Howard Buskirk

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg offered more clarity Tuesday about the carrier’s view of its spectrum needs. The wireless industry eventually will need more licensed spectrum for the U.S. to remain “competitive” with other markets, particularly Asia, Vestberg said during a J.P. Morgan financial conference. “You need predictability, you need ownership, you need spectrum” to justify investments, he said. Like Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Verizon Consumer Group CEO, who mentioned the issue last week (see 2405140055), Vestberg said the company doesn’t face short-term needs, with an average of 161 MHz of C-band in markets nationwide, about half of which is now in use. “I sit really good on the 161 MHz of C-band that we bought,” he said. On another issue, Vestberg said the end of the affordable connectivity program is bad news. The program “is very important for the U.S. economy,” he added. Verizon has about 1.1 million customers receiving ACP funding, he said. Low-income families “should have a possibility to have broadband wireless,” he said, noting other Verizon programs can serve them. Vestberg also said the wireless industry's importance is “sort of underestimated.” Wireless and broadband “are two of the most essential and critical services for people, for organizations, for companies,” he said. People need broadband to work, for education, to access healthcare and to “have some joy in life,” he said. Vestberg said network slicing will be critical to the launch of private networks. Slicing will allow the setup of a private network “probably 10 times faster than … today, because today I need to break out part of the radio network and part of the core network,” he said: “In the future, I can just do a slice and I can probably do it in hours.”

AT&T needs freedom to address its copper network, including parts that are more than 100 years old, but regulation requires that the network keep operating, Chris Sambar, executive vice president-technology operations and head of network, said Tuesday during an AT&T Policy Forum. Sambar said he plans meetings at the FCC this week when he will discuss the cost for AT&T and other carriers of keeping copper lines operating.

DOD is starting part of its work on the national spectrum strategy on its own. At a meeting Wednesday, it will launch an initiative investigating dynamic sharing in the lower 3 GHz band, as a continuation of the Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions (PATHSS) process. DOD announced the meeting last month (see 2404080063), but it has received relatively little attention. A former NTIA official saw no reason for concern.

Ted Miller, co-founder and former CEO of Crown Castle, sent an open letter to Crown Castle shareholders Friday urging them to elect a revised slate of board members. CEO Jay Brown stepped down in January after Elliott Investment Management called for "significant changes" in Crown Castle's executive and board leadership (see 2311280062). Last month, Crown Castle named Steven Moskowitz, a former American Tower executive, president and CEO (see 2404120051). Now at Boots Capital Management, Miller said hiring Moskowitz wasn’t enough. “The last few weeks have exposed us to the candid feedback and insights of Crown Castle's largest shareholders,” he said: “We heard repeatedly an overwhelming concern and frustration with the Company's performance, slipshod governance, and lack of strategic planning.” Agreeing to sell fiber and naming Moskowitz were “worthy moves,” but shareholders “are telling us they want Boots to help drive the necessary changes by replacing decades-old directors responsible for this quagmire and once again focusing Crown Castle on the operations of its core tower business,” Miller said. Shareholders vote Wednesday. The company urged shareholders to vote for management's nominees. Miller “is attempting to replace four of the Company’s highly qualified nominees with his own nominees, whose skill sets and perspectives are not additive and do not reflect current industry dynamics and the competitive ecosystem,” Crown Castle said in a statement. Boots Capital's nominees are Miller, tower veteran Chuck Green, Tripp Rice and David Wheeler, all of whom have ties to Miller. They would replace broad members Ari Fitzgerald, Cindy Christy, Rob Bartolo and Kevin Kabat.

Informal complaints filed at the FCC about communications accessibility issues have risen for the past five years, and the nature of the complaints has shifted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago, an FCC official told a virtual meeting of the commission’s Disability Advisory Committee on Thursday. The top accessibility complaint is about captioning.

Communication companies should prepare now for the threat from quantum computing, which can break the cryptography that protects data from attacks, Taylor Hartley, network security solutions architect at Ericsson North America, said during an IEEE webinar Wednesday. “Anything that utilizes a public key can easily be broken by a quantum computer,” Hartley said. “We definitely have reason to believe” bad actors are gathering encrypted data so that they will be able to unencrypt it one day, she said. Hartley recommended migrating weakened algorithms to post-quantum cryptograpy. The National Institute of Standards and Technology ran a contest and selected the first three algorithms found to be quantum resistant, she said. It's expected the three will be standardized this summer and “then we can start implementing them,” Hartley said. The concept of quantum computing started in the 1980s, and we’ve known since the 1990s that it could “break the cryptography that we use today,” she said. The first commercially available quantum computer was introduced in 2011, she said. Recently, companies like IBM, Google and Honeywell have made advances in quantum computing, she said. Hartley recommended starting a "quantum readiness road map, conducting inventories, applying risk assessments and analysis and engaging with your vendors.”

Qualcomm remains hopeful the FCC will approve final rules this year for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) in the 5.9 GHz band, but the technology is moving forward in the interim, with the agency approving more than 50 waivers already, John Kuzin, Qualcomm vice president-spectrum policy and regulatory counsel, said Wednesday during a Broadband Breakfast webinar. Qualcomm is a longtime proponent of the technology (see 1801220024).

Carriers are using AI and machine learning (ML) in potentially transformative ways, experts said Tuesday during day two of Fierce Network’s Cloud Native 5G Summit. But speakers also reminded attendees AI is in its early stages and has a ways to go before providers fully embrace it.

T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz spectrum has “about a 30% propagation advantage” over the C-band bought mainly by Verizon and AT&T, T-Mobile Chief Financial Officer Peter Osvaldik said at a MoffettNathnson financial conference Tuesday. “C-band is great” and T-Mobile bought some licenses in the 2021 auction, which it plans to deploy in dense urban areas as a “fourth dedicated 5G layer,” Osvaldik said. The wireless industry can’t change the physics of spectrum, he said. The week after EchoStar reported earnings, with questions about its continual financial viability (see 2405080057), analyst Craig Moffett pressed Osvaldik on whether he sees a buying opportunity. “If hypothetically speaking, some company that owns a lot of spectrum were to suddenly unravel, and mid-band spectrum came on the market, is that something where you would say, 'I always want more spectrum?'” Moffett asked. “If there was a hypothetical spectrum availability out there, we'd approach it very similar to any other opportunity” Osvaldik replied. T-Mobile would consider the spectrum, the price and “what sort of returns can we generate on it versus other ways to create capacity than just buying more spectrum,” he said. Osvaldik said the carrier would look at that opportunity the same way it does when investing in fiber (see 2404250047) or at a potential a deal with UScellular (see 2405090053). T-Mobile is analyzing the subscribers it picked up from its acquisition of Ka’ena, including brands Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile. “We just closed,” Osvaldik said. “We've got to run it through all of our subscriber reporting rules.” The biggest question the company gets is whether actor Ryan Reynolds, who owned part of Mint, will remain. “There's so much creative work there that he's done so fabulously, so we'll continue to have a relationship with Ryan,” Osvaldik said.

With the wireless industry pushing hard for additional spectrum, particularly in the lower 3 GHz and 7/8 GHz bands, which are being examined as part of the national spectrum strategy (see 2405060051), a top Verizon official said Tuesday the carrier isn’t in the market for additional spectrum. “We like the assets we have right now,” Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Verizon Consumer Group CEO, said at a MoffettNathanson investor conference. Verizon went big in the 2021 C-band auction, bidding $45.4 billion, plus $8 billion in incentive costs to satellite operators (see 2102250046). In markets where the carrier has deployed C-band it continues to see lower churn and a better mix of premium customers, Sampath said. He said Verizon has limited exposure with the loss of the affordability connectivity program, but also sees opportunities for gaining customers. “There could be an opportunity for us to get on the offensive and take some share,” he said. Verizon has “the largest collection of prepaid assets today, ranging from the discount to the mid-market, to the premium end,” he said: “We will have a service at every single price point.” About 15% of its wireless customers also buy broadband from Verizon, and it plans to double that figure, Sampath said. “We're never going to see it at the European levels of 50%, 60% convergence because the market structure is fundamentally different [in Europe] and the regulatory environment is very different there," he said. Sampath said Verizon believes it has the best U.S. wireless network, as a result of “better RF design” and “a better set of assets.” Verizon's tests show “it's a much better network,” he said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to reliability and coverage.”