Howard Buskirk

NTIA will release a report “later this fall” on the agency’s May request for comment about the state of 6G development (see 2405230010), Lauriston Hardin, NTIA chief technical adviser, said during RCR Wireless’ 6G Forum on Tuesday (see 2410010033). Comments were filed at NTIA in August (see 2409040032). “We’re working through it now,” he said. “I’m not allowed to give any more comment than that at the moment.” NTIA’s Office of International Affairs issued the request, so some of the focus will be international, he noted. “Our job, in part, is to stay ahead and talk about the policies that will be put in place, or possibly regulations that will be put in place, to help foster as well as maintain new developments in the marketplace,” Hardin said: “We’ve asked the marketplace, ‘Tell us about 6G. Tell us about your use cases. Tell us about when new things will happen. Tell us about the policies you think should be in place that would promote things.’” Hardin stressed the importance of focusing on what 6G can do for consumers. “Engineers like to engineer and think technology is in and of itself a great thing.” We’re still dealing with “the unfulfilled promises of 5G.” Hardin said one of the big questions NTIA is addressing is whether a way can be found to “effectively share” the lower 3 GHz band with DOD (see 2409050032). “One of the things there is airborne radar.” Dynamic spectrum sharing isn’t “a silver bullet,” he said. “Most of the spectrum that we look at, especially sub-6 [GHz], is going to have to be shared.” Anton Monk, senior vice president-strategy at Cohere Technologies, said people view 5G as early in its deployment because carriers have been unable to identify many new use cases. “The consumer hasn’t really seen any significant changes, certainly not enough to pay an extra $10 a month for,” Monk said. “There is a lot of valid concern” that we’re just “following the 10-year cycle” and trying to keep up with other countries that “have huge government-funded initiatives to keep pushing the nest generation,” he said: “Regardless, this is the pace that we’re on, and we just need to make sure that we set expectations correctly” and that we pick use cases “that are really valuable and have paying customers.” Marketing for 5G started early and made too many promises, said Michele Polese, research assistant professor at Northeastern University.

While expectations are that 6G will be commercialized by 2030, large scale deployments will likely come later, Milap Majmundar, AT&T director-advanced radio access network technology, standards and spectrum, said Tuesday at RCR Wireless’ 6G Forum. In addition, other speakers warned that finding new licensed bands for 6G could prove difficult.

Verizon Communications will sell tower company Vertical Bridge “exclusive rights” to lease, operate and manage 6,339 Verizon towers for approximately $3.3 billion, including an upfront payment of $2.8 billion, the companies said Monday. The towers are located in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Verizon agreed to lease back capacity on the towers for 10 years, serving as the anchor tenant, with options for extending the lease term up to 50 years, the companies said: “Verizon will also have access to certain additional space on the towers for its future use, subject to certain restrictions.” Reports that Verizon was seeking to sell towers emerged in July (see 2407160026). In 2015, Verizon sold the rights to lease and operate 11,000 towers to American Tower for an upfront payment of $5 billion (see 1502050059). “This transaction builds on our existing relationship with Vertical Bridge while realizing substantial value for this unique set of assets and allows us to be agile in optimizing the network with one of the best operating partners,” said CEO Hans Vestberg. "We are pleased to have been selected by Verizon as the counterparty in the largest US tower transaction in almost a decade," said Ron Bizick, CEO of Vertical Bridge. In March, Vertical Bridge agreed to pay $310.3 million in cash to buy more than 200 towers from Shentel. Vestberg said during Verizon’s last earnings call in July that while he wouldn’t comment on rumors of a tower sale, the company was seeking additional cash flow. “The focus on cash flow is extremely important because it goes straight into our capital priorities,” he said.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday rejected most claims against AT&T by cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin but instructed a lower court to consider a claim that the carrier had failed to adequately protect Terpin’s customer proprietary network information (CPNI) under Section 222 of the Communications Act. The 9th Circuit considered a case Terpin brought after a teenage perpetrator, Ellis Pinsky, allegedly bribed an employee at an AT&T authorized retailer to bypass the carrier’s security measures and “swap” Terpin’s phone number for a SIM Pinsky controlled. Pinsky was then able to find a document that contained Terpin’s cryptocurrency access credentials and use them to steal $24 million in cryptocurrency in 2017, the court said (docket 23-55375). “AT&T maintains that Section 222 protects only CPNI, not a broader category of customers’ ‘proprietary information,’” said the opinion by Judge Roopali Desai. Terpin “created a triable issue over whether, through the fraudulent SIM swap, AT&T gave hackers access to information protected” under the Communications Act, she wrote. Adopting AT&T’s “constrained view of CPNI would lead to absurd results,” the court found. “If Pinsky had walked into the AT&T affiliate store, asked" Jahmil Smith, an employee at an AT&T authorized retailer, "to print Terpin’s recent call log, and looked at the call log, AT&T would not dispute that Pinsky had access to CPNI,” Desai wrote: “Yet under AT&T’s view, Pinsky had no access to CPNI when he walked into the store, updated Terpin’s account to change the SIM associated with Terpin’s phone number, gained control over all incoming communications with Terpin’s phone number, and received confidential password reset messages sent to Terpin’s phone number.” Judges Richard Clifton and Holly Thomas also heard the case.

T-Mobile agreed it will make extensive changes in its business practices to bolster its customers' security and it will pay a nearly $15.8 million fine, the FCC said Monday. The company will spend at least that same amount strengthening its cybersecurity practices, though the carrier's costs will likely be significantly higher, the FCC said. Elements of the announced consent decree resolve separate incidents in 2021, 2022 and 2023, which the FCC Enforcement Bureau was investigating.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr again took aim at how the Biden administration and NTIA have implemented the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program, a concern Republicans on Capitol Hill have amplified (see 2409190063). BEAD is “a program worth fighting for,” but it must change, Carr said Friday during an American Enterprise Institute webinar.

The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council on Friday heard initial reports from its three working groups, which are just starting. Speakers warned that the assigned topics are challenging. Focusing on AI and 6G, CSRIC held its initial meeting in June (see 2406280050). Friday's was the first meeting of substance under the new cycle.

Carriers are starting to go beyond the early stages of 5G, with at least 60 operators across 34 countries moving to 5G stand-alone networks, Ruth Brown, Heavy Reading principal analyst-mobile networks and 5G, said during a LightReading webinar Thursday. Another 143 stand-alone networks are in progress, she added. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project has frozen Release 17, the first for 5G-advanced, Brown noted. Huawei, working with provider du, recently deployed the first indoor 5G-advanced network in the United Arab Emirates and T-Mobile made clear it plans to be the first U.S. carrier to adopt the new generation of wireless, she said. But not everyone is on board. Some question whether 5G has been “a little bit too ambitious” and whether 3GPP was moving too quickly to issue updated releases, Brown said. “There’s still quite a bit of concern" whether "6G is required.” Telefonica Germany expects it will spend the next few years working on 5G-advanced, while also getting ready for 6G, said Tilo Heckmann, senior technology strategy manager. The carrier expects the first commercial 6G deployments in 2030, in line with industry projections, he said. 6G promises "ubiquitous connectivity to everything and everyone” and will facilitate the integration of different networks and sensing. As a carrier, “we have to handle multiple access technologies” and “become a network of networks,” Heckmann said. Carriers also must manage expectations, he said: “Our resources are limited” as is the spectrum that will be available for 6G. The big question for carriers worldwide, said Tingfang Ji, Qualcomm vice president-engineering, is how to handle the massive increase in data expected in coming years. It’s not the “big, bad cellular industry” that needs spectrum for 6G, it’s the entire country. The power levels that are allowed are as important as the amounts, he said. “Do I need to deploy 10 million base stations to actually deliver the coverage the economy actually needs, the ubiquitous coverage?” If the power levels are similar to what’s allowed in 5G, engineers “will have a solution and give you the capacity that you need,” he said. “We need to be really careful when people talk about coexistence and pretend” a band is dedicated to 6G, “but it’s not useful.”

Carriers are moving to AI-native networks but are still determining what the new technology's capabilities could mean for them, speakers said Thursday during an RCR Wireless webinar. A consensus emerged that AI success requires that different parts of a company collaborate more closely than in the past.

NCTA reiterated in reply comments this week the group’s advocacy of giving wireless providers six months to unlock handsets after they’re activated, not the FCC’s proposed 60 days (see 2409110019). While a handset unlocking mandate will be good for competition, the FCC should keep in mind the risk of fraud, NCTA said. “It typically takes a mobile wireless provider longer than 60 days to determine accurately whether a handset is subject to fraud or trafficking,” the group said: Comcast has described “why it can take five months or longer to confirm that patterns of missed bill payments and extensive periods of non-usage, the primary indicia of handset fraud, are attributable to trafficking.” Comments were posted in docket 24-186. In another filing of note, the American Financial Services Association (AFSA) agreed with comments that the FCC lacks legal authority to impose a mandate (see 2409240038). “An FCC mandate to unlock handsets before the installment plans are fully paid off would impinge on state law terms of service and financing agreements providers have with customers,” AFSA said. A mandate would also interfere with agreements between carriers and financial institutions “that offset some of the … financial risks associated with financing handsets for customers,” the group said: “Those agreements necessarily require wireless providers to lock handsets to the wireless provider’s service until the installment plan is paid off.” The Cloud Communications Alliance supported a 60-day requirement but said immediate unlocking would be even better. “As the record reflects, requiring unlocking has not impeded the offering of discount pricing plans for mobile devices either in the United States or in other countries,” the alliance said. “The unlocking requirements applied to Verizon have not prevented the company from offering discounts and, as it states in its comments, an industry-wide unlocking standard will not eliminate discount pricing.”