The U.S. market for drones will reach $15 billion in 2020, said an Information Gatekeepers study released Monday. That’s compared with $5 billion in 2013, it said. Commercial applications for drones include agriculture, real estate and electrical utilities. The drone market is expected to have “significant growth” in 2015 after the Federal Aviation Administration rules on drone access for national airspace, it said.

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) raised objections to an application by Recco, which sought a waiver of FCC rules permitting the equipment authorization and licensing of Recco’s avalanche rescue system using spectrum at 902.85 MHz (see 1410140175). ARRL, which represents amateur radio operators, questioned Recco claims that device does not pose an interference risk. ARRL said its members make frequent use of the same spectrum. “ARRL is supportive of the use of the technology similar to that advocated by RECCO, provided that the system is compatible with incumbent licensed uses of the band,” the group said in a filing in docket 14-176. “However, there are questions relative to compatibility that are left unanswered by the RECCO Petition, and ARRL has concerns about the RECCO Petition that call for resolution before the Commission should grant a permanent waiver to RECCO.”

CTIA stood by its claim that extending the local number portability administrator contract beyond the June 2015 expiration date would cost $40 million per month, in a letter sent to the FCC and posted on the group’s webpage Monday. Neustar had asserted the claim was “wrong on its face" (see 1412030046), but “provides no explanation for disputing the accuracy of the calculation,” CTIA said. CTIA urged the commission to confirm Telcordia as the LNPA by the end of this year. CTIA's claim "ignores the undisputed fact that the alternative to the monthly cost of extending the contract is not an expenditure of $0 per month," a Neustar spokeswoman replied in an email. "Neustar has demonstrated that the expected costs of transition -- $60 million per month in the first year alone -- dwarf the annual difference between the proposals.”

Representatives of CTIA and the four major, national wireless carriers met with FCC staff last week to update the commission on complicated issues raised by contraband cellphones in prisons, said an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 13-111. “The wireless industry has worked diligently with correctional institutions to put an end to the use of contraband wireless devices in prisons,” the filing said. “Wireless providers have a strong record of cooperating with managed access and cell detection vendors in several states.” CTIA and the carriers also argued that a court order is necessary to suspend service to a contraband device, the filing said. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon also had numerous representatives at the meeting.

The FCC should approve TracFone’s petition for a rulemaking on whether to allow Lifeline subscribers to show they’re using the program by sending a text, Sprint and the Lifeline Reform 2.0 Coalition said in comments posted Friday in docket 11-42. Lifeline providers can be reimbursed under the program only for subscribers who use the service within the previous 60 days, Sprint said in its comments. While texting is not a Lifeline service, sending a text using a Lifeline-supported wireless phone “demonstrates that the subscriber did not abandon” the service “and is not engaging in waste, fraud or abuse,” Sprint said. The commission should allow Lifeline broadband and data services as proof of usage, as well, said the coalition, which is made up of Blue Jay Wireless, Global Connection of America and Telrite. Failing to recognize text messaging, broadband and data services “impermissibly discriminates against Lifeline subscribers with various disabilities for whom text messaging or certain smartphone applications may be the preferred or only accessible method of communication,” the coalition's comments said. “Such discrimination impermissibly flies in the face of the goals of the Lifeline program and the disabilities access requirements of the Communications Act,” the filing said.

“Common sense should prevail” and Telephone Consumer Protection Act rules shouldn't apply to isolated, immediate, one-time responses to consumer-initiated requests for text offers, a lawyer for the Retail Industry Leaders Association said in a call with Mark Stone, deputy chief of the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. RILA sought clarity on TCPA rules in a 2013 petition. “If a consumer sends a text to an entity requesting particular information, the entity sending a one-time response with the precise information requested by that consumer should not be subject to TCPA liability,” the group said in a filing in docket 02-278, posted by the FCC Friday.

Mobile Future said the 2007 FCC voice roaming order can in no way be a model for reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service. That analogy misses big differences between automatic voice roaming and broadband Internet access, it said in a filing Friday: “Most importantly, to the extent there is a market for automatic voice roaming, it is a wholesale market involving a discrete set of participants -- namely, mobile wireless voice carriers. In contrast, the broadband Internet access market is a retail market, involving literally hundreds of millions of relationships -- all of which would be dramatically altered by the reclassification of broadband Internet service.” Broadband reclassification “could require a greater degree of forbearance than was required in the voice roaming context -- or, alternatively, could result in a far heavier regulatory burden,” the group said in docket 14-28.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sent letters, as promised Thursday, to wireless carrier CEOs requiring them to lay out steps they will take by the end of Q1 to combat smartphone theft (see 1412040049), FCC officials confirm. The letters weren't posted by the commission. Wheeler asks the CEOs to describe specific steps they're taking to ensure all phones can be locked, wiped and restored, to protect unique identifiers for every device and to improve “the timeliness, accuracy and availability of data about smartphone theft for use by law enforcement,” said one of the letters made available to media. “I would also ask you to take appropriate steps to ensure that employees in your retail and authorized reseller affiliates understand the importance of their role in preventing mobile device theft by checking the appropriate database to ensure that every device they initialize for service has not been reported lost or stolen.” Wheeler said he would send the letters, in remarks Thursday to the FCC Technological Advisory Council. CTIA supports FCC efforts to curb smartphone thefts, said Jamie Hastings, vice president-external and state affairs, in a statement. But Hastings questioned the deadlines in the Wheeler letter, which were not part of the TAC’s stolen phone report. “We must all work together to achieve our shared objectives as soon practical, but we need to be careful in setting artificial deadlines on some stakeholders with respect to implementing technical changes,” Hastings said.

IHS’s 2014 forecast for worldwide unit sales of 58 million wireless charging receivers and 20 million wireless charging transmitters is going to fall short when the company releases figures for the year, said Ryan Sanderson, IHS analyst, in an interview Thursday. But numbers will be better than IHS anticipated midyear after CES and Mobile World Congress didn’t yield the expected number of new smartphones or tablets with wireless charging capability, Sanderson said. While the industry will “struggle” to reach estimates for this year, IHS expects to still see significant growth for the wireless charging market over 2013, he said. Sanderson expects growth in the wireless charging market to get a boost going forward from the wearables category. The Moto 360 smart watch has Qi inductive wireless charging built in, and Apple CEO Tim Cook referenced wireless charging for the Apple Watch at the wearable's product announcement in September. A caveat to wireless charging for wearables derives from the category name itself, Sanderson said. “It’s called a wearable, so the consumer shouldn’t really have to take it off to charge it.” Technologies today require users to do that, either placing the wearable on a surface or near a transmitter for charging. That will change in the near future with far-field wireless charging over a distance of as much as 30 feet, Sanderson said. Energous, with WattUp technology that won a CES Innovations award for 2015, announced this week it has joined the Power Matters Alliance and completed initial FCC Part 15 certification testing for its WattUp receivers. Energous’ technology delivers “scalable power” using the same radio bands as a Wi-Fi router, according to company literature, and allows “meaningful, useable power” that users can tap into while roaming so the device doesn’t have to be plugged in or positioned on a mat for charging, it said. The wireless charging market began slowly in 2014 but picked up midyear with the introduction of products with embedded Qi receivers, including the LG G3, Google Nexus 6 and, more recently, the Nokia 830, which has a receiver that’s both PMA- and Qi-enabled, Sanderson said. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised” to see more developments in multimode, multidevice wireless charging products. On the likelihood of a unified standard, Sanderson said that without A4WP (Alliance for Wireless Power) charging products in the market, “it’s not a level playing field” for consumers to compare products and decide which technologies they prefer. A4WP had expected to have Rezence products in the market by year-end, but that hasn’t happened. A spokesman for A4WP didn’t comment. Over the next couple of years, Sanderson expects to see much more multimode and multistandard support for the tightly coupled technology -- Qi, PMA and Rezence -- as manufacturers look to safeguard themselves in a multihorse field.

The Electronic Communications Committee (ECC) agreed to a “draft decision” on a common technical framework for countries that implement mobile networks in the 700 MHz frequency range. The framework is aimed at giving manufacturers confidence to meet the market demand across Europe, ECC said Wednesday in a news release. It would enable countries that need to implement wireless broadband “to move ahead with the necessary frequency coordination negotiations with neighboring countries, and the reengineering of broadcast networks, with a set of generic technical conditions already in place,” it said. The framework follows the European Commission’s mandate to develop harmonized technical conditions for the 700 MHz band for wireless broadband, it said. The ECC, part of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, is accepting comment on the draft decision until Jan. 12, it said.