The FCC Public Safety Bureau closed all remaining dockets for filings on review and approval of regional plans or plan amendments for spectrum in the 800 MHz National Public Safety Planning Advisory Committee band, except for consolidated docket 23-237. The agency created that docket last year but didn’t close all the other dockets at the time (see 2307210053). “Some of these individual dockets have previously been closed and we now close the remaining individual dockets,” the bureau said in a notice in Wednesday’s Daily Digest.

Auto Innovators urged the FCC to act soon on a proposed order on cellular vehicle-to-everything use of the 5.9 GHz band that is in front of the commissioners (see 2407170042). The group represents the auto industry. Its representatives met with an aide to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. Its representatives “also encouraged the Commission to work with the automotive industry to identify additional spectrum to both support new C-V2X use cases and to ensure that there is adequate spectrum for next-generation V2X technologies, such as 5G-V2X,” a filing posted Tuesday in docket 19-138 said.

India, the U.S. and Southeast Asia lead the world in stand-alone (SA) 5G deployments, while Chinese operators and India’s Jio lead in active 5G SA users, Ookla said in a new report. Europe lags, “with operators still hesitant due to the relatively low [return] on existing 5G investments and unclear business cases for 5G SA.” The United Arab Emirates and South Korea lead in performance -- with download speeds reaching 879.89 Mbps and 729.89 Mbps, respectively, Ookla said. Ookla recorded just 11 new 5G SA deployments in nine countries in 2023 but said growth is expected to accelerate this year. “5G SA uses a dedicated 5G core network, unlocking the full capabilities of 5G with better speed, latency, support for large numbers of devices, and more agile service creation,” Ookla said: It also allows new features including network slicing, but comes with increased infrastructure complexity, higher costs and requires more staff training.

Generative AI (GenAI) smartphone shipments are expected to grow 363.6% year over year in 2024 to 234.2 million handsets, or 19% of the smartphone market, IDC said Tuesday. Growth is expected to continue at a compound annual rate of 78.4% through 2028. "GenAI smartphones are inevitable and look to be the next big thing the industry has to offer consumers," said Anthony Scarsella, IDC research director-mobile phones. “Despite the challenges of elongated refresh cycles and macroeconomic uncertainties, GenAI capabilities on the smartphone will drive upgrades and represent a significant opportunity for both vendors and application developers alike,” IDC said.

Carriers are embracing open radio access networks as they “introduce” more virtualization, intelligence and “ultimately automation” into their networks, Stefan Pongratz, Dell’Oro Group vice president-RAN market research, said during a Fierce Network webinar Tuesday on ORAN indoors. Del Oro recently projected that global RAN revenue will decline at a 2% compound average growth rate through 2028 (see 2407260041). “Within that there are pockets of the RAN market that are growing,” including ORAN, small cells, millimeter-wave deployments and fixed wireless access, Pongratz said. A big challenge for AMB Sports and Entertainment, which manages Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, is keeping up with fan demand, Chief Information Officer Kevin Pope said. “We actually have to track a different demand line when you think of events like the SEC [college football] Championship, a Taylor Swift concert, a FIFA World Cup game, the Super Bowl,” he said. The demands are higher than for average events, he added. Connectivity is “something we take seriously, but it’s a moving target.” Customers don’t care about which technology is used, “they just want to have a good experience" but "we need to have all these tools in our toolbox.” If people are reading email, “that’s one thing,” Pope said, but if thousands of fans are trying to stream high-resolution video at the same time that requires a different set of tools. His company uses a distributed antenna system and Wi-Fi but also millimeter-wave spectrum in areas where it expects the highest bandwidth demands. At the biggest events, during the halftime of a football game or a set break at a concert, the demand peaks “are just staggering.” You also have to deal with customer preferences, Pope said: Some customers have limited data plans so they want to use Wi-Fi, while others may not trust Wi-Fi. The initial focus with any new generation of wireless is on outdoor, macro coverage, said Upendra Pingle, CommScope senior vice president-intelligent cellular networks. When that’s done, the focus moves to in-building coverage, starting with large public venues, followed by more general network densification, he said. “This cycle repeats every decade … and we’ll see the same thing on 6G.” Pingle said carriers are focusing more on high-band deployments “because that’s where high bandwidth is available” for “massive, data-hungry use cases.” With millimeter-wave, the signals don’t penetrate buildings very well and “a dedicated in-building solution becomes more and more important.” With that comes the need for “an open, virtualized architecture to deploy in-building cellular to cover all the use cases,” he said. As venues consider millimeter-wave spectrum, it has to make sense for them financially given the costs. “The use case has to be balanced with the business case.” High-band will have its place, “but it's going to have to be a specific application dealing with a specific use case,” Pingle said.

Handset repair advocates told the FCC that a 60-day period in which handsets can’t be unlocked is too long. Commissioners approved an NPRM 5-0 this month seeking comment on unlocking rules (see 2407180037). “For the sake of full hardware freedom, we call on the Commission to eliminate hardware-based carrier lock-in periods entirely and require carriers to unlock handsets upon sale,” a filing posted Monday in docket 24-186 from iFixit, U.S. PIRG, The Repair Association, the Secure and Resilient Future Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Waveform. A 60-day period, as the FCC proposed, is “customer-hostile, props up predatory business models, and weakens the secondary market for smartphones,” the groups said.

Mississippi-based wireless carrier C Spire said it will pull all its commercials from the Olympic Games in Paris following a controversial segment in the opening ceremonies. “We were shocked by the mockery of the Last Supper,” the carrier said on X on Saturday. The scene showed French DJ and producer Barbara Butch in the center of a long table with drag queens on both sides. Olympic officials said the scene was a tribute to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, not Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper," according to numerous reports. A spokesperson for Paris 2024 said there was "never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.”

A March FCC order creating a voluntary cyber-trust mark program is effective Aug. 29, a notice for Tuesday’s Federal Register said. Questions remain about when the program will launch, with the FCC yet to finalize some aspects of the rules (see 2405090051). The cyber mark label will appear on consumer IoT products with an accompanying QR code (see 2403140034).

Garmin International defended its request for a waiver of FCC rules for handheld general mobile radio service (GMRS) devices limiting them to one transmission every 30 seconds (see 2310060031). Garmin proposes “digital data transmission parameters that, although different than the currently applicable rule, are more protective of GMRS voice communications,” a filing Thursday in docket 24-7 said. Relative to existing rules, “Garmin’s proposed parameters would drastically reduce the duration of each digital data transmission to provide more frequent -- but, in the aggregate, substantially shorter -- data transmissions,” Garmin said.

Dell’Oro Group warned that radio access network revenue worldwide is declining and that this trend should continue through 2028. Global RAN revenue is projected to decline at a 2% compound average growth “as continued 5G investments will be offset by rapidly declining LTE revenues,” Dell’Oro said last week. The Asia Pacific region is expected to lead declines. “It is not a surprise that there is rain after sunshine,” said Stefan Pongratz, vice president-RAN market research: “In addition to [mobile broadband]-based coverage-related challenges, this disconnect between mobile data traffic growth and the capacity boost provided by the mid-band, taken together with continued monetization uncertainty, is clearly weighing on the market.”