LG Innotek thinks the expansion of smartphone-based mobile payments will “dramatically” increase demand for fingerprint recognition technology, it said in a Monday announcement about its new under-glass fingerprint sensor. The company cited IHS saying it expects annual fingerprint sensor sales to more than triple from last year to 1.6 billion units in 2020.

The FCC is seeking comment on the next edition of its always-controversial mobile wireless competition report. Since 2010, the first wireless competition report of the Obama presidency, the FCC, in its required annual report to Congress, repeatedly has declined to say the wireless industry is effectively competitive (see 1005210135). The FCC released its last report in December over the objections of Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Ajit Pai and carriers who said the industry is increasingly competitive (see 1512240019). The pending report is expected to be the last of this administration. “This Public Notice seeks comment and information on competitive dynamics within the mobile wireless marketplace regarding, for example, the number of subscribers and financial indicators, such as revenue or profitability,” said a public notice released Friday. “We seek comment and information on overall industry metrics such as coverage, including by spectrum band, technology, geography, and demographics.” Comments are due May 31, replies June 15.

A report and order on the 3.5 GHz shared band takes the final steps toward establishing rules for the band, the FCC said in the order, approved Thursday (see 1604280062) and released Monday. “Facing ever-increasing demands of wireless innovation and constrained availability of clear sources of spectrum, the Citizens Broadband Radio Service is an opportunity to add much-needed capacity through innovative sharing,” the FCC said. “With this Second Order, we finalize the regulatory scheme we created in 2015, putting in place the last rules necessary for this service to become commercially available.” The order explains why the FCC rejected a request by CTIA that the agency provide license terms of five, rather than three, years for priority access licenses (PALs). Three-year license terms “already [reflect] a balance among parties that advocated for short license terms and those that prefer longer terms,” the FCC said, saying the original rules were for one-year licenses. “Based on the record, we instead adopted a longer, three-year license term and allowed applicants to apply for two consecutive terms, during the first applications window, for a total of six years,” the FCC said. “We continue to believe that ‘three-year non-renewable license terms -- with the ability to aggregate up to six years up-front -- strike a balance between some commenters’ desire for flexibility with other commenters’ need for certainty.’” The FCC said the three-year license terms are long enough to spur investment in the 3.5 GHz band. “Non-renewable, short-term licenses are an essential component of this overall framework,” the FCC said. “They allow operators to obtain PALs when and where Priority Access to the band is needed while permitting periodic, market-based reassignment of these rights in response to changes in local conditions and operator needs.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau will host its annual workshop Wednesday on environmental compliance and the historic preservation review process required for construction of wireless communications facilities, the FCC said in a public notice Thursday. The workshop will include information about construction of towers and collocation of equipment on towers and other structures. Topics include tower siting, archeology, northern long-eared bats and compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. The workshop will be 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the FCC meeting room and will be webcast.

The rationale last month for creating Ford Smart Mobility as a new subsidiary "to design, build, grow and invest in emerging mobility services" (see report in the March 14 issue) was to allow the new unit “to have the organization and the structure to face off with some of the tech and mobility companies in terms of acting really fast,” yet still be “connected” to Ford’s “core operations,” CEO Mark Fields said. But “it's still way too early” to discuss Ford Smart Mobility’s work in much detail, Fields said in Q&A on an earnings call. With the new subsidiary, Ford will be “very focused” in the future “on where to play and how to win” in the mobility space, he said Thursday. “We are generally using experiments and pilots to, not only test technology and customer preferences, but very importantly test the business models, because at the end of the day, you want to make money on these things. And we're doing that before we make what I would call major bets on investments, whether it's internally or externally.” Fields promised the company will have “more to say about this as our Ford Smart Mobility strategy progresses this year.” Fields thinks global automakers will reach “an inflection point as an industry over the next number of years, given the technology that's available, not only in the product itself, but how to serve the customer,” he said. But “there's a lot of cars here in the U.S.,” and “it's going to take a long time, even with breakthrough technologies, where people will change that over,” and adopt autonomous, semi-autonomous or connected cars, he said. “Just the math will show you that will take a good amount of time.” Fields thinks “it's too early to tell” what technological trends will take over, “but we're really looking at this as vehicle miles traveled,” he said. Future autonomous vehicles “will be used 24/7, they'll rack up miles sooner,” which in turn will drive “more service revenue and, ultimately, more car sales,” he said. “Our strategy, very clearly, is to continue to make the investments on the technology side and the investments on the mobility side so that we can participate in both of those revenue streams.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is scheduled to kick off a Tuesday workshop at the FCC on distributed antenna systems and small cells, a Thursday notice said. The daylong program starts at 9 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room at FCC headquarters. The workshop also includes sessions on how the micro systems were used at the 2016 Super Bowl and during last year’s papal visit in Philadelphia. Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Mike O’Rielly also are slated to speak.

Household ownership of wireless audio, wearables and connected devices saw the largest household ownership gains since 2015, CTA said in a Thursday report that cited survey results from its latest study of consumer tech ownership and market potential trends. The findings “verify that smartphones are now a household staple, with ownership trends beginning to mirror those of televisions, which remain the most pervasive tech product in U.S. households,” CTA said. TVs are now owned in 96 percent of U.S. homes, and there are now nearly as many TVs owned (320 million) as the U.S. population (321 million), CTA said. The number of respondents who say they plan never to buy a TV increased slightly to 22 percent from 18 percent in 2015, it said. That’s “likely due to diffusion of video consumption across multiple device screens,” CTA said. Smartphones are now owned in 74 percent of U.S. homes, up 2 percentage points from 2015, CTA said. “On average, Americans now own 2.4 smartphones per household, and the expected smartphone repeat purchase is 91 percent -- comparable only to television ownership trends.” The IoT “continues to drive growth in emerging tech devices,” CTA said: Wearable fitness activity trackers are owned by 20 percent of U.S. homes, double the number that owned them last year.

Always-on mic-enabled devices have unique privacy implications as compared with those that are manually or speech-activated, the Future of Privacy Forum and Ernst & Young said in a new paper released Thursday. The paper said it is inaccurate to label all such devices with speech recognition or mic-enabled features as being always on. Manually activated devices just require a user to press a button or flip a switch to record and transmit audio to a voice-to-text translation service, the paper said. Speech-activated devices like iPhone 6S or Microsoft Cortana stay in an "inert state of passive processing" and require a "wake phrase" to turn on. These devices are "not really 'listening' to its environment" but use the mic as another sensor. But always-on devices -- such as security cameras, baby monitors, the wristband Kapture or wearable camera OrCam -- "evoke different privacy concerns" from the other two categories, the paper said. Such devices "call for notice and consent frameworks in sync with the more extensive data collection that they enable," it added. The paper also discussed how some laws consider a "voice print" as a biometric or personal record with restrictions on usage. Another issue in the paper focused on consent from parties to be recorded. The paper also described emerging privacy issues such as devices transmitting and storing data in the cloud and user ability to disable functions or recognize when devices are recording. “Our expectations will evolve more quickly in some areas than others, and so the manufacturers of devices that are introducing microphones for the first time -- like televisions and toys -- should go the extra distance to provide additional transparency and in many cases greater levels of control and choice,” FPF Legal and Policy Fellow Stacey Gray said in a news release.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau sought comment Thursday on a proposed CTIA framework aimed at enabling carriers to work together to let customers roam on each other’s networks after a disaster like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy (see 1604270035). Industry and government officials said Thursday that the accord was crafted in the hope that carriers would work out agreements before disaster strikes. AT&T and T-Mobile agreed to allow customers to roam on the other’s networks in the aftermath of Sandy, but that agreement took several days to work out, during which time affected subscribers couldn’t call 911 or otherwise communicate using their cellphones, officials said. The FCC sought comment on a broader resiliency issue in 2013, the bureau said. “Since the Resiliency Notice was issued and the record compiled, the Bureau has engaged in a number of meetings with a variety of stakeholders to understand the data that different segments value in evaluating the overall resiliency of wireless networks and outage impacts, as well as other factors in developing more resilient wireless networks,” the bureau said in Thursday's notice. “We seek comment on the carriers’ ‘Wireless Resiliency Cooperative Framework’ in light of the aims of the Resiliency Notice and the associated record.” The comment deadline is 15 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.

Global consumer awareness of Bluetooth wireless technology is at 92 percent, said results of a Bluetooth Special Interest Group online survey. Bluetooth SIG hired research firm Lux Insights to canvass nearly 3,000 consumers in seven countries in January. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported a purchasing preference for Bluetooth-enabled products for their reliability and ease of use, Bluetooth SIG said. Other key findings: (1) On average, consumers now own nearly four Bluetooth-enabled products, compared with 2.7 in 2012; (2) Bluetooth usage has increased 32 percent since 2012; (3) of the U.S. consumers canvassed, 64 percent said they bought a Bluetooth device last year, and 62 percent of people familiar with Bluetooth say they prefer an electronic product with Bluetooth or will buy electronic products only with Bluetooth.