Eyewear company Vuzix signed an agreement with Verizon leveraging the carrier’s Ultra Wideband 5G and edge computing technologies for augmented-reality smart glasses for sports and gaming, said Vuzix Monday. They will focus on advancing the development and commercialization of delivering “immersive” AR “training experiences,” it said.

COVID-19 pandemic-fueled growth will continue next year for the wearables and wireless headsets sectors, but 5G millimeter-wave smartphone shipments won’t reach “critical mass,” reported ABI Research Tuesday on top tech trends for watch in 2022. “With more time being spent at home, the pandemic has seen an uptick in the use of wireless headsets, driven by the need for personalized audio experiences that minimize external distractions and achieve high-quality sound,” said ABI. It forecasts that wireless headset shipments will reach more than 1 billion units globally in 2026 and will lead the smart accessories market, it said. “Ecosystem momentum” for 5G mmWave “is gathering pace as a number of regions are targeting deployments,” said ABI. But even with “tangible indicators” that mmWave is beginning to appear in more smartphone models, it will be less than 5% of global sales in 2022, it said.

Consumer tech unit sales in the first nine weeks of Q4 fell 4% year on year, emailed NPD analyst Stephen Baker. Black Friday week had a 15% year-over-year revenue bump, while Cyber Week grew 3%, he said. Also Wednesday, Pitney Bowes reported that of 2,000 survey respondents interviewed over the past month, nearly 70% expect supply chain issues to continue into early next year, 62% throughout 2022. The most popular product category is electronics, with 30% of all consumers delaying electronics purchases, “likely due to current inventory shortages, compounded by chip shortages and the promise of discounts on high-value products” later, it said.

A Sony Life Insurance employee stole more than $154 million from the Sony Group subsidiary in May and converted the funds to bitcoins worth more than $180 million, alleged DOJ in a “civil forfeiture” complaint Monday in U.S. District Court in San Diego to “protect and ultimately return” the seized money to Sony. The employee, Rei Ishii, diverted the funds to a private account at a bank in La Jolla, California, by falsifying transaction instructions, said DOJ. Ishii was criminally charged in Japan, and all the bitcoins “traceable to the theft have been recovered and fully preserved,” it said. "We would like to express our gratitude to the U.S. and Japanese authorities, for the stolen funds being located, and recovery procedures are progressing,” emailed a Sony spokesperson Tuesday. Attempts to reach Ishii’s lawyers in Japan for comment were unsuccessful.

The “precise positioning” that 5G can render will benefit “a broad range of use cases and devices,” by bringing a “new dimension of location awareness” to IoT devices, blogged Qualcomm Technologies Friday. Though satellite-based global positioning works very well when there’s “clear line of sight” to multiple satellites, accurate positioning in “urban canyons with tall buildings” and other more challenging radio environments “needs the support of other technologies,” it said. When combining “next-level 5G connectivity” with AI, Qualcomm envisions a “wireless innovation platform” it calls the “connected intelligent edge” that leverages “on-device capabilities and analytics” that will grow stronger with “smarter, more capable devices,” it said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., urged Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to use funding for the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act included in the FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act and additional money targeted for inclusion in legislation under House-Senate negotiation to “push back against … consolidation” in that industry. The chambers are working to produce a conference bill marrying elements of the Senate-passed U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (S-1260), which includes $52 billion to boost chipmaking, and a set of similar House-passed measures. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., abandoned efforts (see 2111180073) to include S-1260 in the FY 2022 NDAA (S-1605), which the chamber passed Wednesday 88-11. President Joe Biden is expected to sign that measure. “The semiconductor industry has undergone significant consolidation in the last decade,” which “has reduced competition” and “has harmed consumers by enabling these dominant companies to increase prices and underinvest in key capabilities, which has the effect of also reducing product innovation and product quality,” Warren said in a letter to Raimondo Thursday. Warren praised the recent FTC lawsuit to block Nvidia buying Arm from Softbank (see 2112030002), but believes “the U.S. government has other tools beyond antitrust enforcement that could increase competition, protect consumers and workers, and promote supply-chain resiliency.” She cited S-1260’s proposed $19 billion in FY 2022 and $5 billion in annual funding for FY 2023-26 for incentivizing U.S. chip manufacturing.

Pixelworks signed an “independent software vendor agreement” with MediaTek to collaborate on advanced visual display processing support for smartphone OEMs in the production of high-end 5G handsets, based on MediaTek's Dimensity 5G “open resource architecture” platform, said the companies Thursday.

The best way to measure the “network advantage” of 5G millimeter-wave technology isn't by its “coverage or connected time,” but by its ability “to reduce the growing data strain placed on cellular networks,” blogged Qualcomm Technologies Director-Product Marketing Nitin Dhiman. The “intended purpose” of 5G mmWave is to deliver “massive increases in localized capacity to address the ever-growing demand for data in key areas,” said Dhiman Wednesday. A Qualcomm analysis of field management data found 5G mmWave “offloads significant portions of the data traffic,” he said. “That figure will only increase as the penetration of 5G mmWave-capable devices increases. Using traffic measurements rather than coverage or connected/active time is the key performance metric that evidences the importance of mmWave in the evolution of 5G.” When mmWave capacity is available, “offloading traffic to the wider capacity helps achieve dramatically higher burst rates and average data rates” than 5G sub-6 GHz and LTE, he said. An analysis of the video streaming data set in the field tests found 95% of the data bursts “were observed to be carried over mmWave spectrum, resulting in 10.5x the burst rate with mmWave, compared to sub-6,” he said.

The U.S. wireless power transfer industry is “hampered in its ability to respond to customer demand” for WPT technologies by the current lack of a regulatory path at the FCC for the equipment certification of WPT transmitters that charge client devices under Part 18 at a distance over one meter, said a filing posted Monday in docket 19-226. Without FCC adoption of a regulatory path for WPT over one meter, company representatives told aides to FCC members, the U.S. could relinquish its “global leadership role with respect to WPT technologies.”

Four years after the FCC voted to authorize ATSC 3.0's voluntary deployment (see 1711160060), MPEG LA is about to launch a 3.0 patent pool license, emailed a spokesperson. “If things go as we now anticipate, we expect to begin offering the license in January.” MPEG LA originally planned to have the patent pool operational by early 2019 (see 1811270013). “Each pool has its own unique set of factors affecting time to market, and in some cases, reaching agreement among patent holders to offer a license of wide benefit to the market takes longer than others,” said the spokesperson now. “This license is timely in light of the expected ATSC 3.0 ramp-up.” The 3.0 pool doesn’t have “a final licensor count yet,” he said. ATSC 3.0 services are on the air in about three dozen U.S. cities, with 18 more slated to come online through the spring. CTA forecasts 4 million 3.0-compliant sets will be sold in 2022, climbing to 11 million in 2023 and 20 million in 2024. MPEG LA announced a call for 3.0-essential patents, the first step in the patent pool formation process, in August 2017 (see 1711010054). ATSC bylaws require that patent owners disclose they hold intellectual property relevant to 3.0 and that they commit to licensing their patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (see 1711210004).