Any 5G deployment will need low- and mid-band spectrum allocations plus high band to enable such applications as IoT, and sizably different infrastructure from 4G, with many more small cell sites, said CTIA Chief Technology Officer Tom Sawanobori Wednesday at an FCBA telecom and wireless committees event. Unlike the traditional spectrum evolution where a technology came first, followed by technical requirements and regulations, 5G represents "a slightly different equation," said Michael Ha, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Policy and Rules Division deputy chief. The increasing demand for bandwidth for data transmission and the relative lack of unassigned spectrum is pushing the move into the millimeter wave bandwidths to support 5G, Ha said. The spectrum frontiers rulemaking (see 1510230050) is looking at bands above 24 GHz for 5G, and the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference identified some bands for 5G -- though 28 GHz, a subject of the FCC proceeding, wasn't included in the WRC work, Ha said. While numerous incumbent satellite operations already use that spectrum, Ha said, sharing is inevitable: "We know it's not going to be exclusive use." The satellite industry wants to be part of 5G -- such as in potential applications like driverless vehicles -- but also wants assurances and safeguards against harmful interference, said Satellite Industry Association President Tom Stroup. "We certainly are advocates of sharing, where it works." 4G has become ubiquitous in the U.S., with roughly 98.5 percent of the nation covered and traffic on the 4G network expected to sextuple over the next five years, Sawanobori said. Such applications as Voice over LTE are expected to become commonplace as soon as more products offer "high-definition voice," he said. 5G, by contrast, probably won't be deployed ubiquitously across the U.S. due to different business models, Sawanobori said.

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and iconectiv launched an online registry to "help accelerate the adoption of open mobile-to-mobile (M2M) systems," the groups said Tuesday in a news release. The oneM2M Application-ID Registry -- based on the work of a global standards initiative for IoT and M2M communications -- will move the industry "one step closer" to enabling applications developed on different networks and platforms to "easily and seamlessly" exchange information, they said: The registry provides a unique identifier for each application to facilitate communication between devices, and allows developers to "quickly and easily" register their applications online.

The FCC is focused on encouraging more broadband competition, said Gigi Sohn, counselor to Chairman Tom Wheeler. In a speech Tuesday at a European Competitive Telecommunications Association event in Brussels, Sohn said competition is the most effective way to achieve the agency’s goals of promoting communications innovation and investment while upholding public interest values as technology changes networks. She said the benefits of competition are well known in the long distance, wireless, consumer device and information services markets. “However, in the broadband market, more work needs to be done for consumers and industry alike to realize the full range of benefits that competition can provide,” she said. Sohn highlighted FCC decisions on the IP technology transition, municipal broadband, net neutrality, USF support and broadband speeds, and its concerns that helped thwart Comcast's takeover of Time Warner Cable. She also outlined the commission’s efforts to stage a “historic incentive auction,” carry out further USF reforms to help rural and low-income consumers, and ensure “reasonable” rates, terms and conditions for special-access services in the business data market. Sohn said she recognized that the FCC values of competition, universal access, consumer protection and public safety were basically shared by the EU in its digital single-market strategy. "While our commercial markets differ and may, at times, require different policy solutions, these common values unite us," she said. Sohn said mobile networks now reach about 95 percent of the world's population, with about half having access to mobile Internet service. She noted the international Global Connect effort of governments and private parties to connect another 1.5 billion people by 2020. There are about 15 billion Internet-connected devices, she said, along with projections that number could grow to about 50 billion in five years. "McKinsey estimates that the emerging Internet of Things could generate up to $11 trillion in economic value over the next decade," said Sohn.

Silicon Labs bowed reference designs said to streamline development of ZigBee-based home automation, connected lighting and smart gateway products. Silicon Labs’ entry to turnkey IoT, based on the company’s Golden Unit home automation software stack and ZigBee SoC (system-on-chip) mesh networking technology, includes hardware, firmware and software tools, said the company. The designs are said to reduce the complexity of connecting ZigBee devices, such as lights, dimmer switches and door/window contact sensors, in a home network, Silicon Labs said. The Golden Unit ZigBee stack allows LED lights to join, interoperate and leave a mesh network and to scale from a few to hundreds of light nodes on the same network, it said, while the connected lights can support white, color temperature tuning and RGB color settings as well as dimming. The designs include a capacitive-sense dimmable light switch and a small-form-factor door/window contact sensor that provide color, color tuning and dimming control and are wireless, battery-controlled and have no moving parts, said the company. Capacitive sensing in the switch design can detect gestures including touch, hold and swipe, and the contact sensor design provides the tools for creating wireless, battery-powered sensors for monitoring door and window positions, the company said. Silicon Labs is offering two ZigBee gateway options to complement the reference designs: a plug-and-play USB virtual gateway that works with any PC development platform and supports the Windows, OS X and Linux environments as a virtual machine; and an “out-of-the-box” Wi-Fi/Ethernet gateway reference design based on an embedded Linux computer system, it said.

Thread Group announced phase one of its product certification program and availability of Thread-certified software stacks from ARM, Freescale and Silicon Labs later this month. More than 30 products have been submitted for testing, Thread said. The consortium also announced lighting company Osram joined the group, extending the Thread presence in Europe. Under the certification program, Thread products will be tested to validate device behavior for commissioning, networking functionality, security and operation in Thread’s network, and they may bear the “Build on Thread” or “Thread Certified Component” logos to help consumers and product developers identify Thread products on the market. The group said its royalty-free licensing terms were designed to facilitate rapid adoption and “reduce confusion by creating a royalty-free pledge between members” to speed industry adoption. The group also announced the latest two winners of its Innovation Enabler Program: Centero, a provider of IoT integration services, and iSocket, a smart plug developer. The startups will receive up to 18 months of free Thread Group membership, it said.

The IEEE 802.22 Working Group on Wireless Regional Area Networks said it approved IEEE 802.22b-2015, designed to support point-to-multipoint wireless broadband operation in the VHF and UHF TV bands. “The standard is intended to support wireless broadband services and monitoring applications for the world’s traditionally underserved rural areas, where most empty TV channels can be found and where Internet access services are often scarce,” the group said. “IEEE 802.22b-2015 is designed to double the throughput of devices based on the original IEEE 802.22 standard,” said Chang-woo Pyo, chair of the task force that created IEEE 802.22b. It will enable more capacity for machine-to-machine communications and the IoT, he said.

Intel announced an IoT reference platform architecture along with related hardware and software products Tuesday. The Intel IoT Platform includes two reference architectures and a product portfolio that includes new Intel Quark processors for IoT, analytics capabilities and free and “simple” operating systems with a cloud suite from Wind River, Intel said. The strategy is to make it easier for its customers “to scale from things to cloud” using the Quark processors and Wind River OS, Intel said. The platform architecture is focused on enabling the Intel ecosystem to “develop, secure and integrate smart things,” Intel said. The platform provides a “blueprint” for bringing innovations to market faster by “reducing complexity and defining how smart devices will securely connect and share trusted data to the cloud,” Intel said. The first company to announce IoT technology based on the new Intel IoT Platform is SAP, which will develop IoT enterprise end-to-end products based on the Intel platform along with its SAP HANA cloud platform, Intel said. Yanzi is using Intel’s Quark SoC to develop a solution that can optimize energy use based on space utilization and predictive maintenance in smart buildings, Intel said. A Honeywell connected worker wearable for mission-critical workers is designed to anticipate unsafe conditions and prevent “man-down” scenarios or unsafe conditions, Intel said.

CEA and LonMark said two standards -- ANSI/CEA-709.5, Control Networking Protocol Specification Part 5: Implementation-Application-Layer-Guidelines, and ANSI/CEA 709.6, Control Networking Protocol Specification Part 6: Application Elements -- were approved as American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards for home and building automation. The standards focus on IoT device interoperability and provide a “complete model” for implementing device-to-device and device-to application communication, the organizations said Monday. “As the IoT marketplace expands, having device-level interoperability that is protocol- and platform-independent is an important piece of the puzzle,” said Dave Wilson, CEA vice president-technology & standards. The two new ANSI/CEA standards will help drive “a new level of interoperability into the home and building automation sector with applicability to many other sectors including smart outdoor lighting, smart cities and the smart grid,” Wilson said.

IBM is buying various Weather Co. properties, but not the Weather Channel, to help be the foundation for its Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform, IBM said in a news release Wednesday. Financial terms of the deal -- which would see IBM picking up WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and the Weather Co. brand, as well as its meteorological data science experts, forecasting capabilities and a high-volume cloud-based analytics platform and is expected to close in Q1 -- weren't disclosed. Weather Channel will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM, the company said. Weather Co. CEO David Kenny said the company "see[s] the next wave of improved forecasting coming from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science and analytics." IBM and Weather Co. jointly began integrating real-time weather analytics into business earlier this year through a variety of data services packages and application programming interfaces, and Weather Co. announced plans to move its weather data services platform behind its business-to-business division to the IBM cloud, IBM said.

Verizon introduced a global strategy to simplify the IoT and accelerate market adoption, it said in a news release Wednesday. The company is launching an IoT platform called ThingSpace to allow developers to create applications, customers to manage devices, partners to launch market services and Verizon to launch integrated vertical solutions in an open environment, it said. Verizon also said it's creating a dedicated network core and new connectivity options for next-generation IoT use cases, commercializing its big data analytics engine for IoT deployment and introducing three end-to-end smart cities systems -- Intelligent Video, Intelligent Lighting and Intelligent Traffic Management. Verizon is generating "one of the largest amounts of revenue from the IoT of any company in the U.S.," and is engaged in collaborative projects in connected agriculture, manufacturing and connected machines, pharmaceutical supply chain monitoring and electric vehicles, it said.