The C-band auction will likely generate $52 billion in proceeds, the citizens broadband radio service auction another $3 billion, with Verizon likely the biggest buyer of spectrum, followed by AT&T, T-Mobile, Dish Network and then cable operators and others, New Street Research's Jonathan Chaplin emailed investors Tuesday. The wireless carriers need as much C-band spectrum as they can get, but cable's needs are more modest due to its ubiquitous high-capacity fixed infrastructure, and 20 MHz-40 MHz of CBRS spectrum would constitute auction success, he said.

California earthquake detection and warnings will be baked into all Android phones, said Google and the California Office of Emergency Services Tuesday. The system uses alert data from the state’s earthquake early warning system, OES said. Each smartphone will act as a “mini seismometer” using accelerometers that can sense possible quakes, Google blogged. “If the phone detects something that it thinks may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location of where the shaking occurred. The server then combines information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening.” Google expects to expand to other states and countries over the coming year, it said.

Spigen introduced a fast charger using gallium nitride (GaN) technology Monday, positioning it for the iPhone 12, rumored to be the first iPhone not packaged with a charger or earphones. The 20-watt PowerArc ArcStation Pro, based on Navitas Semiconductor's GaNFast power ICs, is said to be smaller and more efficient than standard chargers. It’s due to sell on Amazon later this month at $20, Spigen said.

Synchronoss Technologies got a five-year contract extension with top customer Verizon that includes a joint marketing agreement for Synchronoss “to step up our marketing efforts to sell Verizon Cloud to their wireless subscriber base,” said CEO Glenn Lurie on a Monday investor call. “We have not previously had, to this degree, a dedicated and coordinated direct marketing effort.” Synchronoss will focus near term on “cloud adoption in the setup flow when Verizon is onboarding a new customer or an existing customer upgrade to their device,” said Lurie, former CEO of AT&T’s mobility and consumer operations. “We believe this joint marketing effort will be a powerful catalyst to drive adoption of Verizon Cloud.” Other Synchronoss initiatives in the contract extension “augment Verizon's service offerings in other areas, which provide us with expanded access to Verizon customers and help us continue to grow cloud revenue,” he said. The stock closed 14.7% higher Monday at $3.51.

A professor backed a national task force on connected vehicles to identify applications, look at standards and work with the FCC on a proceeding, in a Day One Project paper Friday. “We could prevent hundreds of thousands of car crashes every year,” said Carnegie Mellon University's Jon Peha, ex-FCC chief technologist. “We could also reduce commute times, fuel consumption, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and the cost of mobile Internet access,” he argued. “Deployment of connected vehicle technology can lay groundwork for better autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. Nevertheless, after two decades of trying, there has been little progress.”

The citizens broadband radio service auction proceeds were at almost $2.6 billion Friday, after 31 rounds. That's a price of 12.5 cents per MHz/POP. New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin told investors Friday the auction is off to a “very strong start,” likely due to bidding by Dish Network. “It always sucks for the carriers when Dish shows up for a spectrum auction,” he said. “The last time this happened prices went through the roof,” he said, citing the AWS-3 auction. New Street forecasts Dish will spend $6 billion, mostly on the C-band auction, but also on CBRS licenses. “We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them spend more; it will all come down to whether they can find the funding,” Chaplin said.

T-Mobile is adding 2.5 GHz spectrum at the rate of 600-700 sites every week, said Neville Ray, president-technology, on the carrier’s Q2 call Thursday (see 2008060074). “We are running very, very hard,” Ray said: “We’ve got great resources out there working very safely and with health and safety paramount. Our supply chain is actually really robust.” Chief Financial Officer Peter Osvaldik said 95% of customers that took advantage of the FCC’s Keep America Connected pledge have made some form of payment. “There is a small subset of FCC pledge customers that likely will not recover,” he said: Q2 results reflect 110,000 deactivations, including 90,000 postpaid phones.

T-Mobile said it sprinted past AT&T in Q2 to become the No. 2 U.S. carrier with 98.3 million total customers. This was noted in the first quarterly report since the buy of Sprint was completed. The combined company reported 253,000 postpaid phone net adds with churn of 0.8%. CEO Mike Sievert said on a call with analysts T-Mobile now has its eye on surpassing Verizon. T-Mobile said more than 10% of Sprint’s postpaid customer traffic has moved to the T-Mobile network and site decommissioning has started. The carrier reported total revenue of $17.7 billion, service revenue of $13.2 billion and net income of $110 million. T-Mobile said earnings were hurt by $798 million in pretax costs for closing the Sprint deal and COVID-19-related costs of $341 million. T-Mobile 5G users are seeing average speeds above 300 Mbps, which is “better than most home internet speeds and eight times faster than 4G LTE,” Sievert said. The carrier has 319 MHz of low- and mid-band spectrum on average nationwide, he said. “It’s now clear to most observers that it takes all spectrum bands to build a real 5G network.” The stock rose 6.3% to $114.90 at 6:46 p.m. EDT. T-Mobile has more 5G devices on its network than AT&T and Verizon combined, the executive said. AT&T and Verizon didn't comment.

Astronomy interests raised concerns as the FCC looks at future use of the 70, 80 and 90 GHz bands. Comments on a June NPRM were posted in docket 20-133 Wednesday. Nokia and Qualcomm sought changes. The American Astronomical Society stressed the negative implications on “scientific exploration and discovery” if the NPRM is approved. “A process that gives significant weight to the input of experts from the scientific community is sorely needed,” the group said. A proposal for airborne use of the 70/80 GHz bands is particularly concerning, the society said: While “Aeronet mentions the need to protect radio astronomy in its proposal, there is no detail provided on how this will be done.” The National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Radio Frequencies raised similar issues. “There is no indication on the record of how the vitally important coordination task will take place for airplanes in the skies near Haystack,” said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory. Nokia supports the lead proposal to increase the maximum beamwidth 3 dB points from 1.2 degrees to 2.2 degrees and to reduce minimum antenna gain from 43 dBi to 38 dBi. “This simple rule change will allow needed flexibility to deploy smaller, lighter backhaul antennas to facilitate 5G deployments in urban settings,” Nokia said. Other proposals require more study, the company said. “The inherent nature of 5G-based communications in this 70/80/90 GHz high band spectrum allows for multiple co-primary, co-located licensees to each deploy communications systems,” Qualcomm said.

T-Mobile said Tuesday it's the first wireless carrier to launch a commercial nationwide stand-alone 5G network. It's "expanding 5G coverage by 30 percent, now covering nearly 250 million people” and using 600 MHz spectrum, the company said.