Month: January 2020

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nakhorn Yuangkratoke/EyeEm)

Mobile network operators who sold their customers' real-time location data violated US law and the Federal Communications Commission will try to punish carriers that did so, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wrote today.

"[T]he FCC's Enforcement Bureau has completed its extensive investigation and... it has concluded that one or more wireless carriers apparently violated federal law," Pai wrote in a letter today to Democratic members of Congress who asked for an update on the probe.

"I am committed to ensuring that all entities subject to our jurisdiction comply with the Communications Act and the FCC's rules, including those that protect consumers' sensitive information, such as real-time location data," Pai's letter continued. "Accordingly, in the coming days, I intend to circulate to my fellow Commissioners for their consideration one or more Notice(s) of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture in connection with the apparent violation(s)."

Enlarge / Huawei's logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with Samsung at around 20 percent, Huawei at 16 percent, Apple at 13 percent, and Xiaomi and Oppo at around eight percent each.

Counterpoint credits Huawei's success in its home country of China for its success, saying, "This was the result of an aggressive push from Huawei in the Chinese market, where it achieved almost 40 percent market share." According to the firm, China makes up 60 percent of Huawei's shipments.

Is this “Peak Huawei?”

While holding onto the No. 2 spot is a big accomplishment for Huawei, the company's future in the smartphone market currently looks pretty murky. The Trump Administration's Huawei export ban means US companies can no longer do business with Huawei. Huawei should be OK when it comes to hardware, as the company has aggressively cut US components out of its hardware supply line. For software, however, it has a serious problem. No US products means the Google ecosystem is off-limits to Huawei, so Huawei phones don't have access to Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, the Google Assistant, and the millions of apps on the Play Store. This seriously limits the appeal of Huawei phones outside of China.

Enlarge / A crew member of an evacuation flight of French citizens from Wuhan gives passengers disinfectant during the flight to France on February 1, 2020, as they are repatriated from the coronavirus hot zone. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued the first federal quarantine order in more than 50 years for 195 Americans who were evacuated out of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak (2019-nCoV)

The US citizens will be held under quarantine at the March Air Reserve Base in California, where they arrived from Wuhan on Wednesday, January 29 on an aircraft chartered by the US State Department. They have remained at the base since then. The quarantine will last 14 days from the time that their flight left Wuhan. Fourteen days is considered the likely maximum time of a 2019-nCoV infection incubation period—that is the time between an exposure and onset of symptoms.

The decision to issue a quarantine comes amid the continued spread of 2019-nCoV—both within and beyond China. It also comes on the heels of a report that an asymptomatic infected person from China spread the viral illness to a 33-year-old healthy business associate in Germany. Further testing found that three other associates at the same company in Germany had also contracted the infection. All four cases were mild, and the first infected associate, who noticed symptoms on January 24, started feeling better and returned to work on the 27. The report was published yesterday, January 30, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Enlarge / Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, during an interview in New York, on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

After deciding to shut New York and Alaska out of a rural broadband fund, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has made another change that could reduce or eliminate funding available for ISPs in other US states.

When the FCC yesterday approved the $20.4-billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), the order contained a new provision that bans funding for areas already receiving money from any similar federal or state broadband-subsidy program. The new provision is so vague and expansive that it could affect areas in dozens of states or exclude some states from receiving money entirely, according to Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks.

"Based on my initial research, that means that the nearly 30 states that fund rural broadband through their own programs may find their eligibility reduced or eliminated," Starks said before yesterday's vote. "These provisions discourage badly needed state-federal partnerships, risk unequal application of the rules between states, and create an unnecessary risk of litigation."

Enlarge (credit: Tim Robberts)

The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to fine a Utah man $12.9 million for conducting a string of racist robocalling campaigns across the United States over the last two years.

The FCC says one of the campaigns seemed like an attempt to tamper with a jury in an ongoing case. Another targeted a newspaper for criticizing his earlier campaigns.

Shortly before the 2018 election, the man, Scott Rhodes, reportedly made 766 spoofed robocalls in Florida, where black Democrat Andrew Gillum was running for governor. According to the FCC, "robocalls falsely claimed to be from the candidate and used 'a caricature of a black dialect' with jungle background noises."