The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Thursday released a Small Entity Compliance Guide for the 2.5 GHz auction slated to start in July. The guide is “designed to help individuals and small businesses understand the requirements and other procedures for the Commission’s auction of approximately 8,000 new flexible-use geographic overlay licenses in the 2.5 GHz band,” it says: “The Commission established this auction to further the availability of mid-band spectrum that will allow for more efficient and effective use of 2.5 GHz spectrum. More mid-band spectrum will be available for the mobile services on which consumers increasingly rely and the licenses made available in this auction will help extend the availability of 5G services beyond the most populated areas.”

AT&T and Northrop Grumman are joining on R&D into a 5G-based open-architecture offering that will connect a wide array of DOD distributed sensors and data, AT&T said Tuesday. Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden at an Axios event Tuesday said the DOD's current architecture is numerous siloed platforms never designed to inter-communicate, and the joint work with AT&T is to create means for connecting them and allowing them to interface. She said there should be a prototype within a year, but implementation could take years.

Nova Labs received $200 million in funding from investors led by Tiger Global and Andreessen Horowitz for its Helium Network, which offers “decentralized wireless networks powered by crypto incentives,” CEO Amir Haleem blogged Wednesday. “The funding will enable Nova Labs to invest in the Helium ecosystem through hiring additional development resources, accelerating continued wireless protocol support, and building new applications on top of the Helium Network,” Haleem said. In October, Dish Network became “the first major carrier to utilize the Helium Network’s crypto incentive model,” he said: “Today, telecommunications companies like Deutsche Telekom, Liberty Global, NGP Capital back Nova Labs as investors.” The network “consists of more than 682,000 Hotspots built by third-party manufacturers” and is “used daily by companies ranging from titans of the Fortune 500 to local businesses,” he said.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson met Tuesday to discuss spectrum coordination, the first of what they promised in February will be monthly meetings (see 2202150001). A joint task force also started meetings, aimed at updating the 2003 memorandum of understanding between the two agencies. The two discussed a national spectrum strategy, the use of mid-band and millimeter wave for 5G and advanced networks, and the FCC’s pending receiver standards notice of inquiry, the FCC said. “A partnership requires clear communication, open doors, thoughtful listening, and mutual respect,” Rosenworcel and Davidson said in a joint statement: “Our agencies have very compatible and complimentary roles in American spectrum policy making. Congress has been clear about NTIA’s statutory role as manager of the federal government’s use of spectrum and the FCC as the independent agency responsible for non-federal spectrum policy.” Under the old MOU, the FCC and NTIA chiefs had agreed to meet twice yearly.

Wireless carriers are having to change how they do business because of 5G and the move to the cloud, speakers said Tuesday at an RCR Wireless virtual conference. The move to the cloud meant Verizon had to change how it was organized, said Abby Knowles, vice president-information technology. “We needed to really specialize more and functionalize,” Knowles said: “We were able to actually scale faster. As we created infrastructure experts, as we created application experts, as we created folks who focus on the performance, we were able to learn it faster, we were able to turn it up faster.” Staffers had to maintain a focus on customers even as their focus narrowed, she said. The biggest challenge is getting employees with the right skills for the cloud, said Rahul Atri, Rakuten Mobile managing director. “We are in a transition stage with telecom where we need the expertise” of small and medium-sized enterprises, he said. Potential employees don’t have the intersecting skills for legacy telecom and the cloud, he said. Some employees were quick to learn the cloud and others took more time and resisted the change, Atri said. “The whole idea was to get your hands dirty,” he said. Standing up the technology platform is the easiest change, said Chris Hill, vice president global telco at technology provider VMware. “You really do have to focus on the people piece and the process piece,” he said. The focus has to be on being competitive “in a 5G-edge cloud world,” he said. “We are at the point now” where the cloud is “no longer a technology conversation,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, Google Cloud digital transformation officer-telecom. “We understand the technology at this point, the technology is well proven,” he said. “When you really start to see technology adoption ramp … it happens when you spend less time proving the technology is viable and more time focused on how do I organize myself to operate this technology at scale.” Networks are already complicated, “but we generally don’t think about the spectrum, we generally don’t think about balancing the 4G and 5G traffic,” said Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director-radio access network engineering. “We have a mix of customers” and 70%-80% don’t have phones compatible with a 5G stand-alone network, he said: “You need to think about balancing the spectrum usage. You need to think about optimizing your dynamic-sharing features in such a way that you should not hurt the 4G customer … while you’re giving your 5G customer a superior expected experience and you should keep both of them happy.” Service agility, the ability to monetize new services and network efficiency are driving carriers to make changes to their networks, said Chandresh Ruparel, Intel senior director-5G/wireless core infrastructure segment.

The Open RF Association completed the “initial phase” of a study determining RF power levels used in 5G handsets “to help the industry better optimize data throughput performance and ultimately improve battery life,” said the consortium Tuesday. Its founding members are Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, Murata, Qorvo and Samsung. All contributed data and analyses to the study -- done by Signals Research Group -- which the consortium will use “to create a histogram showing RF power levels used in 5G handsets under real-world network conditions,” it said. The findings will be shared with consortium members in June, it said.

T-Mobile unveiled DevEdge, a developer platform Wednesday, and said it will launch a Tech Experience 5G Hub, “a new state-of-the-art innovation center.” The carrier also unveiled 5G partnerships with Disney StudioLAB and Red Bull. The developments are part of T-Mobile’s new 5G Forward initiative. “5G is a game changer,” but “5G hype has been out of control,” the company said: “5G developer innovation has been disappointing. 5G will never reach its full potential if the Carriers don’t get out of the way.”

Global wireless 5G adoption has entered the “rapid acceleration phase,” having exceeded a half billion connections by the end of 2021 and forecast to reach 1.3 billion by the end of 2022, reported 5G Americas Wednesday, citing Omdia data. North American 5G connections grew 292% year on year, reaching 72 million at the end of 2021, said the trade group.

Mavenir told the FCC use of open radio access networks would save significant money over use of traditional telecom equipment, in a filing posted Tuesday in docket 18-89. The FCC reported providers requested $5.6 billion from an FCC program to cover the cost of ripping and replacing Huawei and ZTE gear from their networks, nearly triple the $1.9 billion allocated in a federal fund (see 2202040066). Mavenir can replace gear at an average $420,000 per site, the company said. “Based on publicly available information about the wireless equipment and services that need to be replaced by the Reimbursement Program applicants, it appears that this is about one-third of the average cost of the submitted wireless applications,” Mavenir said: “The Replacement Program could be completed for up to $2 billion less than currently requested if all of the wireless applicants were to use Mavenir’s solution (or a vendor that is similarly cost competitive).”

Some 62,000 attended the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, where a major theme was the fast growth of 5G, John Strand of Strand Consult blogged Monday. Top officials at GSMA didn’t mention “the declining shareholder value of mobile operators,” he said: “Since 1998, the only net value add from has been premium SMS to pay for ring tones, logos, Java games, and TV polls. While mobile data traffic may be up 40% last year, this does not translate into greater revenue for mobile operators. … GSMA's members may talk a big game about the future; it has failed to monetize it.” Strand said “the elephant in the room” was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “While there’s a consensus that Russia’s actions are wrong, few realized just how brutal the invasion could be,” he said. “2022 is likely the last MWC that GSMA and its members can pretend to remain neutral geopolitically. Governments, consumers, and shareholders are forcing companies to choose sides.” MWC was held Feb. 28-March 3.