Some 52% of consumers in U.S. broadband households want a telehealth service that uses data from connected health devices, reported Parks Associates Monday. The number rises to 71% for people who have experienced COVID-19 symptoms. "Many consumers are using telehealth out of necessity and for the first time," said analyst Jennifer Kent.

Home data consumption slowed slightly as last year came to a close, to rates seen in the weeks leading up to COVID-19 pandemic closures, rising 18% overall in all of 2020, Comscore reported. Except for a “slight shift away from gaming consoles in favor of smart TVs in 2020, households continued to consume data in very similar ways to how they did in 2019,” said the report Friday. Data use grew across connected devices, with smart TVs, laptops, gaming consoles, smartphones, smart speakers, streaming players and tablets having strong growth from 2019. Smart TV data usage was higher every month in 2020, even before the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak in March.

The pandemic gave 5G a needed push yet slowed work on standards and deployment, said Kaniz Mahdi, VMware vice president-advanced technologies, at an IEEE webinar Thursday. The wireless industry had high expectations for 2020, "expected to be a year of transformation,” Mahdi said. “5G was expected to be the driving force,” she said: “Then COVID happened.” The transformation instead has been driven by the pandemic, which changed “the way we do our work, the way we shop … the way we are educated,” she said. For years, it wasn’t clear what “killer app” would drive 4G adoption, she said. Then came apps like Uber and Airbnb, and “you have widespread adoption of massive broadband, universal data.” 5G will enable “highly interactive collaboration” among devices, she said: Machines will become “the ultimate end user.”

Landline phones aren't a thing of the past, partly due to trends occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, an industry researcher found. The renewed validation of legacy telephony technologies comes as voice calls “address the universal need for communication and social connection,” Parks Associates reported. Home-based lifestyles drove “dramatic upticks in voice calling in all its forms,” according to telecom providers, said Parks. Some trends are temporary, and others may signal lasting change, the researcher said Tuesday. The pandemic underscored the value of traditional landlines, said Parks. Many turn to a landline for important calls, it said, as 40-60% of North American and EU households use one. Cellphones “can struggle for connectivity inside certain home designs and building materials while fixed-lines provide reliable service,” it said: Spotty Wi-Fi coverage can challenge VoIP calls. There are almost 16 million U.S. mobile-only households, whose only broadband access to the internet is through a mobile data plan, said Parks: During the pandemic, landlines relieve overburdened networks and don’t compete for residential bandwidth. Landlines will continue a migration to support VoIP, which in some households could keep landlines as a reliable backup, the firm said.

Apple committed “arbitrary and capricious restraint of trade,” in violation of the Sherman Act, when it disallowed a COVID-19 geolocation-based symptom-tracking app from being posted for sale in the App Store in the early days of the pandemic, alleged a Tuesday complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire. An “ad hoc group” of developers, including a Dartmouth University computer scientist and a former NASA chief medical officer, submitted the app, called Coronavirus Reporter, for approval, but Apple rejected it on grounds that the submitters were not a “recognized healthcare company,” said the complaint. “Plaintiff is and was a bioinformatics development company” that developed “other large scale data and bioinformatics applications since 2014 that had served hundreds of millions of individuals,” it said. For “many millions” of consumers, “their de facto access to the internet relies upon using an iOS device,” it said. “As such, Apple operates a de facto monopoly for access to the national internet communication backbone.” The Coronavirus Reporter app, “had it been allowed, would likely have provided useful bioinformatics data, and provided a medium for free information exchange among United States citizens and COVID patients,” it said. Apple didn’t comment Wednesday.

ICANN will hold the group's ICANN70 meeting virtually "due to the continuing impact" of COVID-19, the organization announced. It was to have been in Cancun, Mexico. The dates were changed to March 22-25, the group said Thursday of what will be its fourth such digital-only event during the pandemic. See here for more details. ICANN70 was previously scheduled for March 20-25, a spokesperson said Friday.

The pandemic sent global 2020 box office receipts plunging 71% from a year earlier to $12.2 billion, reported Comscore Friday. The North American decline was 80% to $2.25 billion, it said. China had the least damage, falling 66% to $3.1 billion. The combination of a “well-managed pandemic response coupled with strong local product has led to a strong theatrical recovery in many countries,” said Comscore, typifying the positives it accentuated. “With careful planning, adherence to local health regulations and must-see content, studios and exhibitors found a path to success.”

Webcams became an unexpected product scarcity resulting from a computer trickle-down phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Best Buy CEO Corie Barry in a Tuesday CES keynote. Home office shortages abounded when families suddenly began looking for computing solutions last spring, she said. After setting up a PC, households realized they needed webcams to look clearer on the other side and mics for better audio quality, said Barry. “As you had more time to think about what the best experience might be at home, then you started bolting on the ancillary products," she said. “Nobody knew there’d be a run on webcams at the pace we saw, yet suddenly it became the hottest item.” Best Buy’s “overnight” enabling of curbside fulfillment in response to safety concerns required employees to work differently and outside of familiar structured roles, she said: All employees had to pitch in to get tech gear to customers in the way they wanted to receive it, and that has become more important. E-commerce sales exploded -- Best Buy's online sales were up 175% year on year as of Q3 -- Barry said, with 40% of sales still being picked up in stores or curbside.

Consider alternatives to verify providers' eligibility for the emergency broadband relief fund due to "the shortcomings of the National Verifier database," digital and civil rights groups led by Public Knowledge told FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, per a filing posted Tuesday in docket 20-445. Free Press, MediaJustice, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Gigi Sohn of the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy participated. Set criteria for new entrants that encourage "participation by a broad array of providers," including noneligible telecom carriers, the groups recommended, and include periodic reporting so Universal Service Administrative Co. can track how much funding remains available throughout the program and a method for notifying program participants about their eligibility for Lifeline services. The groups raised concerns about public awareness of the fund and recommended the commission use some administrative funds for marketing campaigns (see 2101070052). Adopt "plug and play" materials to inform and reach eligible participants, they said. Starks has been meeting with such groups on their recommendations.

The next phase of vertical location accuracy testing in an industry testbed likely won't begin until “the latter months of 2021” because of COVID-19, CTIA said in an FCC filing posted Monday in docket 07-114.