The American Heart Association and American Stroke Association stressed the importance of improving indoor wireless 911 location accuracy, in a Sept. 11 FCC filing posted Monday in docket in 07-114. Time spent searching for a caller is “valuable, lifesaving time not spent treating patients suffering from an acute cardiovascular event,” the groups said (http://bit.ly/1porHM4). The “FCC’s proposed standards will have significant health benefits.” There are almost 424,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests yearly, and “tragically most result in death,” the groups said. “Timely cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillation in these cases, when coupled with early advanced care, can increase long-term survival rates."

The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) complained to the FCC that makers of wireless devices have a long way to go to make them more readily usable by people with impaired vision. Both groups filed in docket 10-213 offering comments for a biennial FCC report to Congress on implementation of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). Both said in comments posted by the FCC Monday that “gaps” remain. “While industry has begun to demonstrate, through both words and actions, that it is largely taking seriously the access obligations of equipment manufacturers and service providers imposed by the Communications Act, many significant gaps remain,” AFB told the commission (http://bit.ly/1r0Vyk4). That few complaints have been filed at the FCC doesn’t mean there are no problems, the group said. Consumers continue to “struggle” to find accessible handsets “and there continues to be a failure at critical points along the sales, marketing and customer service chain to be aware of and communicate accurate information about accessible features and functions,” AFB said. Devices are better than they were but problems remain, ACB said. All features that are part of a phone should be accessible using screen reader and screen magnification programs, ACB said (http://bit.ly/1uSVgvG). “On [A]ndroid, even with the latest operating system, a person who is blind encounters significant challenges in independently enabling TalkBack, Android’s default screen reader,” ACB said. “There is still too much leeway for carriers to customize the [A]ndroid operating system, and in doing so, leaving TalkBack out.” CTIA said the FCC report must reflect the work the wireless industry is doing to comply with the CVAA. CTIA members “have gone further to undertake voluntary collaborative efforts in the spirit of the Act that have contributed to the widespread availability of, and information about, accessible wireless products and services,” the group said (http://bit.ly/1siqVYE).

Six years ago, when Qualcomm collaborated with Google on the first Android smartphones, “I remember people telling us, ‘This will never be successful,'” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said Thursday in a keynote webcast on the Qualcomm website (http://bit.ly/1wwRXcX) from his company’s Uplinq 2014 developers conference in San Francisco. Fast forward to 2014, Mollenkopf said, and more than a billion smartphones cumulatively have been shipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors built in. “So it’s really been an incredible, incredible thing, and it’s just the beginning,” he said. “If you look at the scale of what we're working on today, last year, calendar year 2013, we shipped a little bit shy of 750 million chipsets. That’s more than twice the number of worldwide PCs. It’s incredible scale that happens in mobile.” Qualcomm estimates there are more that 1,350 models of Snapdragon-equipped devices announced or commercially available throughout the world, Mollenkopf said. “But what we're excited about is that scale is actually going to go into a number of adjacent markets and adjacent categories. We look at every area of consumer electronics, and it’s leveraging all the scale and technology that we're developing and others are developing in mobile.” For example, Qualcomm views tablets as “a scaled-up smartphone,” Mollenkopf said. “They use the same ecosystems. It’s not a secret as to why they use the same chipsets and the same technology.” As for computing, it’s “definitely about mobile computing today,” and “it’s going to be about wearable computing and pervasive computing in the future,” he said. In cars, they're “really all about trying to get connected now,” he said. “You have people that are trying to decide when to buy their car based on what type of modem is actually going to be included in the car. It’s incredible.” If one looks at the Internet today, “the really interesting things” are no longer happening “on your desk,” he said. They're happening “in your pocket through the phone, and where they're really going is that all these different devices are going to be connected together.” Qualcomm predicts that more than 8 billion new smartphones will ship globally in the next five years, he said. “And in the developed world, many of those smartphones are going to be connected to a sea of many other devices, and those devices are not only going to be connected to the smartphone, but connected to each other.” As a result, Qualcomm sees “an enormous amount of innovation and experimentation that comes [into] play when people start to innovate at the edge of the network,” he said.

Internet access via mobile devices soared 67 percent in the past 12 months, said a report released Thursday by StatCounter, a website analytics company (http://bit.ly/1udvccq). Overall, 64.6 percent of Internet access is from desktops, but mobile device access has grown from 17.1 percent to 28.5 percent in the past 12 months, StatCounter said. Tablet Web access has increased from 4.8 percent to 6.8 percent of traffic, the company said. “Mobile usage has already overtaken desktop in several countries including India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia,” said CEO Aodhan Cullen.

Cox Enterprises bought mobile technology company Experience for more than $200 million, Cox said in a Thursday news release (http://bit.ly/1rg82np). Experience provides upgrades and deals at live events such as concerts and sports games, working on its offerings with sports teams and concert promoters. “Experience is the first company created through a partnership announced in early 2013 by Jim Kennedy, chairman of Cox Enterprises, and technology entrepreneur Tripp Rackley,” Cox said. Cox said that 20 months ago, it “announced plans to invest in and develop tech growth companies as part of its portfolio."

Global LTE reached 250 million subscriptions in the first quarter of 2014, an Ovum analyst said. The U.S. is the world’s largest LTE market, with Verizon Wireless and AT&T accounting for 35 percent of global LTE subscriptions, it said Thursday in a news release (http://www.ovum.com/press_releases/ovum-reveals-global-lte-subscriptions-reach250-million-milestone/). Verizon had 47.9 million subscriptions, and AT&T had 38.4 million at the end of Q1 2014, Ovum analyst Thecla Mbongue said. Korea was the most penetrated LTE market during that period, with a rate of 47 percent, it said. In emerging markets, where prepaid service is dominant and handset subsidies are less frequent, LTE take-up is slow, she said. Coverage is limited and operators “prioritize the high-end and business segments,” she said. LTE subscriptions are expected to exceed 2 billion by 2019, she said.

The NFC Forum, the industry group promoting the use of near-field communication (NFC) technology, launched analog testing as part of its certification program, the group said Thursday (http://bit.ly/1BQzyLc). Its analog certification will be the “first detailed evaluation” of the radio frequency (RF) performance of an NFC device, it said. “Consistent RF performance is essential to smooth and swift NFC interactions, fulfilling NFC’s promise of a seamless experience for the consumer,” it said. The testing “milestone” comes at an opportune time, it said, citing IHS estimates that global shipments of NFC-enabled mobile phones will surge fourfold through 2018, when they'll reach shipments of 1.2 billion units and be 63 percent of all mobile phones shipped. “When a device is certified as compliant with NFC Forum specifications —- and the analog specification in particular -— it provides consumers with a better assurance that NFC’s easy touch interface will deliver the comfortable and consistent experience they expect,” the group said. Though dozens of companies belong to the NFC Forum at various levels of membership, its founding “sponsor” members are Broadcom, Google, Intel, MasterCard, NEC, Nokia, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, STMicroelectronics and Visa.

The FCC must “move cautiously” as it creates service rules for unlicensed use in the 600 MHz duplex gap because of the potentially “complicated and challenging” interference issues that will come up as part of that proceeding, said AT&T Vice President-Federal Regulatory Joan Marsh in a blog post Wednesday. AT&T doesn’t share the FCC’s “confidence that unlicensed devices in the duplex gap in the configuration and at the power levels identified in the order can operate without creating interference to the adjacent licensed allocations,” Marsh said (http://bit.ly/1pkLH2c). FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated a draft order and Further NPRM last week on interservice interference after the incentive auction (CD Sept 11 p4). Filings from Broadcom and Qualcomm provide disparate analyses of unlicensed devices’ ability to operate without interference in the duplex gap, an early indication of the technical challenges that lay ahead, Marsh said. Caution is “essential,” she said. “If interfering services are ultimately permitted in the duplex gap, the adjacent licensed blocks (and their associated paired channels) will not be fungible. They will instead be impaired licenses.” Some license impairments may be unavoidable, especially in border areas, but the FCC should try to avoid interference when possible because introducing it “where it need not exist would be a significant step in the wrong direction,” Marsh said.

The FCC and NTIA released a joint public notice providing additional information about federal/non-federal coordination in the AWS-3 bands. “We jointly refine certain AWS-3 Protection Zones, reducing them from nationwide scope to more specific geographic areas,” said a notice posted Wednesday by NTIA (http://1.usa.gov/1qZdYjW). The document also offers guidance “on the overall coordination process” and addresses exclusion zones, NTIA said. The notice provides “(i) information for potential bidders in the AWS-3 auction and (ii) guidance to the ultimate AWS-3 licensees and the affected Federal incumbents regarding coordination between Federal and non-Federal for shared use of the 1695-1710 MHz and 1755-1780 MHz bands,” the notice said. The AWS-3 auction is to get underway Nov. 13.

T-Mobile unveiled its Personal CellSpot service and launched a free Gogo in-flight texting service. Personal CellSpot is “like a T-Mobile tower in your house,” T-Mobile said Wednesday in a news release (http://t-mo.co/1qZsb0r). It lets users get “full bars” experience “wherever you choose even beyond the reach of any cellular network,” it said. The in-flight service lets T-Mobile customers send and receive unlimited text and picture messages on any Gogo-equipped flight on U.S. airlines, it said.