This is no mere transfer of network title, though. Sprint plans to shut down U.S. Cellular’s network completely some time in those two metropolitan regions in the next several months (Champagne, Ill., and South Bend, Ind., will also be affected). And despite the fact that U.S. Cellular’s systems uses the same CDMA technology in the same PCS frequencies, Sprint isn’t supporting its existing handsets. All of those customers must either start over with new devices and new service plans on the Sprint network or go find a new mobile operator entirely.

Sprint Regional VP for the Midwest Kevin Gleason told GigaOM that Sprint planned to make the transition as easy as possible for U.S. Cellular’s customers by offering them plenty of incentive to move to Sprint.

“I believe our recapture rate will be high,” Gleason said. “We’ve already started communicating with them and several of them have already made the switch.”

Sprint has sent out an initial batch of letters notifying them about the transaction but Gleason said Sprint will soon follow up, detailing the timing of the network shutdown and the discount offers Sprint is making to draw those customers under the Sprint umbrella.

While Gleason wouldn’t give any specific details on the exact amount of the discounts, he said they would take many forms: device discounts over Sprint’s usual subsidies, trade-in fees for older phones, porting credits for making the switch and activation fee waivers.

Many customers will be able to get new phones and comparable service plans without having to pay a dime, he said. Many will also be able to upgrade to fancier devices such as the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S 4 for a much lower than price than other customers would pay, Gleason said. He added that switching customers would also have a great deal of flexibility in plan choices, since Sprint is extending the discount offers to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands as well.

In general, Sprint and U.S. Cellular’s contract plans are comparable, and in the case of its unlimited data plans, Sprint is actually cheaper. But depending on the circumstances, not every customer will be getting an equitable deal.

For instance if you happen to have just bought a new high-end smartphone or tablet, Sprint incentive discounts won’t cover the full cost of replacing it. What’s worse is that brand new smartphone essentially become useless in a few months when the Chicago and St. Louis networks go dead (though it would work on U.S. Cellular’s other networks). Some customers may also balk at the idea of signing new two-year contracts if they want to take full advantage of the discount offers.

Gleason acknowledged that some customers will feel like they’re getting a raw deal, but he expects those cases will be kept to minimum. He pointed out that 60 percent of U.S. Cellular customers in affected cities have let their contracts lapse and the large majority of them use feature phones. Those subscribers are ripe for an upgrade, he said.

That’s one of the main reasons why U.S. Cellular opted for a wholesale replacement of U.S. Cellular’s networks and devices, rather than a gradual phase out like Sprint is doing with its Nextel iDEN network, Gleason said. So many of those U.S. Cellular devices are old or obsolete that it decided to start fresh with phones optimized for Sprint’s new Network Vision architecture, which boasts the most up-to-date CDMA and LTE technologies.

We’ll know more details about the sunset timeline and the specific discounts in the next couple of weeks. And if you’re a Chicagoan, you’re probably wondering what will happen to the name of U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox, now that the carrier is leaving the city. Well, it won’t become Sprint Field. Gleason said U.S. Cellular is keeping the naming the rights.

U.S. Cellular Field hoto courtesy of Shutterstock user Alan Mars

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Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering.

Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s built department locator apps for Macy’s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio’s mobile app.

While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you’re in, but what exhibit you’re actually looking at — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you’re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players, including Apple and Google.

Aruba’s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian’s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone’s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone.

Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers.

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ViaSat-1 has already won numerous praise as satellite marvel, boasting a total capacity of 140 Gbps, which it uses to provide its Exede broadband service in remote and rural areas in the U.S. as well as to supply internet connectivity to JetBlue airplanes. The new satellite, aptly named ViaSat-2, is expected to double ViaSat-1’s capacity and greatly expand the provider’s coverage in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America (ViaSat-1’s beams today skip over large parts of the Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains).

The satellite hasn’t been without controversy, though, as ViaSat is switching out suppliers. Space Systems/Loral built ViaSat-1, but the two became embroiled in litigation after ViaSat accused the aerospace company of absconding with its intellectual property when it built a competing satellite for Hughes Network Systems.

That satellite became EchoStar 17, doesn’t have quite the capacity of ViaSat-1, but Hughes is using it to go head to head with ViaSat in the rural broadband market. Its Gen4 service offers speeds of 10-15 Mbps to customers, while ViaSat’s Exede service clocks in at about 12 Mbps.

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In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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Its $60 and $70 prepaid plans still aren’t exactly cheap, but you get a lot more data value out of them. The $60 plan now includes 2 GB of data (up from 500 MB), while the $70 plan includes 4 GB (up from 2 GB). Both includes unlimited talk and text, but as with the previous plans prepaid customers don’t get access to the LTE network. If you want a 4G connection, you’ll have to sign a contract.

I’ve noted before that Verizon is getting a lot more aggressive in the prepaid space – a market it has historically ignored. But Verizon has always been all over the premium smartphone subscriber, and increasingly those customers are moving away from contract plans to prepaid services. In the first quarter, nearly one-third of all smartphones activated landed on a prepaid plan, according to The NPD Group.

While the bigger data buckets are only available to current prepaid customers, Verizon said it will extend them to new customers on June 6.

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The problem is there are a lot of people who don’t realize their phones will link to their home networks — they either can’t figure out how to configure their devices’ Wi-Fi settings or they’ve disabled their Wi-Fi from the get go. Devicescape on Thursday said it has developed a new bit of software that attempts to lure those customers onto their own home networks.

Called Personal Curator, the smartphone client utilizes Devicescape’s radio management and network detection technologies, along with a machine-learning algorithm, to identify when a user is at home and a wireless network is available. If the smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio is disabled, Personal Curator will activate it and prompt the user to connect, walking them through the device configuration process.

Devicescape claims that as many as 30 percent of smartphones never connect to an available home Wi-Fi network, which would mean an enormous quantity of traffic that could easily be shunted onto a cheap broadband connection is instead heading toward the cell towers. That number seems high, but it’s not entirely out of the question. I’ve configured the Wi-Fi settings of many a friend or relative who never bothered to do it themselves.

Devicescape is selling Personal Curator to carriers, who would pre-install it on the smartphones they sell and have the biggest vested interest in coaxing customers on to as many Wi-Fi networks as possible. Devicescape estimates operators would save $631 in lifetime network data delivery costs for each subscriber that it can lure onto a home network.

Frankly, that figure is a bit absurd. It assumes that customers who don’t use their home Wi-Fi today will wander the world blithely unaware of Wi-Fi for the rest of their lives. It also assumes all smartphone users are created equal (More technically savvy users who consume more data tend to be more aware of their device’s networking capabilities).

Still, for Devicescape’s core customers, Personal Curator could be a very attractive service. The company’s whole business model is designed around the idea of providing cheap ubiquitous Wi-Fi to carriers. Through crowdsourcing, it has identified and mapped 12 million open access points around the world, and its client software automatically links to those nodes whenever they’re available.

It counts among its customers MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile USA and mobile virtual network operators like Republic Wireless, which offer subscribers cheap unlimited data plans. Any packet those operators ship over the unlicensed airwaves is a direct cost savings. And once connected to home Wi-Fi, smartphone owners would likely use the heck out of it. A recent Sandvine report shows that 20 percent of all traffic traversing home broadband connections comes from a phone or tablet.

Devicescape has grown considerably in the last year. It now sells its products to eight carriers in North America and Europe (including U.S. Cellular and Bouygues Telecom). It has also struck deals with Intel and Microsoft to embed its software directly into the former’s Ultrabook and tablet connection manager and the latter’s WP8 software. Devicescape revealed today that it has now managing 1.5 billion Wi-Fi connections monthly, a 50 percent increase in 12 months.

Based in San Bruno, Calif., Devicescape hopes to draw more attention to itself next week at North America’s biggest mobile trade show, CTIA Wireless. It’s releasing an Android app called Magnifi CTIA that will let anyone connected to thousands of Las Vegas access points in its curated virtual network for the duration of the show.

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Hotspot maker Ruckus Wireless, however, has developed a kind of ad-hoc security system for open hotspots, which it plans to release next week with the next version of its access point management software. Called Open Secure Hotspot, the technology automatically generates encryption keys for any user who logs into an open Ruckus hotspot, granting them a secure connection within moments, Ruckus VP of marketing David Callisch told GigaOM.

Ruckus started out as a supplier of IPTV wireless streaming nodes and enterprise wireless LANs, over which security measures were much easier to enforce. But as Ruckus’s public access network business grew it found itself supplying more Wi-Fi gear that enterprises and service providers simply wanted open to the public, Callisch said. Those customers didn’t want their open networks turning into playgrounds for Firesheep, man-in-the-middle attackers and other internet nasties, Callisch said, so they pressed Ruckus to develop a secure form of open Wi-Fi.

The rather confusing diagram above details how the security software works, but here’s what it boils down to: Anytime an unknown user connects to an upgraded Ruckus hotspot he or she will receive the option of establishing a secure connection to the network. If the user opts in, Ruckus’s network gateway will generate what Ruckus is calling a dynamic pre-shared key, randomly generated for each device. Users can either input the key by launching an executable file sent by the gateway, or they can manually enter the key into their Wi-Fi settings.

It may not seem like the most elegant way of getting online in a hotel lobby or public square, but Callisch but it’s still a relatively simple process, and it beats the alternative – surfing the internet over a naked connection or installing virtual private network (VPN) software on the fly.

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Since Android has long been the prepaid carrier’s OS of choice, the vast majority of those devices ran Google’s software. NPD’s Mobile Phone Track service show that year-over-year prepaid smartphone unit sales doubled in the first quarter. Quarter over quarter, prepaid’s overall share of the smartphone market jumped from 22 percent to 32 percent. NPD’s VP of industry analysis Stephen Baker said Q1 marked the twelfth straight quarter of triple digit sales increases in the U.S.

Apple certainly isn’t blind to the trend. In fact, it’s been actively seeking out prepaid carrier partnerships in the last year working with carriers like Cricket Communications, Straight Talk and T-Mobile USA. Though the iPhone’s share of the prepaid smartphone market was only 8 percent, that’s up considerably from last year when it was a mere 2 percent. Samsung share of the prepaid smartphone market is big, 32 percent, but it’s relatively stable, while Apple is on a big growth trajectory.

“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”

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Content providers could do this through direct payments to carriers, Stephenson said, but according to Fierce, he also said they could subsidize data costs through some kind of advertising revenue share. The end result, though, would be the same: content providers who pay would see their traffic exempted from customers’ mobile data caps.

Randall Stephenson

Stephenson comments come a week after reports that arch-competitor Verizon Wireless is in discussions with ESPN for just such a toll-free data deal. What seemed like a crazy suggestion from AT&T and other carriers last year, now looks like it might become reality. But is it a reality we really want?

A content provider-subsidized internet would be appealing to many consumers, especially those on AT&T and Verizon since carriers have hunted the unlimited data plan to the point of extinction. Imagine streaming Netflix movies and ESPN games to your heart’s content without ever worrying about exceeding your data cap or incurring overage fees.

But as I pointed out last week there could be some major unintended — or if carriers are being really cynical, intended — consequences to adopting these kinds of subsidy models. Legally mobile operators aren’t subject to the same net neutrality guidelines as the wireline broadband providers, but if mobile carriers created two separate classes of mobile data traffic they could upset the delicate balance that makes the mobile internet the mobile internet:

… there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The  [Wall Street] Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

What’s particularly noteworthy about Stephenson’s comments, though, is the mention of using advertising as a former of subsidy currency. Stephenson could just be talking about inserting carrier-generated advertising into their app ad engines as compensation for their free ride on the network. But the other implication is that AT&T wants a true revenue share, taking a cut off the top of any revenue generated from YouTube ads or any Netflix subscription used on mobile.

This is an old idea the mobile industry first proposed way before the advent of the smartphone – in an age when the mobile internet was still a walled garden and carriers its gatekeepers. The idea was that operators would become equal partners with content providers, and that’s a scary proposition. I doubt that content providers want to give the gate keys back to the carriers.

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MVNO veteran PlatinumTel is launching a new carrier brand called GIV Mobile Wednesday, separating it from the pack not by offering unlimited data, selling app-specific plans or implementing bandwidth sharing features. Instead GIV is playing the role of charitable fund-raiser. You don’t just sign up for a voice and data plan. You sign up for one or more charities such as the American Red Cross or the Alzheimer’s Association. GIV claims it will donate 8 percent of your bill to those selected charities each month, or up to $50 per year per customer.

Of course, it might seem easier to cut a check for $50 to your charity choice rather than build your mobile service around the idea of giving. But GIV seems to targeting the same segment of the population that latches onto to charity vanity credit cards, which donate a small portion of every purchase to a customer’s organization of choice, rather than award points or miles. By allowing customers to divide their giving between multiple charities GIV acts a bit like a donation box; it aggregates a bunch of tiny gifts from individual consumers into one big check.

The MVNO is offering customers dozens of initial charities to choose from, ranging from animal welfare groups to environmental causes to disease research (you can see a full list here). Every six months GIV will take submissions from its customers for new charities, and then those same customers will vote to name one new organization to its roster each period.

As for the actual mobile service, GIV looks like many of the new breed of smartphone-centric prepaid MVNOs popping up. It offers two plans both of which have unlimited voice and text, both of which use T-Mobile’s network. The $40 plan includes 250 MB of monthly HSPA+ data before speeds are throttled, while the $50 plan includes 2 GB of data. There’s still new word on what phones GIV will sell starting tomorrow, but it will support any GSM phone that works on T-Mobile’s network for customers who just buy a SIM card.

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