Hundreds of Verizon employees have spent almost two years getting ready for Super Bowl 50 in the San Francisco Bay area where the carrier says it plans to show off its network. Verizon has built 16 new area cell sites, installed 75 small cells and is deploying a patented antenna system to reach the lower stadium seats at Levi's Stadium, IT said. On Super Bowl weekend, Verizon plans to deploy 14 mobile cell sites in high-traffic locations. Overall, the carrier said it made a $70 million investment in the area to improve its network there before the big game. “We do this because we anticipate that this will be the most ‘shared’ Super Bowl,” said Brian Mecum, vice president-network for Verizon Wireless. “A better wireless network matters when it comes to capturing and sharing life’s greatest moments.” At last year’s Super Bowl, Verizon customers in Phoenix used 4.1 terabytes of data, the carrier said. “A state-of-the-art facility, Levi’s Stadium is designed to handle 1.5 times the wireless data traffic on the Verizon network as compared to University of Phoenix Stadium.” The Super Bowl will be played Feb. 7.

AT&T had 2.8 million wireless net adds in Q4, including 638,000 from Mexico, it said in an earnings report, released after regular U.S. stock markets closed Tuesday. AT&T said it now has 137 million wireless customers worldwide. Postpaid churn was 1.18 percent for the quarter, 1.09 percent for the full year. Postpaid smartphone sales dropped 27 percent in Q4. Revenue was $42.1 billion, up 22 percent year-over-year “primarily due” to the DirecTV acquisition, AT&T said. Net earnings attributable to AT&T were $4 billion, compared with a net loss of $4 billion in the year-earlier quarter. Full-year capital investment was $20.7 billion and is likely to climb to about $22 billion this year, AT&T said. “Our DIRECTV integration is going well, and the customer response to our new integrated mobile and entertainment offers is strong,” CEO Randall Stephenson said in a news release. “Throughout this year, we plan to launch a variety of new video entertainment packages that give customers even more choices.” In Mexico, AT&T said it now covers 44 million POPs with LTE and will deploy LTE in the massive Mexico City market in Q2. Stephenson said AT&T’s growth in Mexico is “exceeding all our expectations.”

Fingerprint sensors are an expected feature in smartphones, driven by biometric security and mobile payments, said an IHS report Monday. The sensors are also being used more in tablets and notebook PCs, said IHS. The iPhone leads the segment in fingerprint sensors, with 499 million shipped in 2015, up from 316 million in 2014, said IHS. Growth will continue each year until 2020, when fingerprint sensor shipments will peak at 1.6 billion units, it said. Apple, which acquired fingerprint-sensor maker AuthenTec in 2012, led the fingerprint sensor market in 2015 on the popularity of the iPhone 6s and iPads, said analyst Jamie Fox.

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to allow them to file a joint amicus brief in a cellphone privacy case. In U.S. v. Damian L. Patrick, Patrick was charged with being a felon in possession of a weapon. Police tracked him down using location information from his phone, obtained from his carrier or possibly collected using a cell-site simulator, EFF said. “This is the first time this federal appeals court, whose rulings affect Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, is considering whether citizens have an expectation of privacy in real-time cell phone location records,’’ said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch in a news release Monday. “This case comes as we are seeing a groundswell of recognition that this information is private.” The brief would give judges a unique perspective on “the broader implications of cellphone tracking, including information on the precision with which cellphones and cellphone service providers may capture data about where the phone’s owner has travelled throughout their day, the privacy interests implicated by the government’s collection of location data, the current trend toward greater legal protection for this data throughout the United States, and the implications of cellphone location data collection for Fourth Amendment analysis,” the groups said Friday in a filing at the court.

CTIA President Meredith Baker met with FCC officials to express concerns about the agency’s pending 11th broadband progress report and on USF issues. “CTIA highlighted the significant role that mobile wireless broadband services have cemented in the lives of Americans, and expressed disappointment that the Commission’s forthcoming … report may not affirmatively conclude that mobile wireless broadband deployment is occurring on a reasonable and timely basis,” the filing said. Currently, 99 percent of Americas have access to LTE, compared with 35 percent of consumers worldwide, Baker said. Wireless carriers invested a record $32 billion in their networks last year, she said. “American consumers use more than 11.1 billion MB of data every day,” the filing said. “As a result, mobile data usage increased more than 25 percent in 2014 alone, and more than ten times the volume from 2010.” The filing was in docket 15-191. The draft Telecom Act Section 706 report that has been on circulation would find that broadband wasn't being deployed in a timely and reasonable manner to all consumers (see 1601070059).

Sprint and T-Mobile are hyping progress they're making on their networks versus AT&T and especially Verizon. T-Mobile premiered a TV ad during the NFL playoffs Sunday. In a take-off on Verizon’s colored balls ad, the piece shows five red Verizon balls headed down a ramp followed by dozens of magenta T-Mobile balls. “In the last two years, Verizon only added LTE coverage for 5 million people,” a female voice exclaims. “T-Mobile, they added 100 million.” A male voice chimes in: “Verizon didn’t tell you that, did they?” Without mentioning T-Mobile’s 700 MHz buys, the ad says the carrier’s in-building coverage is four times better than in the past. “Verizon is better at some things," T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted Sunday. "Like keeping secrets. It's time to spill the balls, once and for all.” Verizon also broadcast its own version of its bouncing balls ad repeatedly during the playoff games. Meanwhile, Sprint, which unveils earnings Tuesday (see 1601220047), said in a news release Monday that it has doubled its number of LTE Plus markets. Sprint also said a new report by Nielsen Mobile Performance said Sprint had the fastest LTE download speeds of the four national carriers. “Over 75 million downloads, collected from real consumers in cities across the country, show that Sprint wins where it matters -- the actual customer experience,” said CEO Marcelo Claure. “Our customers are experiencing a network that’s faster than the competition, and there’s never been a better time to give Sprint a try.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology will host a meeting of prospective Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators and environmental sensing capability (ESC) operators in the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band Feb. 16, they said. The meeting starts at 9:30 a.m. at FCC headquarters, a Thursday public notice said. FCC staff “will only address questions related to the SAS or ESC requirements or the process for reviewing proposals,” the agency said. Other matters, including those raised in pending petitions for reconsideration in docket 12-354, won't be addressed. Potential SASs and ECSs have until April 15 to file applications with the FCC. The window opened Jan. 15.

Taoglas opened a 16,000-square-foot antenna and RF design center for M2M (machine-to-machine) and IoT applications in San Diego. The facility offers prototyping of antennas and printed circuit boards, and antenna and device testing, the company said. The facility also houses an antenna and cable assembly operation for customers requiring products “in a few days rather than weeks,” President Dermot O’Shea said. The facility targets vendors in IoT looking for off-the-shelf or custom antennas along with design services, O’Shea said.

The FCC Wireless Bureau approved a deal under which Triangle will lease spectrum from Verizon under one partitioned upper 700 MHz C-block license covering five counties in parts of two "very rural" local markets in Montana. “After carefully evaluating the likely competitive effects of the leasing arrangement, we find that the likelihood of competitive harm is low,” the bureau said in the Friday order in docket 15-210. “Some public interest benefits are likely to be realized, such as the expansion of broadband services, increased network quality, and a better consumer experience for consumers living in these very rural areas.”

Sprint moved up the expected date of the release of fiscal Q3 financial results by a week to Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche said the move was likely aimed at stopping its bond and equity “free fall.” Fritzsche said in a note to investors that she welcomes the report. “Our checks would show that S saw some momentum with net adds and continued low churn,” she wrote, referring to its stock symbol. “We continue to believe the bonds (which are trading at distressed levels) and equity are trading a worst case scenario and well below the asset value of the 2.5 GHz spectrum” owned by Sprint, she wrote. Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at New Street Research, said recent Sprint moves on its network mean the carrier won’t be deploying additional macro cell sites (see 1601150061). “We always thought Sprint needed to significantly boost the number of cell sites in order to have a competitive network,” Chaplin wrote. “They may be able to get there more cheaply and quickly using small cells for 2.5 GHz rather than traditional macro cells. The expense savings come primarily from using wireless backhaul for the small cells rather than fibre. The time savings come from a significantly streamlined zoning and permitting process (in many cases none is required at all).” Sprint did not comment.