The growth in the number of smartphones will continue, AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie told the CTIA conference Thursday in a keynote. “There’s tons of gas in smartphones,” he said here in Las Vegas. “We have tons of opportunity to continue to grow.” Mobile video, the connected home and the IoT will all be part of the growth, he said. “Our future in this industry in our opinion is about mobility and video -- people having the ability to take their content, view it anywhere, anytime, on any device they want.” AT&T earlier this year said 50 percent of the usage on its network is video, he said. Smartphones aren't the entire market, Lurie said. “I want you to think about tablets, I want you to think about cars, I want you to also think about the enterprise marketplace.” AT&T’s buy of DirecTV is just part of the story as the company looks at video, he said. The connected home is the first thing many customers want to talk about, he said. But it's unclear what the connected home will look like, he said. “If I would have asked all of you in 2000 what do you want your smartphone, what would you have told me?” Lurie asked. “You didn’t know. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what an app store would do.” The IoT is “very, very hard to define because it’s everything,” he said. “Every single thing in our lives is going to be connected.” Some estimates are that the IoT market could be made of 50 billion devices, using a wide variety of protocols. “We have really entered a new era in our business,” said Lurie. “The smartphone has taken us to a new place.” No one leaves their home without their smartphone and it doesn't matter what it will be called. "There's going to be a device that runs your life," said Lurie.

FCC designated entity bidding credits in spectrum auctions should be scrapped, said Doug Brake, telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in a blog post emailed to us Wednesday. Brake said the DE program to foster small business wireless entry hadn't worked well and he questioned whether it even made sense in today's mobile market, where size matters. He said the DE program was a good example of a dynamic described in "The Miasma of Regulation," a 1987 essay by Robert Reich (who later became U.S. labor secretary), which laid out "the cat-and-mouse game" in which regulators write rules and the regulated push the envelope, with the back-and-forth generating more complicated rules that confound American business. Brake said the recent controversy over Dish Network's relationship with two entities in the AWS-3 auction is just the latest controversy. The DE program may have made sense in the 1990s when it started, Brake said, but small businesses today face bigger challenges in launching a network and competing with entrenched national wireless carriers. "I have a hard time seeing a small business breaking into this market in a meaningful way, even with steeply discounted spectrum," which is "just a small fraction of the cost" of building a network, he said. "New entrants to the broadband access business will be the ones with radically disruptive technology, not a discount on one input. The DE program has a history of either being manipulated by large companies, or heaping largess on individual insiders who reap the upside with large profits and incomes."

Google invited Irvine and San Diego, both in California, and Louisville, Kentucky, to explore rolling out Google Fiber to the cities, said a Thursday blog post from the company. The next step will be a joint planning process with city leaders to do a detailed study of factors that affect construction, such as local topography, housing density and the condition of existing infrastructure, the post said. Once that's completed, Google will decide if it's feasible to deliver Google Fiber to each of the cities, the post said.

Public interest groups asked for more time to file opposition to CTIA's petition for reconsideration of targeted FCC Lifeline USF decisions (see 1508130048), in a motion posted Wednesday in docket 11-42. The Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge asked the commission to push back a Sept. 17 deadline for filing oppositions to Oct. 19.

APCO provided tentative support for 800 MHz interstitial channel interference contours proposed by the Land Mobile Communications Council. APCO noted in FCC docket 15-32 that LMCC proposed "interference contours to apply when stations of various modulation types are operated on interstitial channels (12.5 kHz spacing) adjacent to 'standard' (25 kHz spacing) stations operating with various modulation types." APCO said it appreciated the LMCC efforts and believes the "proposed contours can be workable" but said they're untested. "We would encourage manufacturers to submit test reports into the record to verify that no interference would result from new interstitial operations," APCO said. "As noted by the Public Safety Communications Council (of which APCO is a member), APCO would support use of tile-based matrix studies using TSB-88 methods when the proposed operations of a public safety applicant fail a contour analysis. APCO supports the proposed interference contours consistent with the comments herein." Mobile Relay Associates said it supported most of the LMCC proposal but said one part of it was inconsistent with the rest of the proposal and decades of public policy. "That one portion of the LMCC proposal is its proposed treatment of instances where there is absolutely no spectral overlap between the incumbent station and the proposed station," MRA said. "Neither the Commission nor the LMCC has ever required an interference analysis when there is a complete absence of spectral overlap, and, as to very narrowband 4 kHz emissions in particular, there is a plethora of real-world experience proving that interference to incumbent stations does not exist in the absence of spectral overlap."

The FCC should provide information about spectrum impairments well in advance of forward auction rounds, said AT&T in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 12-268. Incentive Auction Task Force staff confirmed that impairment information could change between auction stages “if it becomes necessary to establish a new clearing target,” the carrier said. It said it would be “helpful” for the agency to clarify any plans for licenses so impaired they won’t be sold in the forward auction -- called “category 3” licenses. It said the FCC should also clarify how reserve eligibility will be determined and allow time for bidders to “evaluate its impact” before a reserve round after the reserve is implemented begins. The commission should allow extra time for any extended round -- “at least 24 hours between the end of a forward auction round and the time bids in an extended round would be due,” AT&T said. The commission should also hold more than one practice auction before the real thing, AT&T said. “Such practice auctions would allow applicants to become familiar with the Commission’s auction software and complete the development of their own tools.”

The FCC's Task Force on Optimal Public Safety Answering Point Architecture scheduled its fourth meeting, 1-4 p.m., on Sept. 29 at the FCC Commission Meeting Room, said a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register.

Etisalat Group plans to upgrade its wireless networks, including offering LTE in some markets, using a variety of CommScope equipment, Etisalat said Wednesday. The CommScope gear includes base station antennas, filters, coaxial cables and connectors and other RF-related hardware.

Wi-Fi advocates and the wireless industry are increasingly jousting over LTE-unlicensed. The WifiForward coalition labeled LTE-U users "spectrum bullies," in a short advocacy video put on YouTube Tuesday. The animated video shows a schoolyard bully-like tablet running on LTE-U pushing around smartphones and smart watches. "If Wi-Fi won't work, we all suffer," the video narrator says. "We can insist on politeness, ensuring that Wi-Fi and other new technologies can live in harmony and preventing spectrum bullies from disrupting unlicensed bands." WifiForward launched in 2014 with the goal of increasing the amount of unlicensed spectrum available for Wi-Fi use (see 1402140055). In a conference call Tuesday with reporters, Wi-Fi advocates said licensed assisted access standards should be finalized by the spring and until they are other LTE-U iterations shouldn't be approved (see 1509080046). Such unlicensed spectrum bands used in everything from cordless phones and baby monitors to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi "have been incredibly useful to consumers," said David Young, Verizon vice president-public policy, in a blog Wednesday. "The FCC’s 'permissionless innovation' approach to unlicensed spectrum has been an incredible success, unleashing torrents of innovation in spectrum bands that were once considered useless." Unlicensed spectrum "is poised to unleash a new wave of mobile innovation," said Young. LTE-U "will benefit consumers, competition and innovation," said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs, in a statement Wednesday: "Unlicensed spectrum has always offered an opportunity for permissionless innovation and we look forward to continuing to educate all stakeholders about the benefits of LTE Unlicensed."

Tagging the date to Apple’s new product news, Jumptuit TV planned live demonstrations Wednesday of its multiplatform cloud service on Sony 4K smart TVs at CTIA Super Mobility Wednesday in Las Vegas. “The Jumptuit TV software cloud solution at CTIA Super Mobility defines a new open era of multiplatform data connectivity in contrast with proprietary smart devices being unveiled in San Francisco later today,” said the company. The multiplatform service is designed for consumers whose devices span several platforms including Android, iOS, OS X and Windows along with cloud services including Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Driver and Microsoft OneDrive, it said. Jumptuit links a smart TV with Android, iOS and Windows mobile devices and cloud service accounts to make media accessible on the big screen, it said. Jumptuit TV is initially available as a native Android Lollipop App on 2015 Philips, Sharp, Sony and Vizio smart TVs through the Google Play Store, said Jumptuit. Owners of other smart TVs can install the Jumptuit TV app on a set-top box such as the Google Nexus player, Jumptuit said.