FCC Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel, appearing together at a WifiForward event, agreed the FCC needs to make more spectrum available for Wi-Fi. Both expressed impatience with the slow pace of opening the 5.9 GHz band for sharing with Wi-Fi. O’Rielly said later he doesn’t have a firm timetable for the release of proposed rules for the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band.
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Voice control is passé, found an audience poll at the Parks Associates Connections conference Tuesday. Audience members on a panel on future directions of smart home interfaces in a text poll viewed artificial intelligence (59 percent) as the technology that would have the biggest impact, followed by interoperability (20 percent), voice control (11 percent) and robotics (7 percent). Panelists said the industry's focus is moving beyond smart speakers to AI and to interoperability.
The first congressional hearing on T-Mobile's proposed merger with Sprint was set Wednesday. Earlier that day, a free-market economist found some investor concerns the deal would pass antitrust muster. And an analyst said the deal is different from AT&T/Time Warner. Comcast meanwhile said it's preparing an offer for most of 21st Century Fox assets (see 1805230019).
Since KFPH-CD Channel 35, a Univision-owned Class A station in the Phoenix market, became “the first stick to go up” in the Pearl TV-led ATSC 3.0 model-market project (see 1804080002), “we’re getting a lot of emails from consumers,” Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle, told the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference Monday. In the emails, initiated through the model-market project website that went live during last month’s NAB Show, consumers are “asking when they can buy this new service,” said Schelle.
Amid calls to break up Facebook’s “monopoly,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told us the current tech landscape isn't comparable to that surrounding antitrust activity against Microsoft in the late 1990s, when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. Anticompetitive issues could surface, “but I don’t see any reason for it right now,” he said. The Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen and Content Creators Coalition are among groups demanding Facebook divest Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger (see 1805210051). Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin separately said DOJ should investigate big tech concentration of ownership.
Movie studios and regional sports networks (RSNs) could become antitrust sticking points for a proposed Comcast buy of Fox's nonbroadcast assets, antitrust experts told us. Comcast said Wednesday it's preparing an all-cash offer for the same Fox nonbroadcasting assets that Fox agreed to sell to Disney. It said the structure and terms of its offer, and the regulatory risk provisions, "would be at least as favorable to Fox shareholders as the Disney offer."
Commissioner Brendan Carr promised more FCC action is on the way on changes to wireless infrastructure rules, in an interview on C-SPAN’s The Communicators recorded Wednesday. Carr said he's “actively looking” at ways to speed up siting decisions and steps the FCC can take “to make sure that we’re all moving in the same direction in terms of promoting the deployment of this new infrastructure.” The episode is expected to be televised this weekend and put online Friday.
Congress gave itself multiple options for addressing President Donald Trump's bid to reconsider the Department of Commerce seven-year ban on U.S. companies selling telecom software and equipment to ZTE, lawmakers and lobbyists told us. The issue continued to get Capitol Hill attention Wednesday. The previous day, the Senate Banking Committee attached language to the Senate version of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (S-2098) that would bar Trump from changing the Commerce ban on U.S. sales to ZTE without certification to Congress the company complies with U.S. laws (see 1805220057). Trump has faced criticism over ZTE since he first tweeted about it last week (see 1805140062, 1805150068 and 1805160061). Commerce first announced the ban in April (see 1804170018).
CHARLOTTE -- The FCC will vote in July on a proposal for using C-band spectrum, the 500 MHz of spectrum between 3.7 and 4.2 GHz, Chairman Ajit Pai told the Wireless Infrastructure Association Wednesday. Pai urged aggressive action to win the global 5G race but said he wants to find balance between industry and local government interests. Dish Network plans to spend at least $10 billion on 5G, technology that Chairman Charles Ergen predicted would add “a lot more” than $500 billion to the economy. Chasing a 5G network for IoT, “Dish is back to being a startup business,” Ergen said. The company is spending $500 million to $1 billion in the first phase of its plans, and tower executives voiced eagerness to assist.
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Consumers in the U.S. will buy more than 485 million connected consumer devices in 2021, including smart home, connected health, mobile and entertainment products, said Parks Associates at the opening of its Connections conference Tuesday. By 2022, that will top 520 million units. Making that possible are 106 million U.S. households, 88 percent, with broadband service, said analyst Tom Kerber.