Shure and the Aerospace & Flight Test Radio Coordinating Council (AFTRCC) notified the FCC they are making progress on technologies that support wireless microphone operations on a shared basis in the 1435-1525 MHz band “and the related continuing collaboration between Shure and AFTRCC in developing coordination and registration procedures.” They said discussions were “very productive” and “substantive.” The FCC’s Part 74 rules require protections for aeronautical mobile telemetry frequencies in the band, used for “flight testing of crewed and uncrewed military and civilian aircraft,” a filing posted Thursday in docket 14-166 said.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) announced Wednesday that AT&T has joined the pro-open radio access network group’s board. Rob Soni, vice president-RAN technology, will represent the carrier on the board. “AT&T has been a trailblazer of open and disaggregated technologies” and AT&T joining the board “reflects the global profile of our community,“ said TIP Chair Yago Tenorio, director-network architecture at Vodafone Group. The appointment “supports AT&T’s effort to deploy 70% of our wireless network traffic across open-capable platforms by late 2026 and aligns perfectly with our commitment to efficiency and innovation,” Soni said.

T-Mobile’s proposed $4.4 billion buy of UScellular would be credit positive “because it will expand T-Mobile's scale and provide it with potentially material synergies” and won’t “materially affect T-Mobile's credit metrics,” S&P Global Ratings said Wednesday. The agreement was announced Tuesday (see 2405280047). “T-Mobile estimates the deal will yield about $1 billion of annual run-rate cost and capital expenditure savings, which we view as achievable based on previous transactions,” S&P said. The firm warned that the expected $2.2 billion-$2.6 billion in integration expenses should be “modestly dilutive to the company's cash flow over the near term.”

Top executives from Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony met with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and staff on the “latest developments” on the company’s open radio access network initiatives, said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 21-63. They were joined by officials from the U.S. Embassy in Japan. The executives discussed “key challenges for the deployment and adoption” of ORAN and how Rakuten “making its source code available to other companies” could promote open networks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned the FCC of potential risks to consumers regarding providers’ implementation of security countermeasures to prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the Signaling System 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols to track the locations of consumers through their mobile devices (see 2404290032). “EFF has been concerned about location data privacy for years, including the threat posed by surveillance companies enabling their foreign government customers to conduct surveillance by exploiting SS7 network vulnerabilities,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 18-99. Current use of the Diameter protocol “presents similar problems,” EFF said in reply comments on a Public Safety Bureau notice. EFF urged the FCC to require audits of major wireless carrier use of SS7 and Diameter “every 12-18 months,” with a requirement that providers “address any identified vulnerabilities.”

T-Mobile is beefing up its network as hurricane season starts this week and with wildfire season already underway, the carrier said Wednesday. T-Mobile is “turning on new 2.5 GHz spectrum to boost critical coverage and capacity for nearly 60 million customers throughout the country, including hurricane-prone areas such as Louisiana.” The carrier continues to harden its network and is adding to its fleet of satellite cell-on-light-trucks and satellite cell-on-wheels “as well as heavy-duty trucks to provide Wi-Fi and device charging,” the company said.

Making money has to be the goal when providers expose their application programmable interfaces (APIs), experts said during a Mobile World Live webinar on Wednesday. Open APIs are a growing focus of carriers (see 2404160065) and of the GSMA (see 2402260054). “Monetization is really the end goal,” said Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence. Operators need to expose network capabilities in a consistent way, he said. Consistency is “particularly important” because that leads to interoperability, he said. That allows carriers to “monetize those network capabilities that they built out in a transparent way” so that developers don’t have to go to every operator and “figure out how to integrate with them” and “start from scratch with every single operator they want to work with,” he said. When APIs are exposed consistently, you get the scale that’s attractive to developers, Jarich said. The industry is seeing “traction” since GSMA launched its API Open Gateway initiative last year (see 2302270069), he said. Carriers responsible for nearly 70% of worldwide connections are focused on open APIs, he said. Security is a top concern of providers, and it’s not surprising that many open APIs are focused on security and anti-fraud efforts, Jarich said. GSMA surveys show that operators aren’t just joining the open gateway initiative but are exposing their APIs, he said. Providers are building out fiber and 5G networks against the backdrop of challenging economic conditions and shrinking profit margins, said Ana Redondo, product strategy lead in the Networks Division at telecom tech company Amdocs. “There’s very intense competition worldwide,” she said. “It isn’t an easy environment to operate in,” she said. Carriers are trying to reduce costs and grow core revenues where possible, she said. 5G hasn’t worked as well as carriers hoped, but fixed wireless access “has proven to be very successful,” she said. Open APIs can put carriers “in a far more competitive position,” she said. Carriers have a lot of assets they can monetize in the data that they have, their data centers and edge capacity. Carriers are asking how they can expose everything they do as APIs, she said. It’s a “fundamental shift,” but it puts providers “closer to how the cloud vendors work,” she said.

DOD has relaunched the Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions process to explore dynamic spectrum sharing (see 2405200050), but NTIA needs public engagement as part of the related studies (see 2403120056) of the bands being examined as part of the national spectrum strategy, Shiva Goel, NTIA senior adviser-spectrum policy, blogged Wednesday. For the band studies co-led by DOD and NTIA, “the responsibility to establish a multistakeholder forum for non-Federal engagement falls on NTIA,” Goel said: “We know just how instrumental that engagement was to the identification of bands to be studied in the Strategy. We know how much the execution, too, will benefit from those contributions.” Goel said involving diverse stakeholders in the studies is important “to ensuring that the public has confidence in the work that results.”

The FCC’s Technological Advisory Council will meet June 21 at 10 a.m. at FCC headquarters, a notice in Tuesday’s Federal Register said. “TAC will continue to consider and advise the Commission on topics such as continued efforts at looking beyond 5G advanced as 6G begins to develop so as to facilitate U.S. leadership; studying advanced spectrum sharing techniques, including the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the utilization and administration of spectrum; and other emerging technologies,” the notice said. TAC held the first meeting under its current charter in March (see 2403190060).

The International Association of Fire Chiefs told the FCC it remains “steadfast" in its support for letting the FirstNet Authority manage the 4.9 GHz band. The authority “has experience in maintaining a national public safety broadband network; mandated priority and ruthless preemption for public safety users; and has both federal and Congressional oversight to ensure proper stewardship of a vital taxpayer-owned resource,” a filing posted Tuesday in docket 07-100 said.