AT&T adds fiber markets, Sprint weighs in on small cells … 5 things to know today

1. AT&T is promising business customers download and upload speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. The company said today that it has expanded its AT&T Fiber service in Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Oklahoma. In addition, the carrier is expanding AT&T Fiber in several major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Fresno, California; Miami; Dallas and El Paso, Texas; and Louisville, Kentucky.
AT&T also said it is launching nationwide voice-over-IP service through AT&T Business Fiber. The service is available in 180 U.S. cities, most of which are located in the South, Southeast and Central U.S., or on the West Coast.
2. Sprint said it is not concerned about the pace at which its small cell rollout is proceeding. The company’s top executives report that “the permitting and approval stage for its small cell deployment has been ahead of expectations,” according to Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche, who met with Sprint’s CEO, CFO and CTO last week. In a separate meeting, Mobilitie CEO Gary Jabara told Fritzsche’s team that Mobilitie is cooperating closely with local authorities as it deploys on Sprint’s behalf, and that there have been no cities that have put a complete stop to small cell deployments.
Sprint said last summer that it planned to deploy tens of thousands of small cells, and so far has not released a public update to that number. Jabara said this spring that Mobilitie has deployed fewer than 2,000 small cells to date.
3. Apple is now licensing patents from Huawei, according to The Wall Street Journal. Citing “a person familiar with the matter,” the paper did not specify what type of patent Huawei reportedly licensed to Apple. Noting that Huawei spent $9.2 billion on research and development last year vs. Apple’s $8.1 billion, the report said the Chinese company is also the world’s largest filer of international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
In the smartphone market, Huawei is a distant third behind Samsung and Apple, but the company has made it clear that it wants to compete head-on with the two market leaders. Huawei already dominates the market for wireless infrastructure, where it holds a leading position despite political pressures that keep Huawei’s gear out of U.S. wireless networks.
4. Huawei’s smartphone ambitions may include a proprietary operating system. The company has reportedly hired former Apple designer Abigail Brody to work on an operating system that would be an alternative to Android if Huawei’s relationship with Android developer Google takes a turn for the worse. Other smartphone makers have tried to develop proprietary operating systems, but so far application developers have been reluctant to invest time and money in apps for platforms other than Android and iOS.
5. The Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation has released a specification the group says will make it easier to integrate digital solutions that use disparate hardware. HSA is a standardized platform design supported by more than 40 technology companies and 17 universities. The new spec adds multivendor architecture support, which means manufacturers will be able to combine IP blocks from more than one vendor. One of the group’s primary goals is to enable heterogeneous computing for vision-based “internet of things” systems.
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