The U.S. is “poorly positioned to counter China’s effort to win the wireless future,” said new CTIA President and CEO Ajit Pai in a weekend opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. Carriers lack enough licensed spectrum to keep up with expected consumer demand, wrote Pai, who served as FCC chairman during the first Trump presidency. “Thanks to AI, 5G home broadband and other emerging technologies, traffic on wireless networks is expected to triple by 2029.”
UL Solutions asked the FCC to further extend the deadline from May 3 to June 13 to complete its initial work as lead administrator in the agency’s voluntary cyber trust mark program (see 2503040062). The Public Safety Bureau previously extended the original March deadline by 60 days (see 2503050025).
Competitive Carriers Association representatives spoke with aides to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr about the agency's broadband data collection (BDC) “and the importance of an improved mobile mapping process in general” as it moves forward on a 5G Fund. Representatives of Nex-Tech Wireless, Ookla and Cellcom/Nsight were also at the meeting.
UScellular executives on Friday projected a mid-2025 closing on the proposed sale of wireless assets to T-Mobile following regulatory approvals. During a call with analysts to release Q1 results, UScellular said it lost 39,000 postpaid subscribers in the period ending March 31.
Representatives of Alaska Communications spoke with FCC Wireline Bureau staff about the status of the carrier’s participation in the Alaska Connect Fund. “We stated that the company expects to meet its final deployment obligations under ACF Phase I by December 31” and “also provided an update on the status of Alaska’s participation in the BEAD Program,” said a filing posted Monday (docket 23-328).
Disruptive Analysis Director Dean Bubley said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s high-profile promise of a Golden Dome that will protect the U.S. from missile attacks, similar to Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, “should lead policymakers to rethink the wisdom or feasibility of clearing” the DOD-controlled 3.1-3.45 GHz band for commercial 5G use. DOD supporters’ concerns about repurposing the lower 3 GHz band are the main sticking point in talks to mandate a spectrum pipeline as part of a coming budget reconciliation package (see 2505020047). DOD in March proposed making 420 MHz from current military-controlled frequencies available for FCC auction while maintaining the Pentagon’s grip on the lower 3 GHz band (see 2504040068).
FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington told former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon in an appearance on Bannon’s podcast Friday that China is using 5G to surpass the U.S. in industrial automation and that President Donald Trump’s confidence in Chairman Brendan Carr is “fully justified.” Deployment of 5G in China is “not that much consumer” but “lots in the industrial sector, lots of private networking that is just for running particular factories, medical facilities, logistics facilities, et cetera,” Simington said. “People always assume that China was going to be late to automate because they had such a large pool of unskilled, low-wage labor,” but it's “front-running this” and has a rate of robotics adoption seven times what was predicted, Simington said.
Maine legislators debated whether to repeal the state’s ISP privacy law as they compared a trio of comprehensive privacy bills during a Monday hearing of the joint Judiciary Committee (see 2505050025).
NAB’s FCC petition on allowing broadcasters to use software in place of physical emergency alert system (EAS) equipment is “premature,” and granting it would be a “sweeping regulatory shift without the necessary technical, legal, or operational foundation,” said major EAS box manufacturer Digital Alert Systems in comments filed in docket 15-94 by Friday’s deadline. Nearly every other commenter in the docket -- including broadcasters, NCTA and the Society of Broadcast Engineers -- strongly endorsed NAB’s petition.
A petition by major trade associations asking the FCC for a rulemaking on the commission's enforcement procedures, especially in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 Jarkesy decision, raises interesting issues for the agency under Chairman Brendan Carr, industry experts told us. The groups on the petition are CTIA, the Competitive Carriers Association, NCTA, USTelecom and the Wireless Infrastructure Association (see 2505010058). Experts said they’re watching closely what the FCC does next.