Over 1.5 billion, or one in three, airline boarding passes will be issued via mobile devices by 2019, said a report by Juniper Research. Airports’ transition to mobile near field communication ticketing will be delayed, it said. About 745 million boarding passes will be delivered through mobile devices this year, Juniper said. Frequent flyers are more likely to use mobile boarding passes, it said. Fifty-three percent of airlines have mobile boarding passes via apps, which will increase to 91 percent by 2017, according to airline IT specialist SITA, Juniper said. Local bus and subway NFC-ticketing will increase because of the frequency of consumer purchases, it said.

The FCC made two changes to a 2013 order specifying how trunking may be accomplished in the 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz private land mobile radio bands. The amendments came at the request of the Public Safety Communications Council (PSCC), in an order released Wednesday. A trunked radio system is a computer-controlled two-way radio system that allows sharing of relatively few frequency channels among a large group of users. The FCC dropped a requirement that applicants who operate trunked stations on Public Safety Pool channels be required to demonstrate that the proposed station's service contour will not be overlapped by any incumbent station's interference contour. “We agree with PSCC that the reverse contour requirement is not necessary for the Public Safety Pool channels, and should apply only to Industrial/Business Pool channels,” the FCC said. The FCC also amended its rules on the treatment of mobile stations to clarify how to protect 150-174 MHz band mobile stations associated with a base station. The PSCC suggested that these units should be treated “analogously to unassociated mobile units by using the associated base station’s service contour as both the associated mobile unit’s service contour and interference contour,” the commission said in the order. The FCC agreed.

Additional cities have “already committed” to become interveners in a lawsuit filed Monday against the FCC’s new wireless tower siting review rules, said Best Best municipal telecom and wireless lawyer Gerry Lederer in an interview Wednesday. The suit, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by Los Angeles and additional cities in California, Texas and Washington (see 1503100034), alleges that the rules, contained in the FCC October wireless facilities deployment order, are unconstitutional and misinterpret the 2012 Spectrum Act. Montgomery County, Maryland, filed an identical suit in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday. Best Best lawyer Joseph Van Eaton filed both suits, while Lederer is in charge of recruiting additional cities to join as interveners.

Rovi inked an IP-based licensing deal with Bell Mobility for the carrier's mobile TV service in Canada, the vendor said in a Tuesday news release. “Home entertainment is inevitably moving from the TV set in the living room to multiple screens and mobile devices,” said Samir Armaly, Rovi executive vice president-intellectual property and licensing. Through Rovi guide technology, Bell Mobility customers will have access to an integrated TV programming guide that enables them to see what’s playing “now and later,” Rovi said.

U.S. Cellular sold a large part of its Midwest wireless business, including its Chicago property, to Sprint in 2012, because of an inability to buy more spectrum there, CEO Kenneth Meyers said Tuesday during a presentation at a Deutsche Bank financial conference. U.S. Cellular is based in Chicago, where the company had only 20 MHz of spectrum. “We had been to about every auction trying to augment that position and we weren’t able to get it,” he said. “There’s just no way that we could have gone to LTE … from where we were on 20 MHz. The network was full and we weren’t going to be able to grow it any further.” Selling the market was “painful” but a “business decision,” he said. U.S. Cellular has been reluctant to move from CDMA to voice-over-LTE on its current network until it better understands how to make sure that customers will have an equal or better experience, Meyers said. “What we do know is that CDMA is a wonderful voice technology -- it has great, great coverage,” he said.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau decided that Arizona Public Service Co. is entitled to less than half of the reimbursement APSC sought from Sprint as part of the 800 MHz rebanding. After running through a complicated analysis of arguments presented by APSC and Sprint and findings of the 800 MHz Transition Administrator (TA) mediator, the bureau approved $1.19 million in reimbursements for APSC. “We generally concur with the TA Mediator and find that, in most respects, APSC has failed to meet its burden of proof to demonstrate that its estimate of the cost to reband its 800 MHz communications system meets the Commission’s well-established Minimum Necessary Cost Standard,” the bureau said in an order released Tuesday. Among the findings, the bureau said APSC operates a Motorola system, but chose Motorola competitor Harris to reband its system. “We note that APSC is free to use Harris or whichever other vendor it wishes and can use any rebanding methodology it desires,” the bureau said. “However, the Minimum Necessary Cost Standard still applies.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit should reject one of the few remaining challenges to the FCC's 800 MHz rebanding order, approved in 2004, on the grounds that petitioner James Kay does not have standing to bring the action, the FCC said in a brief filed with the court. Kay held two 800 MHz licenses, revoked by the FCC in 2002, in a decision upheld by the D.C. Circuit three years later, the agency said. Kay’s only other connection is that he claims to be the sole owner of Third District Enterprises, which holds licenses in Southern California that must still be relocated, the FCC said. Kay “holds no 800 MHz licenses himself, and while he claims to be the indirect but controlling shareholder of Third District, the shareholder standing rule requires him to show an injury to himself separate from any injury to his company,” the agency said. “He has not even attempted to do so. The case should therefore be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.” Even if Kay were granted standing he has not met the “high burden” of showing the 800 MHz rebanding order was “unsupported by substantial evidence, much less that he is entitled to the drastic relief of unwinding the nearly complete effort of reconfiguration, which has lasted over 10 years and already cost over $1.8 billion,” the FCC said.

Not all sub-1 GHz spectrum is equal or superior to spectrum in higher bands, AT&T said in a filing posted by the FCC, answering Wireless Bureau questions on AT&T’s proposed buy of spectrum from Club 42 CM Limited Partnership. Much of the response was redacted. But AT&T did not redact details it offered on the difference between sub-1 GHz spectrum bands. AT&T argued that the lower 700 MHz D and E blocks have limitations that mean they shouldn’t be counted with other low-band spectrum as the FCC does a competitive analysis. “These blocks currently can only be used in conjunction with spectrum above 1 GHz, rendering moot many of the ‘inherent benefits’ of spectrum below 1 GHz,” AT&T said. The blocks are also subject to “unique technical limitations,” the carrier said. Pairing the lower 700 MHz B or C blocks with the lower 700 MHz D or E blocks “would create an unacceptable level of self-interference within a device supporting both blocks,” AT&T said. “Such self-interference occurs because these blocks are directly adjacent, and there is not enough frequency separation to mitigate interference.” AT&T has to do substantial work on its towers just to “combat this interference and, in a significant number of cases, even that is ineffective and power must be substantially reduced -- by approximately 6-9 dB -- to limit the impact on B Block operations,” AT&T said. The filing was made in docket 14-145.

Los Angeles was among four California cities that joined with municipalities in Texas and Washington Monday in the second lawsuit against the FCC's October wireless facilities deployment order. They told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the order’s wireless tower siting rules are unconstitutional and misinterpret the 2012 Spectrum Act. The order is “arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion; and otherwise contrary to law,” the cities said in their joint petition for review. The other petitioning cities are: Bellevue, Washington; Ontario, Redwood City and San Jose, California; McAllen, Texas; and the Texas Coalition of Cities for Utility Issues. Montgomery County, Maryland, made the same arguments in a petition for review it filed in Richmond Friday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuits respectively asked the D.C. Circuit and 4th Circuit to vacate the new tower siting rules and “grant such other relief as the Court may deem appropriate.” The FCC didn’t comment. Montgomery County and the cities had jointly objected to the wireless tower siting rules in a Feb. 3 FCC filing. The localities had asked the FCC to “significantly revise” the siting rules because the current set of rules would “lead to a wide range of serious problems in local communities that it is impossible to believe Congress could have intended." The FCC voted unanimously for the rules, as part of the commission’s implementation of the 2012 Spectrum Act. They were meant to speed up wireless tower siting decisions. The rules reduced the shot clock for siting approval from 90 days to 60 days in exchange for a promise from CTIA and PCIA to work with local jurisdictions on streamlining, though many localities had urged prior to the commission vote against shortening the shot clock (see 1410170048). The two groups and local government groups jointly released a model ordinance and siting application review checklist Thursday (see 1503050056). PCIA President Jonathan Adelstein responded to the Montgomery County lawsuit, saying in a statement Monday that “we hope that this lawsuit will not detract from that goal, since PCIA supports the FCC’s rationale behind its Infrastructure Order and its guidelines for implementation.” PCIA is “working closely with cities, counties, and municipalities to make the implementation of the FCC’s new wireless facility siting regulations smooth and efficient,” Adelstein said.

While Q4 organic growth met or beat estimates for all major U.S. tower companies, New Street Research said in a report to investors Sunday that the companies forecast a sharp slowdown in 2015. SBA Communications has had the largest moderation in growth, the analyst report said. The lower growth may be due to declining activity at AT&T, the report said. AT&T has slowed network investment in part because it paused activity leading into the AWS-3 auction and in part because it plans to repurpose newly acquired Leap sites rather than build new ones, the report said. Despite the guidance, the report doesn’t see any changes to long-term industry growth predictions.