The FCC 911 governance and accountability rulemaking’s desired transparency and situational awareness goals “may be able to be reasonably achieved without being overly cost-prohibitive or unduly burdensome,” Texas 911 officials told Public Safety Bureau officials during a meeting Wednesday. Texas Commission on State Emergency Communications General Counsel Patrick Tyler and Richard Muscat, Bexar Metro 9-1-1 Network District director-regulatory affairs, met with Deputy Chief David Furth and other bureau staff members to discuss potential benefits from additional communication and collaboration among 911 stakeholders to “enable more detailed review and consideration of issues and potential optimal alternatives,” the Texas officials said in an ex parte notice posted Monday. The bureau is accepting comments on an NPRM, in dockets 13-75 and 14-193, through March 9. Replies are due April 7. The Texas officials said more-detailed contingency plans filed with the FCC “might provide a coherent picture of relevant 9-1-1 information in a transparent manner.” Updates to those plans could be coordinated with notices of “material changes” similar to the notices the FCC uses to notify competitors about changes to LECs that might affect competitors, with any updates that go beyond minimum transparency requirements potentially benefiting all stakeholders, the Texas officials said. This approach to contingency plans "might be preferable to including within new FCC rule requirements at this time subcontractors, operating system suppliers and/or system integrators responsible for certain functions," the officials said. The IP transition and the shift to next-generation 911 technology “is still in the early stages,” with areas that have transitioned to NG-911 and IP technologies usually still needing to address “wholesale” 911 interconnection and competitive carrier issues included in the FCC’s local competition order, the Texas officials said. There may be potential opportunities for more “voluntary cooperation” on 911 transparency and situational awareness given that most areas are still in early stages of implementing NG-911 and IP technologies, the officials said.

Hype about the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last fall took a toll on sales of iPads in Q4 for Apple, which shipped 4.6 million fewer tablets versus the previous-year quarter, an industry research firm said. Apple had a 17.8 percent shipment decline over Q4 2013, to 21.4 million units in 2014 Q4, a Monday report​ from IDC said. Apple CEO Tim Cook said last week when releasing quarterly results that the iPhone was the star of that quarter (see 1501280031). The company expanded its iPad lineup by keeping around older models and offering a lower entry price point of $249, but the strategy “wasn't enough to spur iPad sales given the excitement around the launch of the new iPhones,” Jitesh Ubrani, IDC senior research analyst, said. Apple’s efforts to maintain iPad momentum “have fallen flat” because the latest generation of iPads offer “very minimalistic upgrades over their previous versions,” IDC said. "Cannibalization at the bottom from the iPhone and at the top from the Mac appears to be a serious issue for the iPad.” Worldwide tablet shipments, meanwhile, had a year-over-year decline for the first time since the market's inception in 2010, IDC said. It said overall shipments for tablets and 2-in-1 devices slipped 3.2 percent, to 76.1 million in Q4, compared with 78.6 million for the 2013 period. "The tablet market is still very top heavy" because Apple and Samsung are largely carrying the market each year, Ubrani said. Fifth-place Amazon had the steepest annual volume decline of the top five tablet vendors, IDC said. Despite a product refresh at the end of September with the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and 7-inch Fire HD, holiday sales tumbled nearly 70 percent compared with 2013, IDC said. Of the top five, it said that only Lenovo, in a distant third place, had growth in Q4, boosting tablet shipments by 9 percent to 3.7 million units for 4.8 percent global market share. IDC forecasts growth for the tablet category in 2015, Jean Philippe Bouchard, research director-tablets, said. Potential growth contributors include Microsoft's new operating system, a shift toward larger screen sizes and “productivity focused solutions,” along with technology innovations such as gesture control, he said.

Motorola Solutions said it successfully deployed its Advanced 9-1-1 text-to-911 technology in Kershaw County, South Carolina. It's the state's first jurisdiction to implement text-to-911, something that less than 4 percent of U.S. public safety answering points have done, Motorola Solutions said in a Tuesday news release. The company said it’s continuing to partner with Intrado on next-generation 911 technology in the county and elsewhere.

Carriers appear to be winning the fight to turn back parts of a proposal by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on rules for improving indoor wireless 911 location accuracy, in favor of an order closer to the industry public safety road map, FCC officials said Tuesday. Eighth-floor staff is writing a new draft of the rules, to be voted at the FCC's Thursday meeting. The draft was expected late Tuesday.

CTIA asked the FCC to reject arguments that the agency should effectively exclude all emergency calls that are satellite-based from being counted as indoor calls as the agency develops metrics for measuring the ability of carriers to identify the location of indoor wireless calls to 911. Industry officials view that as one of the key policy decisions that the FCC will make when it approves rules, to be voted on at Thursday’s commission meeting (see 1501130062).

Officials with SouthernLINC Wireless raised concerns about provisions it understands are in the FCC’s proposed rules for wireless location accuracy on calls made indoors, during a series of eighth-floor meetings, said a filing posted by Friday in docket 07-114. The FCC is to vote on rules Thursday (see 1501130062). SouthernLINC's understanding is the rules include “new location accuracy requirements for both horizontal (x/y-axis) and vertical (z-axis) location information that would exclude any location information or measurements obtained through the use of satellite-assisted technologies,” the carrier said. “The rationale for excluding satellite-generated measurements is to create a proxy for ‘indoor-only’ 9-1-1 calls, based on the assumption that satellite-assisted technologies are unable to provide location information for wireless 9-1-1 calls made from indoor locations.” Both provisions raise “significant concerns,” the carrier said. T-Mobile also raised concerns about the order. In a letter to the agency, T-Mobile encouraged the agency to develop reasonable standards. Establishing compliance metrics for indoor wireless calls has long been an FCC goal, T-Mobile said. “But that task has been stymied by the difficulty of measuring indoor compliance,” it said. “For instance, it has long been clear that widespread local-level compliance testing, of the kind used for outdoor location accuracy compliance, is simply not feasible for indoor location assessment.” In a third filing posted Friday, New America’s Open Technology Institute reported on various meetings at the FCC to discuss privacy concerns raised by the proposed requirements. “It is critical for the Commission to address privacy concerns associated with E911 at this stage, before the technology is developed and deployed,” the group said.

As Commissioner Ajit Pai said the largest U.S. hotel chains have made progress on ensuring guests can call 911 without first dialing 9, he also criticized the lack of FCC action in dealing with the problem at its own offices. Speaking at a news conference Friday at the Marshall, Texas, police headquarters, Pai said Commissioner Mike O’Rielly discovered “something disturbing” last year. When callers using the agency’s phone system try to call 911 directly, they receive a message saying, “'Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please consult your directory and call again or ask your operator for assistance. This is a recording.'” The message should have an additional line, Pai said: “This is completely unacceptable.”

The FCC established a pleading cycle on TeleGuam’s proposed buy of an upper 700 MHz C-block license and two AWS-1 licenses from Club 42. The licenses cover two cellular market areas (CMAs) -- Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. “Our preliminary review indicates that TeleGuam would be assigned 42 to 62 megahertz of spectrum in five counties in these two CMAs,” the FCC said. “Post-transaction, TeleGuam would hold 82 to 97 megahertz of spectrum in total, including 47 megahertz of below-1-GHz spectrum” in Guam. Petitions to deny are due Feb. 20, oppositions March 2 and replies March 9.

The FCC received thousands of emails seeking tough indoor location accuracy rules for wireless, the Public Safety Bureau said in a notice posted in docket 07-114. The notice said the agency received 9,297 emails from last July to October urging a “reasonable and achievable two-year path to indoor location accuracy for wireless 9-1-1 calls.” The communications came after the FCC proposed rules in February (see 1402210038). More emails came in after APCO, AT&T, CTIA, the National Emergency Number Association, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon proposed a road map for location accuracy in November (see 1411190064), the bureau said. So far in January, the commission has received more than 1,000 emails with essentially the same message, the bureau said. “I am writing to urge you to oppose the phone companies' attempt to delay real and enforceable requirements for accurate 9-1-1 locations,” reads a typical email, according to the bureau. “The technology exists today to find all wireless 911 callers, so we should require phone companies to find the location of indoor and outdoor callers within the next two years, as your original rule proposed.” Two emails, meanwhile, urged the FCC to “accept the deal,” the bureau said. The agency is to vote on rules at its Jan. 29 meeting. Meanwhile, the four national carriers supporting the road map filed a letter at the FCC offering additional concessions. Their modified version of the road map adopts “new, quantifiable indoor-specific metrics to assure widespread wireless 9-1-1 indoor positioning fixes, including vertical location fixes,” expands the performance metrics to apply to all 911 calls, and commits to creation of a National Emergency Address Database Privacy and Security Plan to be developed and sent to the FCC, they said. “The amended Roadmap commits carriers to widespread implementation of solutions that either provide a dispatchable location or a z-axis component, or both, to assure the availability of accurate horizontal and vertical location information for indoor calls,” the carriers said. “With these commitments, there can be no doubt the Roadmap provides clear targets and accountability for indoor location through aggressive performance metrics verified by live call data and an open and transparent test bed.”

The FCC is on the right track as it moves forward on new location accuracy rules for wireless calls made indoors, said Thera Bradshaw, executive director of Hawaii’s Enhanced 9-1-1 Board, in an email. Bradshaw said she has been a public safety official for more than 30 years and supports Chairman Tom Wheeler’s approach on location accuracy (see 1501130062). “I welcome the opportunity to work with a proactive FCC that is really passionate about tackling location accuracy in order to find people when they need help,” she said. “This Wheeler led FCC is doing just that in their efforts to produce meaningful accurate indoor and outdoor location to achieve a dispatchable address. By putting aside efforts to establish blame and staying the course, bringing all stakeholders into the discussion, the Commission will succeed in attaining the goal of an accurate location when people call 911, sooner rather than later.”