Sprint and T-Mobile are developing a plan to jointly raise some $10 billion to spend in the TV incentive auction, reported The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, citing unnamed sources (http://on.wsj.com/1meWCZG). Sprint parent SoftBank is widely expected to make a play to buy T-Mobile. One industry analyst told us it’s unclear how the agreement would work if any proposed deal is ultimately rejected by regulators. “Sprint and T-Mo begged for and got unjustified bidding preferences,” said Preston Padden, executive director of the Expanding Opportunities For Broadcasters Coalition, via email. “Now they propose a joint collusive bid. This is world class ‘gaming’ of the regulatory process.” T-Mobile and Sprint were not commenting. Sprint and T-Mobile were active proponents of spectrum aggregation rules limiting spectrum purchases by AT&T and Verizon in the auction (CD May 15 p4).

Comments are due Aug. 29 on a joint proposal by NTIA and the FCC for a program that would test advanced spectrum sharing technologies in a model city, after a notice was published in the Federal Register Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/1l0zsqg). The model city program was initially recommended by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The program could “facilitate large-scale sustainable facilities for systems-level testing in real-world environments across multiple frequency bands, potentially including selected federal and non-federal frequency bands,” the agencies said. Responses to the notice will determine “whether NTIA and/or the FCC may need to undertake additional actions or initiate formal proceedings,” the notice said. Comments to the FCC should be filed in docket 14-99.

After a monthslong search, T-Mobile US said Tuesday Andy Levin was named senior vice president and head of the Washington, D.C., office, replacing Tom Sugrue, who retired in April. Levin is former general counsel at Clear Channel, which he left four years ago. More recently he has been a managing partner at Traveling Light Partners. He’s also a former House staffer and Verizon veteran. After Sugrue left, T-Mobile did an extensive search for a replacement, industry officials said. The appointment is effective July 21. T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham has been filling in as acting head of the D.C. office.

FCC wireless location accuracy rules shouldn’t cover underground mass transit systems “until a test bed proves that suitable indoor location systems, specifically proven in the underground mass transportation environment, are commercially available, cost effective, and technology and air interface neutral,” said Transit Wireless’s comment posted Monday in docket 07-114 (http://bit.ly/1rb4Nyb). Transit said it’s building out a distributed antenna system covering “the nation’s largest mass transportation infrastructure,” the New York City subway system. The company cited the “lack of record regarding current indoor location technologies for their effectiveness and accuracy in the underground mass transportation environment.” Also filing in the docket, the National Association of State EMS Officials, National Association of EMS Physicians, National Association of EMTs and National EMS Management Association urged the FCC to impose indoor location accuracy standards on carriers. “Accurate location information can assist in finding indoor callers quickly, and improved response times translate directly to improved medical outcomes in life-threatening cases,” the groups said (http://bit.ly/1jIcA4c).

Dish Network spectrum is valuable for Verizon, wrote New Street Research analysts in an email to investors Sunday. With 38 percent of industry revenue and just 16 percent of industry capacity, Verizon has a tremendous amount of value at stake if capacity utilization were to approach 100 percent, they said. Verizon should increase its share of industry capacity slightly in the upcoming FCC spectrum auctions, and “Dish is the only asset that would meaningfully narrow the gap,” they said. Dish may have lost two near-term options with AT&T’s plan to buy DirecTV “and the path to value realization may be less clear as a result,” they said. “The intrinsic value of Dish’s assets is unchanged,” New Street said. The most compelling transaction for both affected parties would be for Verizon to acquire Dish, said the analysts.

The FCC should adopt a three-tier access system for the 3.5 GHz band, based on recommendations by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, public interest groups told the FCC in comments posted by the agency Monday. The FCC is examining the band for shared use and small cells. Under that proposal, tiers would be offered for incumbent access, priority access and general authorized access, said comments by the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance, Public Interest Spectrum Coalition and WhiteSpace Alliance (http://bit.ly/WdaSxk) in docket 12-354. The groups said geographic exclusion zones “should be based on actual deployment scenarios and sized solely to protect incumbent users.” The FCC “should minimize protection zones for incumbents as much as possible, by adopting requirements that are based only on the interference tolerance of incumbent operations and not the tolerance of potential new operations,” the groups said.

AT&T notified the FCC it sold its stake in América Móvil and no longer has any relationship with the Mexican wireless carrier (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 these changes are sufficient to deem the America Movil commitments now null and void,” it said in a filing posted by the FCC Thursday in docket 08-246.

The wireless industry needs prompt decisions on zoning applications in order to continue to grow, CTIA said in an amicus brief in T-Mobile South v. Roswell, Ga. The case, to be heard this fall by the Supreme Court (CD May 6 p12), examines whether local governments have to provide detailed written explanations when they deny carriers’ applications to build new cell towers in their jurisdictions. “The wireless industry is facilities-based and depends on quick and effective judicial review of local zoning decisions to meet the ever-growing consumer demand for more and better wireless services,” CTIA said in Supreme Court docket 13-975 (http://bit.ly/1nektZH). Carriers still face “too many cases of obstruction and delay” when they file applications with local governments to build wireless facilities, the group said. “While the whole community benefits from having a new facility and thus better service, usually only nearby landowners who object to the facility have enough of an incentive to communicate with their representatives or attend meetings to protest.”

NTIA and the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology sought comment on a public-private partnership to create a spectrum test city, as expected (CD July 11 p19). The model city would be used for “demonstrating and evaluating advanced spectrum sharing technologies” in a real-world environment, said Friday’s joint public notice from the agencies (http://bit.ly/1r4jeDZ). The notion of a model city was first put forth by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in its July 2012 spectrum sharing report. “It is too soon to know what a ‘Model City’ might entail and what aspects would fall within the jurisdiction of the NTIA and/or the FCC,” said OET Chief Julius Knapp in a blog post (http://fcc.us/1r4kaIv). “For example, the model city could be developed as a public-private partnership and implemented under existing provisions such as the FCC’s experimental licensing program. What is clear is that there is a high likelihood that both NTIA and FCC will have a role to play, particularly because most of the spectrum is shared between federal and non-federal users.”

ZigBee technology is “specifically designed for large networks and device-to-device communication and has significant advantages” over the “CSR Mesh” product showcased at a Bluetooth Special Interest Group exhibition in London this week (CD July 10 p13), the ZigBee Alliance said Wednesday. “Solutions built on Bluetooth still suffer from the inherent limitations of Bluetooth networks, such limitations as range and the number of active devices on a network,” the alliance said. “The so-called ‘mesh’ of CSR uses flooding where every device simply re-broadcasts,” it said. “This will have significant performance implications in large networks. True mesh networks like ZigBee mean reliable and robust networks with devices routing operations only when required to target devices, saving energy and reducing network traffic.” The CSR product does not “standardize the definitions” of bulbs, fixtures and switches, the alliance said, “which means problems for multi-vendor interoperability.” By comparison, ZigBee “standardizes both network and application layers,” it said. “Everything from joining a network” to operating a device, including turning it on or off, is “defined so devices from different vendors can work together seamlessly,” it said. The Connected Lighting Alliance, comprising almost all the major global lighting vendors, “has endorsed ZigBee Light Link as the preferred standard for residential lighting applications,” it said. “This decision represents the first time an alliance of leading lighting companies has unanimously endorsed a common open standard for wireless lighting solutions.” Moreover, recent announcements by industry leaders, such as GE, Osram, Philips and others, “demonstrate the growing dominance of ZigBee for connected lighting,” it said.