T-Mobile opposed giving Verizon a waiver so it can adopt a temporary, 60-day lock on 4G LTE handsets to ensure bona fide customers are purchasing the handsets. Verizon faces special restrictions because of the rules for the 700 C-block spectrum the carrier bought in a 2008 auction (see 1903050057). “Verizon does not demonstrate a sufficient nexus between the relief it seeks and the fraud it seeks to prevent,” T-Mobile said in comments posted Wednesday in docket 06-150. “Any change to Verizon’s obligation must be as a result of a change to the Commission’s rules.”

Members of the P2P Alliance met with Chairman Ajit Pai asking him to move forward on the group's request that the FCC clarify that peer-to-peer text messages to mobile phones aren't subject to Telephone Consumer Protection Act restrictions (see 1805040028). “P2P texting allows organizations to communicate with students, employees, neighborhood residents, voters, and customers through individualized, manually-sent, person-to-person text messages ... and permit real-time, two-way communications between the sender and the recipient,” the group said, in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 02-278. “Each text message is individually and manually sent from a single sender to a single recipient.” The coalition also discussed “the key role fulfilled by P2P texting in rendering aid to Houston, Texas residents affected by Hurricane Harvey last year,” the filing said. Hustle CEO Roddy Lindsay and Gerrit Lansing, co-founder of Opn Sesame, were among attendees. Pai Wednesday unveiled other TCPA-related steps (see 1905150041).

The Trump administration rightfully takes a strong stand against Huawei's controlling 5G, Adonis Hoffman, chairman of Business in the Public Interest, blogged Tuesday for The Media Institute. “Huawei is not your garden-variety Chinese company in the same vein as Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu,” Hoffman said. “By many credible accounts, Huawei is a corporate extension of the Chinese government.” Huawei “has been accused of stealing technology from Cisco, Nortel, and T-Mobile,” he said. Huawei didn’t comment. It says it doesn't spy (see 1905100070).

Verizon said Tuesday its narrowband IoT network is now available nationwide, covering more than 92 percent of the U.S. population. “There is a whole universe of smart solutions needing scalable and affordable connections,” said Jeffrey Dietel, senior vice president-business marketing and products. The standard price plan offers 50 KB of data with a $1 monthly access fee per device, Verizon said.

A lawyer laid out the Wireless ISP Association's stance on the 2.5 GHz educational broadband service band, in a meeting with aides to Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. For existing EBS licensees, the FCC should “eliminate leasing, ownership and educational requirements, and should rationalize existing Geographic Service Areas by extending them to the county border,” said Stephen Coran of Lerner Senter. “With respect to unassigned EBS spectrum,” WISPA’s preference is for “an open eligibility auction designed with appropriate safeguards to ensure that one entity could not acquire all available spectrum in a geographic market,” Coran said, per a Tuesday filing in docket 18-120. Pai is expected to propose revised 2.5 GHz rules for a vote at the June 6 commissioners’ meeting (see 1905130054).

General Counsel David Miller and others from T-Mobile and Sprint met FCC Chief of Staff Matthew Berry on their proposed deal. Also attending were Julius Knapp, chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology, and members of the FCC's T-Mobile/Sprint transaction team, said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 18-197. The companies “reviewed in detail the New T-Mobile 5G network build plan, as described in their network model and various filings previously submitted in this docket,” the companies said: “The representatives discussed the planned low-band and mid-band 5G network coverage, the pace and depth of such deployment, and the resulting speeds likely to be experienced by consumers using 5G devices. The representatives also discussed New T-Mobile’s incentives to complete the 5G network build as proposed.”

ClearCaptions offers an application using geolocation technology available within an iPhone to “accurately identify a user’s geographic location for the purpose of quickly routing an emergency call,” becoming the first IP captioned telephone service to do so, it told the FCC Monday in a notice of substantive change in docket 03-123. The app includes Bluetooth connectivity and “improved location tracking for 911 support,” it said.

AT&T reached a tentative four-year agreement with an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers System Council on a mobility labor contract, the carrier said Sunday. The existing contract expires Aug. 24. The pact, covering about 1,500 employees in Illinois, Idaho and Montana call centers, will be submitted to union membership for ratification in “coming days,” AT&T said.

The FCC Wireless Bureau proposes changing the industrial/business pool frequencies on which Vantage Geophysical can operate. The license in question “authorizes itinerant operations throughout the continental United States, but the authorized frequencies … are not designated for itinerant use and the underlying application did not undergo frequency coordination,” the bureau said: “It appears that the application was granted in error.” Vantage frequencies 451.125, 451.675, 452.675, 456.175, 456.725, 462.125 and 463.725 MHz would be replaced by 451.800, 451.8125, 456.800, 456.8125, 464.500, 464.550 and 469.500 MHz, under the order, posted Monday. The company has until June 12 to protest.

Oil companies led by Chevron asked the FCC to exclude the Gulf of Mexico from any expanded unlicensed use of the 6 GHz band. “The 6 GHz backhaul network is essential for the safety of oil and gas operations and for new government continuous monitoring regulation," said a filing in docket 18-295."Offshore energy production operations have become safer and more secure over the last decade, in part through greatly improved communications between oil production platforms and on-shore management, monitoring activities and public safety entities." The FCC is examining Wi-Fi and other unlicensed use of the band (see 1903190050).