The recently completed AWS-3 auction demonstrated that licensed spectrum remains valuable, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said in a blog post Friday. “Although some argue that the future lies only with unlicensed or shared spectrum, this view ignores the fact that our nation’s commercial wireless carriers still seek exclusive spectrum in order to be able to maintain quality of service and network control,” he said. The auction showed the paired spectrum blocks are much more valuable to industry than unpaired spectrum, he said. The auction also showed that location matters. "As expected, the licenses covering the top 30 metropolitan areas, which account for approximately 10 percent of the licenses offered, brought in 79 percent of the overall gross revenues. This is nothing against medium- or small-sized markets, but this fact is important as the Commission looks toward the incentive auction and issues raised by potential market impairments.” The auction also showed that mid-band spectrum remains valuable and highlighted the need for the FCC to address its designated entity rules. Dish Network was able to indirectly buy the second most AWS-3 spectrum of any player in the auction at a discounted price through DEs Northstar and SNR Wireless (see 1501300051). He didn't directly cite Dish. This major company was “able to use this structure to outbid not only small businesses and rural telephone companies, but also some of the country's largest wireless providers,” he said. “If these bidding credits are granted, which I take no position on at the current time, the rules would allow these licenses to be ‘flipped’ to another company after five years without repaying a penny of the subsidy.”

Carriers disclosed pre-order and pricing plans Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge smartphones that launched at Mobile World Congress earlier this month. Sprint said the 32 GB S 6 will be available free as part of an $80 monthly lease plan over 24 months that includes unlimited talk, text and data on the Sprint network; international value roaming in Telefonica countries; and annual upgrades. Sprint will continue its promotion offering to pay all of customers' costs to switch to Sprint from another carrier, including the contract and whatever is owed on the device. Price for the Galaxy S 6 edge with a 24-month lease is $5 monthly after a $20 per month lease credit, Sprint said, and the monthly charge paired with the Sprint Unlimited Plus Plan is $85 per month. Sprint's Boost Mobile unit will offer the S 6 (32 GB) in black for $649 as a no-contract purchase option, the carrier said. Preregistration began Thursday at the website. Boost Mobile's Data Boost Up plan with automatic payments is $35 per month for unlimited talk and text and 2.5 GB of high-speed data, it said. Availability for the S 6 and S 6 edge on Sprint and Boost Mobile is April 10. U.S. Cellular announced its presale Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge beginning Friday in stores and online. U.S. Cellular has pricing options including $0 down using installment pricing over 20 months, it said.

Representatives of CTIA disputed arguments by Google, NCTA, Federated Wireless and various public interest groups that the FCC should “effectively bar” LTE-unlicensed from the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band. The FCC is moving toward final rules for spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band and tweaking its rules after several comment rounds (see 1502050049). In meetings with officials from the FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology, a filing in docket 12-354 said, CTIA said: “It is not the agency’s role to make technology choices. LTE-U is a promising new technology and one possible solution that does not preclude other air interface solutions that meet the FCC’s technical requirements.” The order also should support devices that are tunable across the 3.5 GHz band and encourage investment by Priority Access Licenses that pay for better access to the band, it said.

The record developed so far supports the wisdom of the FCC’s proposal to permit personal/portable unlicensed operations in a 6 MHz channel of the duplex gap after the TV incentive auction, Google said in comments filed in docket 12-268. Opponents of unlicensed devices in the gap make some wrong assumptions in pointing to potential problems, Google said. Opponents “assume unjustifiable receiver-sensitivity levels,” fail to take account of expected attenuation and “arbitrarily handicap LTE performance to suggest" LTE devices "are more susceptible to interference than real devices,” Google said.

Kyocera launched a national mobile phone takeback program for consumers wanting to dispose of unused cellphones of any brand, the company said Wednesday. Kyocera said it’s working with SecondWave Recycling, which promotes free phone recycling to support charities. For every four phones recycled for their raw materials, Kyocera will donate $1 to Cell Phones For Soldiers, a nonprofit that provides free communication services to active-duty military members and veterans, Kyocera said. Nearly 2 billion mobile phones are sold globally each year, but only 13 percent of unused phones are recycled in the U.S., with the remaining 87 percent going to landfills or incinerators, Kyocera said. In the take-back program, donors can print free shipping labels at Kyocera’s sustainability website and Kyocera will provide shipping containers for phones at no charge to those who need them, the company said. SecondWave will receive the phones and break them down for their recyclable raw materials, it said.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance supported deployment of Wi-Fi location-based services (LBS) Wednesday. A WBA paper said Wi-Fi LBS opens up a wider range of possibilities for location-based services and analytics in areas like emergency services, entertainment and retail. LBS also provides an opportunity for service providers and others in the industry to innovate and create a competitive advantage, WBA said. The WBA report “clearly indicated that LBS over Wi-Fi is seen by service providers as one of their most important monetisation strategies,” CEO Shrikant Shenwai said in the news release. “This is a further illustration of how Wi-Fi is continuing to evolve beyond connectivity, to enable a wide range of value-added services.”

FCC net neutrality rules pose a potential threat to LTE broadcast, which lets wireless carriers multicast over their networks, said Daniel Lyons, a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, in a blog post Wednesday. The traditional way carriers transmit video, as an individual copy of requested content to each consuming device, “makes little sense when multiple people are consuming the same content at the same time, as many do during the Super Bowl or other live sporting events,” Lyons said. LTE broadcast uses a portion of the network to transmit one copy of the content to multiple devices. The net neutrality order doesn’t directly address LTE broadcast, Lyons said. But it could potentially violate the order’s paid prioritization ban, he said. “Because carriers must reserve a portion of cell capacity to engage in LTE broadcasting, a creative lawyer might argue that LTE broadcast allows a carrier to use ‘resource reservation’ to ‘directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic’ in violation of the Commission’s prohibition, if done ‘in exchange for consideration’ or ‘to benefit an affiliated entity,’” he said. LTE broadcast would also be a strong candidate for a waiver of the ban, as allowed by the order, Lyons said. “It is also possible that the FCC would consider LTE broadcast a non-BIAS [broadband Internet access] service that is exempt from the Open Internet rules, like the cable company’s facilities-based VoIP service or IP television,” he said. “One can describe LTE broadcast as an ‘application-level’ service that shares capacity with the carrier’s broadband service but does not itself offer access to large portions of the Internet.”

Comments are due May 11, replies May 26, on a Feb. 9 NPRM on how the FCC can promote efficiency and flexibility in 800 MHz mid-band spectrum. The deadlines came after the NPRM was published in Wednesday's Federal Register. “The Commission seeks comment on whether to create new, full-power 12.5 kilohertz interstitial channels in the 800 MHz Mid-Band,” the notice said. “The Commission also seeks comment on appropriate interference protection criteria for interstitial channels, including a proposal from the Land Mobile Communications Council (LMCC) to amend the rules to adopt new ‘Interstitial 800 MHz Coordination Procedures.’”

Consumers Union is asking the FCC to stop telemarketers from finding loopholes in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and using robocalls to cellphones, said a CU news release Wednesday. CU said it added to the series of petitions submitted to the FCC in support of the act by delivering about 130,000 petition signatures to the agency Wednesday. Some telemarketing and financial service companies are lobbying the FCC to allow “wrong party” robocalls to cellphones, which would subject consumers to intrusive calls if the company obtains a number previously owned by someone else, or if a debt collector associates a number with the wrong person, CU said. It's working to pressure phone companies to offer free, effective call blocking tools to stop unwanted and illegal robocalls.

Participation in Virgin Mobile's broadband Lifeline pilot project was “considerably less” than the company had planned, with only hundreds of customers in any given month instead of the 2,500 anticipated, the company said in a letter to the FCC posted Wednesday in docket 11-42. Requiring a contribution, either upfront or in the form of a monthly recurring charge, even if relatively small, “is a significant barrier to participation,” said the company. “Any broadband Lifeline program should be designed with the extremely cash-constrained consumer in mind.” About 70 percent of Virgin Mobile’s Assurance Wireless Lifeline subscribers report having no access to the Internet at home or elsewhere, and “may not have hardware available to access the internet using broadband service,” the company said. The pilot was part of the agency’s Lifeline broadband pilot program to collect data on how the Lifeline program can be structured to increase broadband adoption among low-income Americans. Virgin Mobile said it offered four options to 104,000 Massachusetts customers and 150,000 Ohio customers. The company said it offered the choice of an initial device fee of $10 or $50, and an activation fee of either $20 upfront with no recurring monthly fees or no upfront charge with a $20 monthly fee.