The FCC shouldn’t give AT&T and FirstNet control of the 4.9 GHz band, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley told the FCC in the latest filing on the contested band. Giving FirstNet control “would strip today’s 4.9 GHz public safety licensees’ right to expand their systems by forcing incumbent licensees to surrender the spectrum they are not using” and “runs counter to a 2023 FCC order and its commitment to locally controlled public safety in the 4.9 GHz band,” said a filing Wednesday in docket 07-100. It would also allow AT&T “to use the band for commercial purposes, which runs counter to the mission of this public safety band,” Crowley said.

The FCC on Thursday approved environmental sensing capability sensor deployments and coverage plans for Federated Wireless in Hawaii in the citizens broadband radio service band. The Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology in coordination with NTIA and the DOD made the approval. Federated has satisfied the sensor coverage requirements to protect DOD operations in nine dynamic protection areas in the state and Pearl Harbor, the notice said. Federated on Wednesday asked for an extra six months, from June 30 to Dec. 31, to launch operations. The extension “is necessary to allow Federated Wireless sufficient time to complete construction of its ESC network in Hawaii, which… is taking longer than anticipated due to circumstances beyond the company’s control.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned the FCC of potential risks to consumers regarding providers’ implementation of security countermeasures to prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the Signaling System 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols to track the locations of consumers through their mobile devices (see 2404290032). “EFF has been concerned about location data privacy for years, including the threat posed by surveillance companies enabling their foreign government customers to conduct surveillance by exploiting SS7 network vulnerabilities,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 18-99. Current use of the Diameter protocol “presents similar problems,” EFF said in reply comments on a Public Safety Bureau notice. EFF urged the FCC to require audits of major wireless carrier use of SS7 and Diameter “every 12-18 months,” with a requirement that providers “address any identified vulnerabilities.”

DOD has relaunched the Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions process to explore dynamic spectrum sharing (see 2405200050), but NTIA needs public engagement as part of the related studies (see 2403120056) of the bands being examined as part of the national spectrum strategy, Shiva Goel, NTIA senior adviser-spectrum policy, blogged Wednesday. For the band studies co-led by DOD and NTIA, “the responsibility to establish a multistakeholder forum for non-Federal engagement falls on NTIA,” Goel said: “We know just how instrumental that engagement was to the identification of bands to be studied in the Strategy. We know how much the execution, too, will benefit from those contributions.” Goel said involving diverse stakeholders in the studies is important “to ensuring that the public has confidence in the work that results.”

Making money has to be the goal when providers expose their application programmable interfaces (APIs), experts said during a Mobile World Live webinar on Wednesday. Open APIs are a growing focus of carriers (see 2404160065) and of the GSMA (see 2402260054). “Monetization is really the end goal,” said Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence. Operators need to expose network capabilities in a consistent way, he said. Consistency is “particularly important” because that leads to interoperability, he said. That allows carriers to “monetize those network capabilities that they built out in a transparent way” so that developers don’t have to go to every operator and “figure out how to integrate with them” and “start from scratch with every single operator they want to work with,” he said. When APIs are exposed consistently, you get the scale that’s attractive to developers, Jarich said. The industry is seeing “traction” since GSMA launched its API Open Gateway initiative last year (see 2302270069), he said. Carriers responsible for nearly 70% of worldwide connections are focused on open APIs, he said. Security is a top concern of providers, and it’s not surprising that many open APIs are focused on security and anti-fraud efforts, Jarich said. GSMA surveys show that operators aren’t just joining the open gateway initiative but are exposing their APIs, he said. Providers are building out fiber and 5G networks against the backdrop of challenging economic conditions and shrinking profit margins, said Ana Redondo, product strategy lead in the Networks Division at telecom tech company Amdocs. “There’s very intense competition worldwide,” she said. “It isn’t an easy environment to operate in,” she said. Carriers are trying to reduce costs and grow core revenues where possible, she said. 5G hasn’t worked as well as carriers hoped, but fixed wireless access “has proven to be very successful,” she said. Open APIs can put carriers “in a far more competitive position,” she said. Carriers have a lot of assets they can monetize in the data that they have, their data centers and edge capacity. Carriers are asking how they can expose everything they do as APIs, she said. It’s a “fundamental shift,” but it puts providers “closer to how the cloud vendors work,” she said.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) announced Wednesday that AT&T has joined the pro-open radio access network group’s board. Rob Soni, vice president-RAN technology, will represent the carrier on the board. “AT&T has been a trailblazer of open and disaggregated technologies” and AT&T joining the board “reflects the global profile of our community,“ said TIP Chair Yago Tenorio, director-network architecture at Vodafone Group. The appointment “supports AT&T’s effort to deploy 70% of our wireless network traffic across open-capable platforms by late 2026 and aligns perfectly with our commitment to efficiency and innovation,” Soni said.

T-Mobile is beefing up its network as hurricane season starts this week and with wildfire season already underway, the carrier said Wednesday. T-Mobile is “turning on new 2.5 GHz spectrum to boost critical coverage and capacity for nearly 60 million customers throughout the country, including hurricane-prone areas such as Louisiana.” The carrier continues to harden its network and is adding to its fleet of satellite cell-on-light-trucks and satellite cell-on-wheels “as well as heavy-duty trucks to provide Wi-Fi and device charging,” the company said.

T-Mobile’s proposed $4.4 billion buy of UScellular would be credit positive “because it will expand T-Mobile's scale and provide it with potentially material synergies” and won’t “materially affect T-Mobile's credit metrics,” S&P Global Ratings said Wednesday. The agreement was announced Tuesday (see 2405280047). “T-Mobile estimates the deal will yield about $1 billion of annual run-rate cost and capital expenditure savings, which we view as achievable based on previous transactions,” S&P said. The firm warned that the expected $2.2 billion-$2.6 billion in integration expenses should be “modestly dilutive to the company's cash flow over the near term.”

Top executives from Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony met with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and staff on the “latest developments” on the company’s open radio access network initiatives, said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 21-63. They were joined by officials from the U.S. Embassy in Japan. The executives discussed “key challenges for the deployment and adoption” of ORAN and how Rakuten “making its source code available to other companies” could promote open networks.

Supplemental coverage from space activities could make radio astronomy impossible from 600 MHz to 2700 MHz and beyond, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said Tuesday in FCC docket 22-271. NRAO said strong beam coupling or high passband occupation by SCS will destroy or permanently impair a radio astronomy receiver, though this could be mitigated. It said large swaths of spectrum where terrestrial interference has been coordinated away or otherwise obviated will be blocked by bands allocated to SCS. SCS emissions would block even protected bands, NRAO said, noting SCS undermines the protections the National Radio Quiet Zone and other remote locations enjoy today. Accordingly, it said the FCC should make SCS applicants show they can operate without directly illuminating, incapacitating or damaging radio astronomy observatory receivers. NRAO also urged cumulative limits on SCS interference.