The FCC Public Safety Bureau granted Boeing’s request Thursday for an extension to April 30 to complete 800 MHz rebanding of its 800 MHz facilities around the U.S.-Canada border. Boeing said in its Feb. 17 waiver request that it had substantially completed rebanding but needed to retune several bi-directional amplifiers (BDAs) used in its system. The requested extension is “modest and we credit Boeing’s representation that '[t]he need to retune and validate the performance of these BDAs was not identified until after the completion of the fixed network equipment rebanding,'” the bureau said in a letter to outside Boeing counsel Bruce Olcott of Jones Day. Boeing’s rebanding had also been delayed by the FCC’s need to coordinate frequencies with the Canadian government, the commission said. Boeing doesn’t need to close its frequency reconciliation agreement with Nextel West by April 30, but should do so “as soon as possible, the FCC said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler believes the AWS-3 auction should promote competition, an agency official told us in response to T-Mobile President John Legere’s Wednesday blog post criticizing the sale of the brunt of the spectrum to three providers (see 1502180054). Wheeler supported policies that “will not permit dominant carriers to ‘run the table’ in the incentive auction, which includes a market-based reserve of spectrum for bidders who don’t currently have a lot of low-band spectrum,” the official emailed. The auction also has buildout requirements “to ensure that the spectrum is put to use for American consumers.” The commission will require new 600 MHz Band licensees to build out to 40 percent of the population in their service areas within six years and to 75 percent of the population by the end of their initial 12-year license terms, the official said.

The FCC Wireless Bureau needs information from AT&T to resolve a license assignment application from AT&T Mobility Spectrum and Club 42CM, said a letter sent to the company Thursday. The bureau wants information AT&T's current spectrum holdings, according to the letter. AT&T is expected to respond to the information request “as expeditiously as possible," the letter said.

The Michael Kors brand is leading the wearables effort for the Fossil Group and plans to bring product to market later this year, Fossil CEO Kosta Kartsotis said on an earnings call Tuesday. The company is working closely with the Kors brand on wearable technologies and is in talks with all its brands “about the appropriate time to bring out some products,” he said. Fossil's other brands include Burberry, Diesel and DKNY. Kartsotis sees wearables as a key element in company strategy as it looks to leverage its fashion position “to become the point where fashion, design and technology converge.” He said Fossil is working with Google and Intel (see 1501080038) on the electronics side, and wearables are a part of the company’s long-term vision. “Someday, every watch we make could have some type of technology in it,” Kartsotis said. “I expect at some point all our watches will have enhanced technology, whether it's sensors, communication,” he said, and an app community also could develop around its platform. The watch business is just a small percentage of “the huge amount of spending” taking place in technology, including phones, iPads and service plans, Kartsotis said. If just a small percentage of the total consumer technology spending moves into the watch business, it could have “a dramatic impact on the growth of the category and make it more relevant,” he said. “We are sitting right in the middle of something that could be much larger.” Fossil is hoping for a receptive market in millennials who “largely have grown up without watches” and believes connected technology can make a watch “more relevant to their lives,” Kartsotis said. “They had a cellphone when they grew up” and didn’t necessarily wear a watch, he said. “With the branding and technology coming into play, we think we've got a big opportunity.” Investing in wearables enables Fossil to leverage its global platform, which includes numerous brands and 30,000 points of sale worldwide, Kartsotis said. He referred to the company's "mindshare" in the market and said Fossil can "make great-looking products that have an emotional attachment to customers that love brands but also have a little extra functionality." The plans extend beyond watches. "We are looking at both display items like smart watches but also non-display items like jewelry and potentially bracelets," he said. Eventually, connected technology "will probably impact all brands," he said. Speaking on the economics of wearable technology, Kartsotis said one of the “exciting things” about wearables is that “as technology gets better, battery life is going to be better … functionality is going to be better and the economics will be better because as the quantities grow, then the costs, etc., come down pretty quickly. So that's partly why we think it's a very compelling long-term opportunity.”

Apple’s decision to scale back on the number of health sensors originally planned for the Apple Watch is likely cause for relief among consumer health device makers, Parks Associates analyst Harry Wang said in a blog post. Wang cited a Wall Street Journal ​story Tuesday that said efforts to integrate multiple health sensors to detect functions including blood pressure, skin perspiration and heart activity were scrapped for reasons including reliability, complexity and required regulatory oversight. The news is likely “welcoming” to health device makers “nervously watching and waiting for the Apple Watch’s impact to unfold,” Wang said. He compared the arrival of the Apple Watch to the iPhone that has “rendered so many single-functional device categories into obsolescence and left many traditional consumer brands in shackles.” Sources in the medical field have feared that the arrival of the Apple Watch will “kick off the era of multi-sensor health monitoring design” and a subsequent consolidation of brands that manufacture single-function ECG meters, blood pressure monitors and pulse oximeters, Wang said. Health device makers were “excited about the prospects” of increased visibility that Apple Watch could bring for the various tools available for health monitoring on one hand, but also concerned that “less sophisticated” technologies could confuse consumers with “poorly collected data and attract unwanted regulatory scrutiny to this market” on the other, Wang said. The analyst applauded Apple for “following its principle of not bringing inferior user experience to the market.” He said the decision illustrates that the health monitoring technology “still has frontiers to conquer,” since a company like Apple was challenged to deliver a “perfect 10” experience to the market. Apple representatives didn't comment.

Three in five Americans and Germans replace their smartphones for upgraded functionality or because they “just want a new device,” said a Gartner survey released Wednesday. That is contributing to a worldwide market for refurbished phones sold to end users that’s expected to reach 120 million units and equivalent wholesale revenue of $14 billion in 2017, up from 56 million and equivalent revenue of $7 billion last year, Gartner said. Consumers in mature markets are upgrading smartphones on average every 18-20 months, Gartner analyst Meike Escherich said, and of the replaced devices, 7 percent are recycled, 23 percent are given to other users and 41 percent are traded in or sold privately. With nearly two-thirds of replaced smartphones being reused, continued demand for high-end used devices will increasingly affect new product sales, leading phone providers to look for opportunities in the secondhand market, Escherich said. In North America and Western Europe, the market for refurbished phones is forecast to be worth $3 billion this year, growing to $5 billion in 2017, with buyers attracted to used high-end devices that they wouldn't have been able to buy at the original selling price. The growing number of privately sold phones will stir up competition in the take-back market and drive wireless providers and refurbishers to grow business through aggressive marketing campaigns and compelling incentives that appeal to tech enthusiasts, Escherich said. Fifty-three percent of U.S. respondents who identified as enthusiasts said they would replace their smartphones in the next 12 months, while 56 percent said their current phones were less than a year old, she said. Tech enthusiasts are important to handset makers because their trade-ins provide channel partners with hardware that can be reused for warranty replacements, she said, “and for extending the brand reach" to users who can’t afford new phone pricing. The survey was done in June 2014 among 5,600 U.S. and German consumers.

Despite security concerns, mobile commerce is growing at nearly three times the rate of overall commerce worldwide, said research from PayPal and Ipsos released Wednesday. A survey of more than 17,500 consumers from 22 countries found that smartphone users wanted to use their phones for payment options such as tapping a smartphone at the cash register to pay (16 percent), or use an app or browser to order ahead of time (15 percent). While 21 percent said they didn’t use their smartphones to shop due to security concerns, the top complaint, stated by 34 percent of respondents, was that the screen size is too small. “We are on the cusp of the mobile-first era,”” said Anuj Nayar, PayPal senior director-global initiatives. ““We’ve seen our mobile growth rise from less than one percent of our payment volume in 2010 to more than 20 percent in 2014.” Mobile commerce is still small compared with online purchases made using laptops, desktops and notebooks, but the “prevalence of mobile shopping is quite significant,” a PayPal release said. Consumers in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates were most likely to purchase something online using a smartphone, the release said. Online shoppers globally preferred to purchase an item from an app compared with a browser, but with the “advent of low cost mobile phones, large phone screen sizes and mobile device security improvements, the barriers to mobile commerce will decrease,” Nayar said.

LoopPay, the mobile wallet solutions provider, will become a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics America, the companies said in a Wednesday announcement. Terms weren’t disclosed. "Through this deal, we can significantly accelerate our mobile commerce efforts," Samsung said in a statement. "LoopPay’s outstanding leaders and team have deep-rooted relationships with banks, card networks and merchants that will complement those Samsung has established over the years.” LoopPay’s technology turns existing magnetic stripe readers at the point of sale into “secure, contactless receivers,” the companies said. The technology has the potential to work in an estimated 90 percent of existing POS terminals, with no investment in new infrastructure required by the retailer, they said. Best Buy and Walmart have been retail holdouts on Apple Pay since Apple introduced the service last September. Neither retailer has explained its decision not to support Apple Pay, except to say it lacks near field communications POS terminals in its stores (see 1409150051). “Today is a great day for LoopPay and all those who have supported us over the last few years,” LoopPay CEO Will Graylin said in a Wednesday blog post. LoopPay’s “vision of inspiring consumers to transition from a physical wallet to a truly digital wallet will continue,” Graylin said. “I’m most excited that Samsung shares this vision and has chosen to help change how we shop and pay for goods and services.”

Sony’s mobile communications businesses are among the “areas of volatility management,” not “growth drivers” or “stable profit generators,” under the company’s three-year “corporate strategy” plan disclosed Wednesday. Sony sees its semiconductor, games, Sony Pictures and Sony Music businesses as growth drivers, and imaging products and video and sound as stable profit generators. But TVs, smartphones and tablets “operate in markets characterized by high volatility and challenging competitive landscapes,” Sony said. “Sony will place the highest priority on curtailing risk and securing profits in its operation of these businesses. Since both markets are experiencing intense cost competition and commoditization, Sony will strive to further increase the added value of its products by leveraging its in-house technologies and component devices.” Sony won’t chase market share or volume sales in TVs or mobile communications, but will rely on niche sales of products that don’t require high scale, CEO Kazuo Hirai said Wednesday on a conference call for overseas investors. “These two businesses are areas where we really need to focus on the volatility management,” Hirai said in answer to a question of whether Sony’s “Plan B” might include exiting the TV or mobile communications businesses. “The market is very quickly changing, and we obviously need to stay competitive with our products,” Hirai said. “With these two businesses, we need to especially keep an eye on the competitive environment, how profitable these businesses are for us, and what the future prospects of these businesses look like.” Sony plans to review those metrics “very often” to be sure “we feel comfortable with where we are in these businesses,” Hirai said. “And if in fact we make the determination that we aren’t comfortable being in these businesses, given some of the factors I talked about, we need to take a look at a variety of different options for Plan B.” Hirai said he hopes that Plan B won’t amount to “a complete exit” from the mobile communications business, “because we learned when we exited the PC business that the cost impact was tremendous.” The “better alternative,” he said, should Sony need to “go down that path,” would be to “partner up with other companies, third-party companies, that are willing to get into this space or expand their reach or are interested in some of the potential of brand collaborations that we can bring to bear.” Those possibilities strike Hirai as “more palatable as a Plan B option as opposed to getting out of these businesses outright.” Hirai acknowledges that “it’s very apparent to us” that smartphones are still “a very aggressively growing business,” he told another questioner who asked why Sony was unable to group mobile communications with other Sony growth drivers. “But the volatility involved in the business also makes it a very challenging one, where we need to, instead of go for scale, really make sure we’re driving the business in a very safe way,” he said. “One of the things we see when we look back with 20/20 hindsight is the fact that we tried to ride the growth in the smartphone business too aggressively.” Sony incurred huge cost impairments, and Hirai said that’s “obviously something that we don’t want to go through once again.”

The AWS-3 auction may have been “a success” for the U.S. Treasury, but “it was a disaster for American wireless consumers,” T-Mobile President John Legere wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “AT&T and Verizon showed that they can, and will, dig into their deep pockets to corner the market on available spectrum at nearly any cost. To add insult to injury, the FCC’s rules actually allowed companies that don’t provide wireless service at all to buy up huge amounts of spectrum and sit on it for ten years! The results are not good for consumers.” Three companies spent “an insane” $42 billion, buying “a ridiculous 94 percent of the spectrum sold at this auction,” he wrote. Rules for the next auction “should be focused on fostering competition in the US wireless industry and doing what’s right for the American consumer,” said Legere. The agency had no immediate response.