The FCC should rule that nonemergency, service-related phone calls and text messages to customers who have provided a phone number don't violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, said the Alarm Industry Communications Committee in comments posted Friday in docket 02-278. AICC supported a petition for expedited declaratory ruling sought by Edison Electric Institute and the American Gas Association (see 1503270020). Calling the proposed exemption a “common sense approach to customer relations,” AICC acknowledged TCPA exempts communications made for emergency purposes, but “alarm companies may also benefit by being able to use the contact number provided by their customer … to contact that customer about their account and alarm system status and to verify installation/maintenance appointments.” Other notifications “can best be quickly distributed to alarm subscribers by auto-dialer and/or text message," the group said, citing alerts about the need for an equipment upgrade, an equipment recall, alerts regarding a system security risk, suspicious activity like someone is knocking on doors, or about home invasions in the area. Customers who give a vendor or creditor a phone number expect “to be contacted on that number in connection with its relationship with that vendor,” AICC said.

The FCC will take up a public notice seeking additional comment on designated entity (DE) rules at its meeting Friday, the commission said Friday in an announcement. Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated the draft notice last month (see 1503240055) after promising he would do so during an appearance before the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee. Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Ajit Pai earlier urged the FCC to revisit the rules in the wake of the AWS-3 auction, where Dish Network used two DEs to indirectly buy $13.3 billion worth of licenses for $10 billion (see 1504090053). The notice will look at “how to ensure that small businesses, rural telephone companies, and businesses owned by members of minority groups and women have an opportunity to participate in the provision of spectrum-based services, while ensuring that there are adequate safeguards to protect against unjust enrichment to ineligible entities,” the FCC said. The agency is also taking up rules for the 3.5 GHz band, as was expected (see 1503270052).

The FCC released a Small Entity Compliance Guide to help small businesses, small organizations and small governmental jurisdictions comply with the FCC’s revised wireless E-911 location requirements. The guide is no substitute for the rules, released in February, the document noted. “In any civil or administrative action against a small entity for a violation of rules, the content of the Small Entity Compliance Guide may be considered as evidence of the reasonableness or appropriateness of proposed fines, penalties or damages.”

Apple will take Apple Watch pre-orders exclusively at apple.com beginning Friday at 12:01 a.m. PDT, for delivery starting April 24, the company said Thursday. Apple expects Apple Watch demand at launch will easily outstrip supply, Angela Ahrendts, Apple senior vice president-retail and online stores, said in a statement. The online-only pre-order policy will be in place “to provide the best experience and selection to as many customers as we can,” she said.

The FCC Wireless Bureau will host its annual educational workshop on the environmental compliance and historic preservation review process for the construction of cell towers and other wireless facilities May 12, the bureau said Thursday. Starting time is 9 a.m. at FCC headquarters. Topics include National Environmental Policy Act compliance, “with an emphasis on wetlands and endangered species review,” and National Historic Preservation Act Section 106 compliance under the Nationwide Programmatic Agreement, the bureau said.

Federated Wireless Chief Technology Officer Kurt Schaubach and others assured FCC officials that a spectrum access system (SAS), a key part of the agency's proposed rules for the 3.5 GHz band, will work. Federated Wireless develops systems to allow more sophisticated sharing of spectrum. “There is tremendous interest in unlocking the value of this spectrum, including among carriers, and moving forward with innovative uses of the band,” the company said in meetings with FCC officials, according to a filing in docket 12-354. The WInnForum, a multistakeholder SAS working group, “is already hard at work addressing the functional and performance requirements for SASs that will achieve the Commission’s goals for the Citizens Band,” the company said. “There should be no doubt that skepticism about how SASs will work, and requests for static PAL licenses, are rooted in the same place -- conventional notions about the value of licensed spectrum.” The skepticism is because the proposed use of the 3.5 GHz band is a “new paradigm,” Federated Wireless said. “The Citizens Band, with SASs, sensing technologies, and spectrum sharing, is not intended to replicate spectrum use as it exists today in licensed bands.” The company also stressed the importance of interoperability of devices designed for the band. Federated Wireless said it hopes “to ensure not only that there is technology neutrality, but also that devices for the band work for all users of the band, and that any technology used in the band will not favor one class of users (e.g., carriers) over all other users of the band.” The FCC is to vote on rules for the band next Friday (see 1503270052).

Wi-Fi offloading would help relieve LTE networks and add value for consumers, Iain Gillott, founder of iGR, said in a webinar Thursday about Wi-Fi offloading. The webinar was sponsored by iGR, a market strategy consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile communications industry. Wireless companies such as AT&T have set up Wi-Fi hot spots in congested metropolitan areas as a way to ease the network traffic, and Gillott said those hot spots can be helpful, but in metro areas like New York City they're not the most effective. Other weaknesses for using Wi-Fi offloading are that older networks lack security and others have cumbersome log-ins, he said. There's also no handoff between Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G, Gillott said, and Wi-Fi roaming isn't as seamless as cellular. Despite those downsides to wireless companies offering Wi-Fi offloading for its customers, some strengths may be hard for those companies to ignore, he said. The network gets larger when the wireless companies have Wi-Fi hot spots everywhere, which can help with marketing, Gillott said. Wi-Fi offloading is also inexpensive to deploy and supports stationary traffic, he said. A big plus for consumers and wireless providers alike is that the free Wi-Fi usage helps customers stay under their data limits, Gillott said.

Just over two months since RadioShack’s Feb. 5 bankruptcy filing triggered Sprint’s store acquisition deal with RadioShack's largest shareholder Standard General and its General Wireless subsidiary (see 1502060023), Sprint set Friday as the grand opening of 1,435 “Sprint-RadioShack” stores within RadioShack stores, Sprint said in a Thursday announcement. The openings will more than double Sprint’s company-owned “retail footprint” from its current 1,100-store base, it said. The openings follow recent statements by Sprint senior management that the company was in crying need of more retail storefronts to raise its brand's public profile. Besides having a “great network” and a “compelling offer,” giving consumers more places to shop is one of the “basic fundamental principles” guiding a carrier like Sprint, CEO Marcelo Claure said on a recent earnings call. Before Sprint’s RadioShack store acquisitions, the company had 500-600 fewer retail locations than T-Mobile and 3,000 fewer than Verizon, he said. Sprint has said its ambitions are to “effectively operate a store within a RadioShack store” at the 1,750 RadioShack locations it’s acquiring. Sprint will occupy about a third of the retail floor space in each location, it has said. The stores will be co-branded, with Sprint being the primary brand on storefronts and in marketing materials, it has said. With Friday’s opening, Sprint hopes to begin to “transform the customer store experience” as it works to finish converting the remaining 315 RadioShack stores “over the next several months,” Sprint said.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a class-action lawsuit against the four major national wireless carriers alleging they colluded to fix prices for text messaging services. The case is Aircraft Check Services Co. et al. v. Verizon Wireless et al. “It is of course difficult to prove illegal collusion without witnesses to an agreement” and there are none in this case, Judge Richard Posner wrote for the panel that heard the case. It is also reasonable to expect that competing firms will closely track the pricing and other market behavior of their competitors, he said Thursday. “The plaintiffs have presented circumstantial evidence consistent with an inference of collusion, but that evidence is equally consistent with independent parallel behavior,” Posner wrote. Lawyers need to be careful about invoking the term collusion without being precise, he said. “Tacit collusion, also known as conscious parallelism, does not violate section 1 of the Sherman Act,” he said. “Collusion is illegal only when based on agreement. Agreement can be proved by circumstantial evidence, and the plaintiffs were permitted to conduct and did conduct full pretrial discovery of such evidence. Yet their search failed to find sufficient evidence of express collusion to make a prima facie case.”

Mitsubishi Electric is demonstrating with Nokia Networks a prototype Active Phased Array Antenna (APAA) to verify new multibeamforming technology for envisioned 5G mobile networks, at the Brooklyn 5G Summit in New York this week. Features of the APAA prototype include four-beam spatial multiplexing achieved in a multi-element antenna, beamforming control of the direction of radio signal transmission and reception for two-dimensional vertical and horizontal scanning and use of 3.5 GHz, the highest frequency available in current cellular mobile communication, Mitsubishi said. Mobile systems based on 5G will use multibeamforming to cope with fast-increasing radio traffic volume, it said. Mitsubishi plans to adapt its APAA technology, currently used commercially in satellites, for use in 5G base stations, it said.