Jimm Phillips

AT&T is raising its expectations for full-year smartphone sales after what AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said has been a record-setting first two months of Q4. The carrier sold 6.4 million smartphones during October and November, already making Q4 AT&T’s second best quarter for smartphone sales; quarterly figures typically improve even more during December, de la Vega said Wednesday during an investor conference. The carrier now forecasts it will sell 26 million smartphones for the year, 1 million more than previously expected, de la Vega said. “Excitement is at an all-time high,” he said. “I feel very good about momentum going into December.” The growth in smartphone sales came as a result of an improved supply of Apple’s iPhones, as well as Android-powered models like the LG Optimus G and HTC One X, de la Vega said. The carrier is also “really excited” about the prospects for Windows Phone models like the HTC 8X and the Nokia Lumia 920, he said.

The U.S. should formally seek to “dismantle” the ITU, said former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin Thursday. “Sometimes you need some destruction; you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new pine trees,” he said during a Future Tense forum on Internet governance. Future Tense is a program of the New America Foundation. “In the case of the ITU, I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone. The U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening” its demise. The ITU was set up to coordinate regulation of international telecommunications, but it has become outdated in the Internet age, McLaughlin said. “For an Internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently."

Voluntary incentive auctions for spectrum held by federal agencies will likely be discussed during the 113th Congress, said David Redl, majority counsel for the House Commerce Committee. But he and others at an FCBA continuing education panel said the incentives involved on the federal side would be very different than the ones involved in the voluntary incentive auction of TV stations’ frequencies. “At the end of the day, when we look at ways to incentivize folks in the government to relinquish spectrum authorizations, simply paying them from the federal coffers isn’t going to cut it,” Radl said. “It’s the left hand paying the right hand.”

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) should consider a set of “threshold” issues at the start of its upcoming conference -- any changes to the preamble and Article 1 of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), including the definitions used in the ITRs and the agencies the treaty-level document will apply to -- before delegates tackle any other proposed revisions, the U.S. and Canada said in a proposal filed Tuesday with the ITU. “Streamlined and rapid” consideration of changes to the Preamble and Article 1 “will ensure there is consensus from the beginning of the conference on how to proceed with revisions to the ITRs,” the two nations said in the proposal. Addressing those issues at the beginning of the conference would also allow delegates to consider the impact of other ITU meetings, including the outcomes of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, the proposal said.

A promised full release of documents related to the World Conference on International Telecommunications began online Thursday through .Nxt, an Internet policy information service. It cited growing public interest in the WCIT in its decision to release the files. Delegations from ITU member states will meet at WCIT, which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai, to revise the treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). “As interest has grown over the outcomes of this conference (thanks largely to concerns raised about what they may be) the issue of availability of related documents has itself become a major bone of contention,” .Nxt said in a blog post announcing the documents’ release (http://xrl.us/bn27p9). Files relating to WCIT, including proposed revisions submitted by national delegations, are available to parties within the telecom industry and members of the ITU that pay for membership to the organization. CEO Kieren McCarthy of .Nxt told us that while he’s had access to WCIT documents through the ITU portal for some time, “it got to the point where there was a massive public interest in the conference.” That rise in public interest is due in part to PR campaigns by Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future, Google, Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation, all of which have centered on proposed revisions to the ITRs that the U.S. and other nations fear could alter the current Internet governance structure, McCarthy said. Google’s effort, which went live Tuesday, centers on getting its users to sign a petition that says “A free and open world depends on a free and open Internet. Governments alone, working behind closed doors, should not direct its future. The billions of people around the globe who use the Internet should have a voice” (http://bit.ly/TdH9iK). Some national proposals have also received heightened public scrutiny, such as a set of proposals from the Russian Federation that critics claim could alter the current model of Internet addressing and other Internet governance issues (CD Nov 21 p7).

The U.S. is concerned that the Russian Federation’s newest set of proposed revisions for the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) would increase governments’ ability to control the Internet, officials and Internet governance experts told us. Russia originally submitted the proposals Nov. 13 before sending a revised version to the ITU on Saturday. Delegates will consider proposed revisions at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai.

If portions of the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that come out of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) next month prove objectionable to the U.S., there’s no chance the Senate would vote to ratify the revisions to the treaty-level document and make it a part of U.S. law, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said Wednesday. But McDowell and others at an American Enterprise Institute event said they believed a worst-case scenario coming out of WCIT could result in a “balkanization” that would disrupt the growth of the Internet. The U.S. delegation to WCIT sees controversial proposals that would expand the ITRs into the realm of Internet governance -- including cybersecurity and Internet traffic compensation -- as “non-negotiable” items, said U.S. delegation head Terry Kramer. That makes it all the more critical that the delegation focus on outreach efforts to wavering delegations in the weeks before WCIT convenes in Dubai Dec. 3, he said.

FCC process reform will likely return as a major tech issue in the next Congress, industry experts said Tuesday at a TechFreedom event, but they were unsure of how effective a legislative solution would be. Continued Republican control in the House means FCC reform measures like those introduced in the last session -- including by Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Steve Scalise, R-La. -- will remain on the agenda when the new House convenes (CD Nov 13 p1).

T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS believe some losses in Q3 resulted from their anticipated merger. T-Mobile said Thursday that the deal drove it into a net loss in Q3, while MetroPCS said it was losing prepaid customers to T-Mobile. No. 4 national carrier T-Mobile saw a net gain of 365,000 prepaid customers during Q3, which came at the expense of MetroPCS, MetroPCS Chief Financial Officer Braxton Carter said Thursday during an investor conference. T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom inked a deal in October to join MetroPCS with T-Mobile. The deal would give MetroPCS shareholders $1.5 billion in cash and 26 percent ownership of the combined carrier (CD Oct 4 p1). T-Mobile blamed its overall net loss of $7.8 billion for the quarter on the merger, saying Thursday in an earnings report that the figure included an $8.1 billion “goodwill” non-cash impairment charge related to the deal (http://xrl.us/bnyoqp). The carrier posted a $332 million net profit a year ago.

AT&T’s $14 billion “Project Velocity IP” plan to expand its wireline and wireless broadband network will broaden the company’s reach into areas that are “underserved and unserved” by this technology thus far, industry analysts and brokers told us. AT&T told investors at a company conference Wednesday that it plans to spend $8 billion to expand its 4G LTE wireless broadband coverage and $6 billion to increase offerings of its U-verse and U-verse IPDSLAM services.