U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen rejected AT&T’s claim that the FTC couldn’t sue the wireless carrier to stop its throttling of unlimited data plans, ruling in San Francisco Tuesday that he would allow the FTC’s lawsuit to move forward. The FTC filed suit against AT&T Oct. 28, claiming AT&T throttled data transmissions more than 25 million times since October 2011 for 3.5 million of its customers subscribed to unlimited data plans. The FTC is seeking injunctive relief against AT&T and restitution for affected customers (see 1410280047). AT&T argued in January that the FTC couldn’t sue the carrier over throttling because it held common carrier status and was therefore outside the FTC’s jurisdiction. The FTC Act does exempt common carriers from the FTC’s jurisdiction, but the mobile data services at issue in the lawsuit weren’t considered a common carrier service when the FTC filed the suit, Chen said in his ruling. The FCC reclassified wireline broadband and mobile broadband as Communications Act Title II services Feb. 26 in its new net neutrality rules, with reclassification set to happen after the net neutrality order appears in the Federal Register (see 1502260043). Once the order “goes into effect, that will not deprive the FTC of any jurisdiction over past alleged misconduct as asserted in this pending action,” Chen said in his ruling. AT&T has also misinterpreted the common carrier exemption in the FTC Act to mean the FCC and FTC can’t overlap on common carrier regulations, when in fact “it appears that the more precise purpose was to prevent overlap between common carrier regulations,” Chen said. “Indeed, it is not uncommon for any particular activity of a business to be subject to multiple sets of regulations.” FTC Commissioners Terrell McSweeny and Joshua Wright expressed concerns in late March about Title II reclassification endangering the FTC’s jurisdiction over broadband providers (see 1503250059). The FTC looks “forward to proving that AT&T's marketing of its ‘unlimited’ data plans was unfair and deceptive and returning money to the millions of consumers who were harmed by AT&T's action,” Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said in a statement. AT&T said in a statement that “we’re obviously disappointed in, and disagree with, the decision and will seek to appeal it as soon as possible.”

The Wireless ISP Association urged the FCC to exempt small ISPs from any USF charges that may be imposed on broadband. Imposing new costs and burdens on unsubsidized broadband providers “will make broadband less affordable for customers, including many in those areas most in need of access services,” WISPA said in a letter to the commission posted Tuesday in docket 96-45.

U.S. Cellular said Tuesday it plans to add more than 600 4G LTE cell sites through the end of the year in 10 states in partnership with King Street Wireless. The additional cell sites will give 98 percent of U.S. Cellular customers access to 4G LTE coverage, the carrier said. The additional sites will be in California, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, U.S. Cellular said. “This network expansion brings fast 4G LTE speeds to areas that other carriers ignore,” said U.S. Cellular Chief Technology Officer Michael Irizarry in a news release.

Major product launches with a “clear commitment to wireless charging” will make 2015 “a breakthrough year" for the wireless power industry, said David Green, research manager, IHS technology. Wireless power receiver and transmitter shipments will more than double to 120 million units this year, from 55 million in 2014, said IHS research released Tuesday. The Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge will help drive revenue to more than $1.7 billion this year, said IHS. It said the Apple Watch will help spur growth of wireless power receivers for wearable technology to more than 20 million units this year. To avoid initial negative customer experiences, said Green, the wireless charging industry will need a stronger focus on interoperability among the standards from the Alliance for Wireless Power (Rezence), Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and Wireless Power Consortium (Qi), even accounting for the combination of A4WP and the PMA announced earlier this year (see 1501060013). Consumers “do not care which technology or standard their device uses; they just want it to work well,” Green said. Multimode wireless charging receivers supporting more than one technology will comprise 30 percent of the market by 2018, said Green. MediaTek announced in early March it was the first semiconductor company to mass-produce multimode wireless charging chipsets supporting PMA, Qi and Rezence standards. IHS forecasts industry revenue will grow by nearly $15 billion a year through 2024. But 63 percent of consumers weren’t aware of wireless charging in IHS consumer surveys conducted last year. New products in 2015 should help raise awareness and drive demand, said Green.

Google executives, including Milo Medin, head of Google Fiber, pressed the FCC in a meeting with Wireless Bureau officials to move forward on rules for the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band. The meeting came two days before Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated an order on the band (see 1503270052), said a filing posted Monday in docket 12-354. The Google officials said the FCC should “adopt rules without delay” following the three-tiered framework proposed by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The rules should “establish interference protection requirements that take into account aggregation effects of secondary and tertiary usage” and “establish dynamic protection zones that protect incumbent operations when and where they are in use,” Google said.

The American Petroleum Institute, Edison Electric Institute and the Utilities Telecom Council said the FCC shouldn't authorize the use of the six 173 MHz telemetry channels for Vehicular Repeater Systems, in a meeting with Public Safety Bureau staff. Utilities, pipeline companies and other critical infrastructure industry companies use the frequencies “for mission critical communications to support applications such as supervisory control and data acquisition, distributed automation and early warning sirens at nuclear power plants and water dams,” the energy groups said, in an ex parte filing in docket 13-229. “Mobile voice is incompatible with telemetry equipment currently employed in the band.”

The Wireless IoT Forum launched to support and promote the deployment of the IoT worldwide and to drive the widespread adoption of wireless wide-area networking technologies in licensed and unlicensed spectrum, it said Tuesday. Founding members will be announced at the M2M World Congress in London April 28. The forum said it plans to promote and market IoT benefits for companies “building the ecosystem” including fixed and wireless network operators, infrastructure providers, app developers in utilities, government and specialist SMEs (small and medium enterprises), semiconductor vendors, radio technology providers, module developers, systems integrators and vertical end users. The wireless IoT "is bringing connectivity and control to an order of magnitude more devices,” said William Webb, CEO, Wireless IoT Forum, and president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Webb cited the “tremendous amount of work” in the IoT world so far and said success lies in the promotion of open standards. The forum will work with key stakeholders from across the value chain on requirements that “inform and accelerate standards development and deployments,” it said.

The FCC published a more-complete agenda on a Tuesday workshop with the Food and Drug Administration on medical technology innovation and wireless test beds. Leading off the session are FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and William Maisel, deputy director, Center for Devices and Radiological Health at FDA, according to the agenda. The session starts at 9 a.m. EDT at FCC headquarters.

The global bring-your-own-device security market is expected to reach $24.6 billion by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 36.3 percent from 2014, said a new report by Allied Market Research. Smartphones are widely used for business purposes, generating nearly 58 percent of revenue for the global market in 2013, which will continue to increase, the report said. The report also said the mobile application management segment will likely grow at a rapid rate as compared with other segments, which include mobile device management, mobile content management, and mobile identity management.

Privacy issues have become a “growing concern” for those who advertise on mobile devices, said a Monday news release from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announcing the release of IAB’s third edition of the “Marketer Perceptions of Mobile Advertising” study commissioned by IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence and conducted by Ovum. Privacy was cited as a “very important” issue by 37 percent of the study’s respondents, which included 200 top-level brand marketing executives, in the current survey, compared with 22 percent in 2013, the release said. “With mobile taking a more prominent role in consumers’ lives each year, an uptick in marketers’ potential concerns surrounding mobile privacy is no surprise,” said IAB Executive Vice President-Public Policy and General Counsel Mike Zaneis. “The IAB is in full support of the Digital Advertising Alliance’s work on this front. Its recent release of new user-friendly tools for mobile choice and transparency brings [a] new level of consumer control to the fast-growing mobile medium,” Zaneis said.