” rather than “a full replacement as we have seen in previous generations,” he said. “Early 4G systems were not built to support features such as multiple carrier aggregation that are already in demand today,” Suri said. “This means that modernization of both hardware and software will need to take place in many networks prior to large-scale 5G deployment.” Though it’s clear there will be some “dip in the market” as the industry transitions “from one technology generation to the next, some of that will likely be mitigated by one or more additional waves of 4G evolution,” he said.