Verizon Business plans a virtual event with Apple for global enterprise customers Thursday at 1 p.m. EST to showcase the iPhone 12 lineup. The companies will unveil an iPhone 12 offer for enterprises and bow new options for enterprise 5G, showing how Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband can be used in manufacturing, field service and healthcare, said the carrier Monday. Registration is available here.

Dish Network agreed to lease space on up to 20,000 Crown Castle towers, they said Monday. “DISH will receive certain fiber transport services and also have the option to utilize Crown Castle for pre-construction services,” the companies said. “The agreement encompasses leases on towers located nationwide, helping DISH facilitate its buildout of the first open, standalone and virtualized 5G network in the U.S.” New Street said the deal is positive for Crown Castle and the broader tower sector. Crown Castle has “30% of the US tower market, which could suggest that DISH intends to build to 65,000 towers if DISH’s network build is evenly distributed across the tower companies,” the firm told investors.

Midband spectrum will be the differentiator among carriers as 5G unfolds, with Verizon and AT&T likely to be the big spenders in the upcoming C-band auction, Wells Fargo’s Eric Luebchow told investors Monday. He forecast that Verizon will spend more than $21 billion in the auction, and AT&T $8 billion. T-Mobile “will likely continue to have after the C-band auction, the industry's leading sub-6 GHz portfolio,” he said. By the time the C band is built out, T-Mobile “will have a mid-band 5G network to the vast majority of the U.S.,” he said. Wells Fargo predicted Verizon’s share of the postpaid market will be steady at 43% over the next five years, while T-Mobile will increase its share from 28% to 31%, mostly at the expense of AT&T. “As they rapidly build out a nationwide 5G mid-band network, [T-Mobile] will be the predominant share-taker and only true ‘growth’ story in an otherwise mature marketplace,” Luebchow said.

A field test by CTIA and Southern Co. found interference is an issue for unlicensed low-power indoor and very-low-power outdoor use of the 6 GHz band, CTIA said in an FCC filing posted Monday in docket 18-295. The test focused on a 6 GHz link between Fortson and Columbus, Georgia. Because commercial devices aren’t available, “the testing emulated unlicensed devices by using a vector signal generator, with programmable power levels, modulation, channel size, and duty cycle to replicate the expected radio transmissions of an unlicensed 6 GHz device,” CTIA said: The tests found a device can “reduce the microwave link fade margin by a considerable amount, by 3 to 4 dB in indoor tests, and 5 to 11 dB outdoors.” Commissioners could take up a further 6 GHz order in December (see 2011130045).

The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology approved a waiver for Piper Networks to operate an ultra-wideband train positioning system in the 4243-4743 MHz band in the Greater New York City area and Harris County, Texas. “Piper’s system, which it calls the Enhanced Transit Location System (ETLS), is designed for use on subways and commuter trains to calculate the position of a moving train and provide that information to the trains’ communication-based train control system,” OET said Friday in an order in docket 19-246. “Operation in any other geographic area is not permitted” and would require a separate waiver, OET said.

Don’t adopt the exclusion zones proposed by NTIA in the 5.9 GHz band (see 2010260024) but instead seek comments in a Further NPRM, the Wireless ISP Association said in calls with FCC commissioner aides. “In addition to seeking comment on NTIA’s recommendation, the Commission also should seek comment on alternative means to protect federal radiolocation facilities from harmful interference, such as automated frequency coordination that has been approved for the adjacent 6 GHz band,” WISPA said, posted Friday in docket 19-138. WISPA indicated in filings that it met with aides to Commissioners Mike O’Rielly, Brendan Carr, Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks.

As Qualcomm starts to deploy 5G in the automotive sector over the next 12-18 months, “we are seeing really a complete overhaul in terms of how automakers are thinking about the connectivity portion of electronics in their vehicle,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president-general manager, automotive, at a virtual Deutsche Bank investor conference Wednesday. “The antennas have to be designed differently,” he said. “You basically have to have four different antenna elements for transmit and receive that requires the car design to change to be able to accommodate that type of capability. The location of where you put the modem becomes important because of the distance from the antenna.” The electronics need to be “closer to the roof line” to prevent signal loss, he said: “This is really a major architectural shift for a lot of different automakers.” That expands Qualcomm's role from the supplier of the semiconductors “to become kind of the adviser for the system platform for the automaker,” he said.

Facebook representatives spoke with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on revised 6 GHz rules, widely expected to get a commissioner vote Dec. 10 (see 2010190040). The company wants to allow very-low-power devices to operate across the band at power levels of at least 14 dBm, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 18-295. “VLP devices are poised to offer exciting applications and yet-to-be-imagined advancements in such areas as healthcare, augmented reality/virtual reality, automotive, and fitness,” Facebook said. “Anything lower would result in dropped connections, high latency, and battery drain.”

Qualcomm Ventures is investing in four 5G startups, said a Tuesday news release: Celona, “an enterprise networking platform provider that brings 5G to enterprises”; Cellwize, an “enabler in mobile network automation and orchestration”; Azion, “an emerging provider of edge computing platform solutions”; and Pensando Systems, which is “pioneering the new edge services model of enterprise and cloud computing.” Qualcomm Ventures has invested to date more than $170 million “in the global 5G ecosystem.”

ARRL asked the FCC to rethink an order removing the secondary allocation for the amateur service at 3.3-3.5 GHz, in a petition for reconsideration. The order is part of a broader item approved 5-0 by commissioners last month (see 2009300034). “Amateur services in this band long have been operated on a secondary allocation status functionally similar to the de facto secondary status of Part 5 experimental licenses whose continued operation was (correctly) approved in this same proceeding,” said a petition posted Tuesday in docket 19-348. “Continued operation of amateur stations similarly should be permitted in the vacant portions of this spectrum that otherwise will go unused, subject to the same secondary status.”