Public Knowledge posted an electronic petition Tuesday giving the public a chance to tell the FCC to impose tougher wireless 911 location accuracy rules. “I am writing to urge the Commission to adopt strong E911 rules to protect the public and ensure first responders can successfully reach people in need,” the petition said (http://bit.ly/1v0vQdH). The lack of strong rules “makes it extremely difficult for first responders to accurately locate people calling indoors from a mobile phone,” said a Public Knowledge spokesman. While first responders may be able to find a block or apartment [building] with less specific information, “they won’t often know what floor or apartment number to look for,” he said.

DisplaySearch estimated the flexible AMOLED display in the Apple Watch costs several times more to make than equivalently sized LCD displays, and more than the more-established glass-based AMOLEDs currently used in smartphones, the company said Monday (http://bit.ly/1rycJZz). DisplaySearch estimates it costs $7.86 to produce the display for the Apple Watch, which is believed to use a 1.5-inch-diagonal AMOLED fabricated on a plastic substrate, protected by a proprietary thin and flexible solid-phase plastic seal. The touch panel interface, cover lens and other items add $19.55 to the total, DisplaySearch said. Accounting for the panel yield rate and other manufacturing costs, the total display system costs are estimated to be $27.41, it said. The smart watch craze “is expected to spur tremendous growth in OLED display shipments this year,” DisplaySearch said. It forecasts that worldwide OLED smart watch display shipments will exceed 11 million units in 2014, for a year-over-year increase of 450 percent. Shipments of AMOLED panels for the Apple Watch alone are expected to reach 8 million units this year, as Apple builds up inventory for the 2015 launch, it said.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and Marty Cooper, considered the father of the cellphone, urged the creation of a prize for the first person who devises a way to make spectrum use more efficient. Rosenworcel and Cooper wrote an opinion piece for Monday’s San Jose Mercury News (http://bit.ly/1nABXXu). Under the proposed contest, the first person who devises a way to make low- to mid-band spectrum use 50-100 times more efficient would receive 10 MHz of spectrum suitable for mobile broadband. “That might sound like a small goal and a modest reward, but the impact could be really big,” they wrote. “If the winner can find a way to use spectrum 50 times more efficiently, 10 megahertz of spectrum could do the work of 500 megahertz using today’s technology.”

The U.S. Department of Labor gave Virginia State University a $3.25 million grant to help develop a training program for the wireless workforce of the future, with $750,000 set aside for PCIA to help create “nationally recognized competencies and credentials in the field of wireless infrastructure deployment,” PCIA said Monday in a news release. The grant will help VSU, an historically black university, “strengthen a new program aimed at building a network of colleges to train students for high-wage, high-skilled careers in wireless infrastructure,” PCIA said (http://bit.ly/10fxY8i). The grant runs through 2018, PCIA said. The department announced $450 million worth of “job-driven training grants” Monday, including the award to VSU (http://1.usa.gov/1qOZGhd). The administration also unveiled 25 grants for cybersecurity and IT-centric job training. The cybersecurity and IT grants include $15 million to the Maryland Cyber-Technology Job Pathways Consortium, which will fund an accelerated two-year degree program, virtual internships and job planning, the White House said. The programs funded by the 25 grants will “alleviate the projected national shortage of IT workers,” the White House said, noting a Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of only 400,000 computer science graduates by 2020 to fill 1.4 million projected additional IT jobs (http://1.usa.gov/1vrEpQ6).

The FCC Wireless Bureau approved a waiver request for Globe Wireless Radio Services, letting it use high frequency (HF) public coast frequencies above 5 MHz for communications between public coast stations. Agency rules permit communications between stations only using frequencies between 0.415 MHz and 5 MHz, setting aside frequencies above 5 GHz for communications with ships at sea, the bureau said. “We agree with GWRS that limiting communications between public coast stations to frequencies below 5 MHz imposes an unnecessary burden on operators,” the bureau said an order released Thursday (http://bit.ly/1vnALXw). “Allowing inter-station HF communications on frequencies above 5 MHz will provide more frequencies and significant diversity to assure reliable HF communications links under virtually any atmospheric condition.” The company owns high seas public coast stations in Palo Alto and Rio Vista, California; Bishopville, Maryland; and Pearl River and Long Island, New York.

The FCC Wireless Bureau granted McDonough, Georgia, a waiver, letting it use a channel normally reserved for two-way communications to read water meters. The city had previously received a license to use the 952.56875 MHz channel for meter reading and had invested $876,000 in equipment, the bureau said. But in 2013, the city let the license expire, the bureau said in a Friday order (http://bit.ly/1rkcMZV). An FCC reminder letter to renew the license “was addressed to a former City administrator who had retired seven years earlier, and ... the letter had not made its way to anybody else who was currently working for the City,” city officials told the bureau. The bureau said “while we do not condone or excuse the City’s failure to renew its license, under the unusual circumstances of this case, we believe it would be inequitable and unduly burdensome to require McDonough to replace its water meter equipment to operate on a new frequency.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau agreed with AT&T that since it no longer has ties to Latin American carrier América Móvil, it need not continue to honor transaction commitments made five years ago. In 2009, as part of its purchase of Centennial, AT&T agreed to operate Centennial’s CDMA network in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for 18 months after the closing and to limit dealings with Mexico’s América Móvil. AT&T notified the FCC in July it had sold its stake in América Móvil and no longer has any relationship with the company (http://bit.ly/1jjtw0s). AT&T told the commission it was required to file notice as a condition of a November 2009 order approving AT&T’s buy of Centennial (http://bit.ly/1waibQG). AT&T asked that the bureau conclude that the changes are sufficient to deem the América Móvil commitments “null and void.” The Wireless Bureau did so in the Friday letter to AT&T posted in docket 08-246 (http://bit.ly/1okNPaY).

Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld said the FCC shouldn’t adopt a presumption against unlicensed mobile operations on Channel 37 so that the wireless medical telemetry service (WMTS) is protected. “The Commission should, at this early stage, avoid overly conservative presumptions that would preclude access to necessary spectrum for broadband use -- particularly in urban markets,” Feld said in a filing (http://bit.ly/1pf1Qar) posted Thursday in docket 12-268. The question of how white spaces devices and WMTS “can best share Channel 37 should be resolved by engineering data submitted in the record,” Feld said. GE Healthcare earlier asked the FCC to reconsider its “arbitrary and capricious decision” to allow the unlicensed use of TV Channel 37 (http://bit.ly/1ARjJ4s). GE Healthcare is one of the main companies promoting WMTS. GE, the WMTS Coalition and others also met with FCC officials on the issue in recent days, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1uKegdP). The main focus was “mathematical and other errors” in FCC analysis of whether unlicensed mobile base stations would cause interference with WMTS if allowed to use Chanel 37, said the WMTS promoters.

CTIA urged the FCC to nail down final rules in its wireless infrastructure proceeding. CTIA Assistant Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Brian Josef spoke with Wireless Bureau Associate Chief Chad Breckinridge by phone Tuesday on the topic, said an ex parte filing Thursday in dockets including 13-238. Josef laid out what he saw as several necessary changes the agency should make, such as excluding from the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) assessment “the installation of new or replacement antennas on existing structures more than 45 years old, if the new antennas are: (i) being added in the same location as existing antennas, (ii) no more than 3 feet taller than existing antennas (with limited exception), and (iii) comply with any requirements placed on the existing antennas based on prior NHPA review,” the filing said (http://bit.ly/1viO5MF). “The Commission should not require new antennas to be invisible from the street in order to qualify for the exclusion, as this approach would largely eliminate its benefits.” Equipment with an enclosure of 17 or fewer cubic feet should be categorically excluded from any environmental and NHPA review, it said, also suggesting the FCC interpretation of the Spectrum Act’s definition of “substantially change the physical dimensions” be “a definition consistent with the Nationwide Programmatic Agreement for the Collocation of Wireless Antennas.” The agency should also “make clear that existing legal, non-conforming structures, including both towers and base stations, are eligible for Section 6409(a) relief,” CTIA said.

Opportunity in the smart home market is being challenged by a host of factors including pace of new product introductions, lack of interoperability, increasing product complexity and business objectives that “aren’t aligned,” said Tom Kerber, analyst at Parks Associates, during a webcast. Kerber said there’s swelling interest in the category as participants on the manufacturer, service provider and retailer sides all look for ways to profit from the nascent, but growing, category. Kerber said interest is growing worldwide, as Tuesday’s webcast included attendees from North and South America, Africa, Asia and throughout Europe. As the number of smart home devices grows “exponentially,” companies in the market are challenged to “scale to keep pace” with the number and breadth of smart devices available, Kerber said. Consumers increasingly want those products to be interoperable, but most aren’t because interoperability “is rather difficult to accomplish,” he said. In most cases, customers who have bought a networked camera and thermostat, for example, find “those products don’t work together,” Kerber said. Another hurdle to smart device interoperability is the “growing number” of home network standards, Kerber said. “It seems like every month there are announcements of new groups that are working together to expand interoperability,” he said, citing Open Interconnect Consortium, Thread Group and ULE on the home network side and Allseen, DLNA and UPnP on the peer-to-peer side. Interoperability also is occurring in the cloud where services and business data are exchanged between partners to create new value-added services, he said. “The challenge is bridging between the multiple protocols and communications standards.”