China, the world’s largest smartphone market, saw Q4 handset shipments reach 105 million, a 16 percent “sequential” increase from Q3, Bharat Book Bureau, the India-based market research firm, said Friday in a report. Overall smartphone shipments in China declined 7.9 percent for all of 2014 to 388.8 million units, the report said. Bharat estimates 248 models of smartphones from all suppliers were launched in China Q4, it said. Apple rode the “white hot” sales of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to the top market share position in China for Q4, when it shipped a total of 17.3 million iPhones of various models, it said. Supplier Xiaomi lagged only slightly behind Apple with 17 million units shipped Q4, it said. IDC has estimated that Xiaomi is the world’s third-largest distributor of smartphones behind Samsung and Apple.

Only 16 percent of current iPhone users would "never consider” upgrading or switching to a Samsung smartphone, ecoATM said a survey it commissioned found. The survey canvassed 637 iPhone users and was conducted Feb. 22-23, ecoATM said. That’s about a week before Samsung announced its Galaxy S 6 and Galaxy S 6 Edge on March 1 for April delivery (see 1503040051). Nearly a third of iPhone users canvassed said they would switch to a Samsung “for the right price and features,” ecoATM said. “Price may be the biggest factor for iPhone owners, with 42 percent reporting they would consider upgrading” to a new Samsung phone if offered the upgrade for free or for a very low price, it said. As for the features that might inspire iPhone users to switch to a Samsung, 21 percent would consider it for longer battery life, 18 percent for a larger screen size, it said. But brand loyalty "plays an important role” in iPhone nation, it said.

Consumers Union submitted to the FCC a petition with 130,000 signatures from consumers urging the agency not to grant several petitions for clarifications and exemptions against rules prohibiting non-emergency robocalls to cellphones, said an ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 02-278. The group said earlier last week it was making the filing (see 1503250038). Utilities are asking the FCC for leniency under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in what some called an age of cellphones (see 1503270020).

The recently completed AWS-3 auction demonstrated that licensed spectrum remains valuable, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said in a blog post Friday. “Although some argue that the future lies only with unlicensed or shared spectrum, this view ignores the fact that our nation’s commercial wireless carriers still seek exclusive spectrum in order to be able to maintain quality of service and network control,” he said. The auction showed the paired spectrum blocks are much more valuable to industry than unpaired spectrum, he said. The auction also showed that location matters. "As expected, the licenses covering the top 30 metropolitan areas, which account for approximately 10 percent of the licenses offered, brought in 79 percent of the overall gross revenues. This is nothing against medium- or small-sized markets, but this fact is important as the Commission looks toward the incentive auction and issues raised by potential market impairments.” The auction also showed that mid-band spectrum remains valuable and highlighted the need for the FCC to address its designated entity rules. Dish Network was able to indirectly buy the second most AWS-3 spectrum of any player in the auction at a discounted price through DEs Northstar and SNR Wireless (see 1501300051). He didn't directly cite Dish. This major company was “able to use this structure to outbid not only small businesses and rural telephone companies, but also some of the country's largest wireless providers,” he said. “If these bidding credits are granted, which I take no position on at the current time, the rules would allow these licenses to be ‘flipped’ to another company after five years without repaying a penny of the subsidy.”

Carriers disclosed pre-order and pricing plans Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge smartphones that launched at Mobile World Congress earlier this month. Sprint said the 32 GB S 6 will be available free as part of an $80 monthly lease plan over 24 months that includes unlimited talk, text and data on the Sprint network; international value roaming in Telefonica countries; and annual upgrades. Sprint will continue its promotion offering to pay all of customers' costs to switch to Sprint from another carrier, including the contract and whatever is owed on the device. Price for the Galaxy S 6 edge with a 24-month lease is $5 monthly after a $20 per month lease credit, Sprint said, and the monthly charge paired with the Sprint Unlimited Plus Plan is $85 per month. Sprint's Boost Mobile unit will offer the S 6 (32 GB) in black for $649 as a no-contract purchase option, the carrier said. Preregistration began Thursday at the website. Boost Mobile's Data Boost Up plan with automatic payments is $35 per month for unlimited talk and text and 2.5 GB of high-speed data, it said. Availability for the S 6 and S 6 edge on Sprint and Boost Mobile is April 10. U.S. Cellular announced its presale Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge beginning Friday in stores and online. U.S. Cellular has pricing options including $0 down using installment pricing over 20 months, it said.

Representatives of CTIA disputed arguments by Google, NCTA, Federated Wireless and various public interest groups that the FCC should “effectively bar” LTE-unlicensed from the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band. The FCC is moving toward final rules for spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band and tweaking its rules after several comment rounds (see 1502050049). In meetings with officials from the FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology, a filing in docket 12-354 said, CTIA said: “It is not the agency’s role to make technology choices. LTE-U is a promising new technology and one possible solution that does not preclude other air interface solutions that meet the FCC’s technical requirements.” The order also should support devices that are tunable across the 3.5 GHz band and encourage investment by Priority Access Licenses that pay for better access to the band, it said.

The record developed so far supports the wisdom of the FCC’s proposal to permit personal/portable unlicensed operations in a 6 MHz channel of the duplex gap after the TV incentive auction, Google said in comments filed in docket 12-268. Opponents of unlicensed devices in the gap make some wrong assumptions in pointing to potential problems, Google said. Opponents “assume unjustifiable receiver-sensitivity levels,” fail to take account of expected attenuation and “arbitrarily handicap LTE performance to suggest" LTE devices "are more susceptible to interference than real devices,” Google said.

Kyocera launched a national mobile phone takeback program for consumers wanting to dispose of unused cellphones of any brand, the company said Wednesday. Kyocera said it’s working with SecondWave Recycling, which promotes free phone recycling to support charities. For every four phones recycled for their raw materials, Kyocera will donate $1 to Cell Phones For Soldiers, a nonprofit that provides free communication services to active-duty military members and veterans, Kyocera said. Nearly 2 billion mobile phones are sold globally each year, but only 13 percent of unused phones are recycled in the U.S., with the remaining 87 percent going to landfills or incinerators, Kyocera said. In the take-back program, donors can print free shipping labels at Kyocera’s sustainability website and Kyocera will provide shipping containers for phones at no charge to those who need them, the company said. SecondWave will receive the phones and break them down for their recyclable raw materials, it said.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance supported deployment of Wi-Fi location-based services (LBS) Wednesday. A WBA paper said Wi-Fi LBS opens up a wider range of possibilities for location-based services and analytics in areas like emergency services, entertainment and retail. LBS also provides an opportunity for service providers and others in the industry to innovate and create a competitive advantage, WBA said. The WBA report “clearly indicated that LBS over Wi-Fi is seen by service providers as one of their most important monetisation strategies,” CEO Shrikant Shenwai said in the news release. “This is a further illustration of how Wi-Fi is continuing to evolve beyond connectivity, to enable a wide range of value-added services.”

FCC net neutrality rules pose a potential threat to LTE broadcast, which lets wireless carriers multicast over their networks, said Daniel Lyons, a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, in a blog post Wednesday. The traditional way carriers transmit video, as an individual copy of requested content to each consuming device, “makes little sense when multiple people are consuming the same content at the same time, as many do during the Super Bowl or other live sporting events,” Lyons said. LTE broadcast uses a portion of the network to transmit one copy of the content to multiple devices. The net neutrality order doesn’t directly address LTE broadcast, Lyons said. But it could potentially violate the order’s paid prioritization ban, he said. “Because carriers must reserve a portion of cell capacity to engage in LTE broadcasting, a creative lawyer might argue that LTE broadcast allows a carrier to use ‘resource reservation’ to ‘directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic’ in violation of the Commission’s prohibition, if done ‘in exchange for consideration’ or ‘to benefit an affiliated entity,’” he said. LTE broadcast would also be a strong candidate for a waiver of the ban, as allowed by the order, Lyons said. “It is also possible that the FCC would consider LTE broadcast a non-BIAS [broadband Internet access] service that is exempt from the Open Internet rules, like the cable company’s facilities-based VoIP service or IP television,” he said. “One can describe LTE broadcast as an ‘application-level’ service that shares capacity with the carrier’s broadband service but does not itself offer access to large portions of the Internet.”