Delta Air Lines will equip its more than 19,000 flight attendants with the 5G iPhone 12, AT&T said Wednesday: Attendants will use the phones' augmented reality capabilities to inventory in-cabin supplies and “perform critical tasks -- from safety checks to passenger assistance.”

Support is broad on a proposal for smaller, lighter antennas in the 70/80/90 GHz bands, said 5G Americas Monday in a filing in FCC docket 10-153. This “would facilitate deployment of 5G,” and similar antennas are widely used in Europe, the advocacy group said: “The public interest would be served by granting these proposed amendments immediately, independent of the Commission’s continued consideration of more complex proposals to add new services to the band.”

Ligado completed a 5G over-the-air call on its test network earlier this month, validating that its spectrum and planned network architecture "are well-suited for next-generation applications," CEO Doug Smith blogged Wednesday. He said Ligado expects to start trials later this year with Rakuten Mobile toward its planned 5G mobile private network. He said Ligado hopes to be working with tech companies by this time next year on collaborations and doing a real-world trial of its 5G mobile private network. Ligado received 5-0 FCC approval a year ago (see 2004200039).

Bernstein’s Peter Supino questioned Dish Network complaints that T-Mobile closing its CDMA network hurts competition (see 2104140036). “The incremental cost to migrate Dish's customers to a more advanced network is not high,” he told investors Monday. Prepaid churn is high, “so a significant amount of the base will have an opportunity to update their phones,” he said: “Customer phones need to be upgraded to use Dish's standalone 5G network anyway.” But “millions of Boost customers, the majority of whom are underserved and face income challenges, are at risk of being impacted,” said a Dish spokesperson. “This issue is not just about devices, which are in limited supply due to global chip shortages and LG's exit from the market, or cost. As T-Mobile well knows, technology migrations take time.”

T-Mobile has “a lasting advantage” over AT&T and Verizon on spectrum for 5G, Neville Ray, T-Mobile president-technology, blogged Monday. In the second phase of 5G, “everyone in the industry is playing the same game -- building out optimal mid-band spectrum to deliver the perfect combo of speeds and coverage,” Ray said: Verizon will have access to only 60 MHz of C-band spectrum and AT&T 40 MHz by year-end, with the rest available in late 2023.

Verizon is starting to install C-band radio access network equipment from Ericsson and Samsung. Verizon was the top bidder in the auction, gaining an average of 161 MHz nationwide. “Although the initial spectrum won’t be cleared until the end of this year, Verizon and its vendor partners have already begun the work to ensure the super-fast 5G Ultra Wideband service using C-band is deployed to 100 million customers by March 2022,” the provider said Monday.

Building open radio access networks could be difficult, warned the Marconi Society in a filing posted Friday in FCC docket 21-63. “In Open RAN, the network integration has no single owner and is therefore problematic,” said the society. “While integration is easier in a private/enterprise network, public networks are much more complex and integrating network elements into a coherent, efficient RAN is proving to be difficult. Solving this integration gap requires new technology intervention and investments.” Commissioners approved an ORAN notice of inquiry 4-0 last month (see 2103170049).

Dish Network slammed T-Mobile’s defense of plans to close its legacy CDMA network at the end of this year in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 18-197. T-Mobile’s latest was posted Tuesday (see 2104120035). “T-Mobile makes no effort to challenge the central basis of DISH’s concerns: that the accelerated shutdown of the CDMA network likely will harm millions of Boost consumers, many who already face economic challenges,” Dish said. “This is because the harms are indisputable.” Dish wants the carrier to “honor the commitments it made to regulators under oath and keep the CDMA network operational until at least July 2023.” T-Mobile agreed to sell Boost to Dish as a concession to regulators as it sought approval to buy Sprint. Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, spoke with aides to acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on the group's concerns. “A pandemic emergency is the worst time possible for pre-paid mobile subscribers to lose cellular phone service, or for a rapid transition that reportedly faces the challenges of contacting customers and providing them with a new device, SIM card and/or software upgrade,” he said.

Qualcomm said it completed 5G data calls combining millimeter wave with frequency-division duplexing or time division duplex sub-6 GHz spectrum by using 5G stand-alone mode dual connectivity. It combined the company's Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF system and QTM545 mmWave antenna module inside a smartphone form-factor device, demonstrating the ability to aggregate low, mid- and high bands across global combinations, said the company Tuesday. Spectrum aggregation, including dual connectivity using mmWave and sub-6 GHz frequencies, is “critical to delivering multi-Gigabit speeds and massive capacity required for a new generation of consumer and enterprise applications,” said the company. Combining different types of radio spectrum will enable mobile 5G devices to achieve wired broadband-class speeds, even in challenging conditions such as crowded venues and transit hubs, it said.

Mobile operators are struggling to create average revenue per user (ARPU) uplift from 5G network upgrades as mobile data revenue in Q4 fell below $1 per gigabyte for the first time, reported Strategy Analytics Tuesday. Cellular data traffic grew 35% year on year in Q4, but total mobile service revenue inched up just 0.6%, it said. Weak service revenue growth in strong 5G markets -- South Korea and China -- “paint a challenging picture for consumer 5G value creation across the globe in 2021,” said the researcher. Subscriptions used on 5G networks grew from 2.1% in September to 3% three months later; China had 80% of global totals, it said. Speed-based, tiered unlimited data plans in Finland helped lift ARPU by 17% over the past five years, compared with a 15% decline across Western Europe, noted SA. “Volume-based data pricing is going to cause a headache for many operators conditioned to utility-based revenue or cost per unit thinking,” said Phil Kendall, director-service provider group. With the capacity gains offered by 5G “diluting value per Gigabyte, operators need ‘more for more’ pricing that offers revenue uplift through better experiences and richer content rather than through more data,” he said. Carriers need to “educate users away from high-volume low-cost plans and the idea that 150GB is meaningfully better than 100GB,” said analyst Josie Sephton. Consumers are picking price plans that fit their budget first, data usage requirements second, she said: “We are in a data pricing merry-go-round that needs to be reset.”