Though AT&T’s smartphone penetration is well over 60 percent, it keeps activating new smart devices at a rapid clip. AT&T remained the carrier of choice for iPhone customers. It added 3.7 million iPhones in the second quarter, 22 percent of which came from competitors. Read more »
While there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for Wi-Fi as a mobile data alternative to cellular, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg says there is a limit to what Wi-Fi can accomplish. Wi-Fi will have a role, but it will be one connection option among many. Read more »
In an aggressive proposal, the President’s Council of Advisors on Policy and Technology not only wants the administration to double the amount of federal spectrum being targeted for new mobile and wireless networks, but it also wants to make a good portion of those airwaves shared. Read more »
Free Mobile has launched a new front in its war with France’s incumbent operators. It’s taking SFR to court over the handset subsidies it charges, claiming they amount to usurious loans that consumers wind up paying back in the form of hidden fees in their contracts, Read more »
Sure, using voice commands to turn on the car radio on your iPhone is nifty, but iSpeech wants to elevate speech-recognition technology beyond the device and distribute it throughout our homes. Tony Stark can talk to his house in Iron Man, so why can’t you? Read more »
Despite Verizon’s evangelizing push to convert its subscribers to 4G LTE, the 3G iPhone remains king at the country’s largest operator. At its second-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Verizon reported selling 2.7 million iPhones, compared to 2.5 million 4G Android phone sales. Read more »
Verizon Communications is the first U.S. operator out of the gate in the second quarter earnings heat, reporting 1.2 million new net subscriber adds in its wireless division and 134,000 new FiOS residential broadband customers in its wireline group. Read more »
Confused by how AT&T’s new shared-data planswork? Well, we’ve put together a primer to show you how they work and compare them to Verizon’s similar pricing structure. Ultimately, shared data might not be for you, but hopefully this guide will help clear up the confusion. Read more »
Honda on Wednesday became the latest big automaker to unveil an in-car connected infotainment system. Called HondaLink, the platform uses Harman’s Aha technology to connect to reams of different content sources and customized software to let new Fit EV customers manage their cars’ power systems. Read more »
When Verizon announced its new shared-data plans, it should have enjoyed a big advantage over its archrival AT&T. Consumers had been demanding the right to pool data, and Verizon was the first carrier to deliver. Instead, Verizon fumbled, and AT&T has picked up the ball. Read more »
AT&T revealed the shared data plans it’s been hinting at for so long. The new pricing structure looks very similar to the shared tiers Verizon announced last month with two key differences: AT&T’s plans are optional for new and existing customers, and they’re slightly cheaper. Read more »
Mobile data gateway maker Stoke already has some impressive investors from the telecom world, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and India’s Reliance Communications, but it’s adding a third. Samsung is making a $5 million strategic investment, betting that its LTE triage and security technology has a bright future. Read more »
What happens when you get four-dozen carriers in a single room? Apparently nothing. The organization tasked with creating common carrier APIs, the Wholesale Application Community, revealed on Tuesday it is dissolving, selling off its technology to Apigee and folding its development efforts into the GSM Association. Read more »
Interested in trying your hand at worm composting or grant writing? Ever felt the desire to make your own sausage or kimchi? There’s a good chance someone on startup Dabble’s website is teaching just such a class this month, and for $20 you can sign up. Read more »
In addition to turning up its 4G service in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and San Antonio, Sprint went live in 10 cities and communities in the surrounding areas of those metro markets. It also tried to set expectations for average data speeds on the network. Read more »
Last week, Orange France’s mobile network tanked, knocking out the mobile phones of millions of subscribers. This week the same thing happened to O2 in the U.K. U.S. carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile aren’t immune either. Global networks have developed a big signaling problem. Read more »
Verizon continued its push into carrier apps on Friday, announcing it will distribute Extent’s GameTanium subscription mobile gaming service. For $6 a month, Android smartphone and tablet users can play more than 100 games such as Fruit Ninja and World of Goo on an unlimited basis. Read more »
When Republic Wireless launched last November it promised to deliver reams of data, voice, and SMS to its customers using a hybrid cellular-Wi-Fi network model. That Wi-Fi has to come from somewhere, and now we know the source: Devicescape. Read more »
Fon may have launched in Madrid, but lately the company taking on a very Japanese flavor. According to the company, which pioneered the concept of a global community Wi-Fi network, 1 million or a full one-sixth of its global access points now reside in Japan. Read more »
The Internet of things is supposed to connect every aspect of our lives from our homes and cars to the objects we wear and the goods we consume. It’s even connecting ice machines. But one thing the Internet of things lacks is a unifying standard. Read more »
Twitter wants a taste of the success Facebook is experiencing globally. For that to happen it needs to embed itself in the feature phone, the primary device used in developing markets to access the internet. So Twitter is following in Facebook’s footsteps by partnering with MediaTek. Read more »
When a trio of engineers led by Bill Shockley built the first solid-state transistor at Bell Labs in 1947, they thought they had consigned the vacuum tube to oblivion. But vacuum tubes – or at least their underlying principles – may be set to make a resurgence. Read more »
FreedomPop, a mobile virtual network operator focusing solely on data, has reached an agreement with Sprint to resell its 3G and 4G services. The deal will allow FreedomPop to trade up on its agreement with Clearwire, exchanging its limited WiMAX footprint for Sprint’s eventual near-nationwide LTE coverage. Read more »
It was perhaps a very badly kept secret, but Huawei has officially confirmed it will be the latest vendor to build T-Mobile USA’s MyTouch smartphones. These phones aren’t bottom-of-the-portfolio placeholders, and Huawei hopes to use them to propel it into U.S. prominence. Read more »
In terms of mobile data, our smartphones are far more reliant on Wi-Fi. So why are carriers so single-mindedly focused on acquiring new licensed spectrum and building expensive 3G and 4G networks, when they could implement more Wi-Fi and tap into other sources of unlicensed spectrum? Read more »
Verizon pledged to no longer accept new 3G-only smartphones, putting its considerable market might behind LTE. But it now seems willing to make an exception to that rule for its old partner RIM. Verizon will sell the BlackBerry Curve 9310, a device with no 4G connectivity. Read more »
Look out Nuance. there’s a new speech recognition player in town, AT&T. Ma Bell has taken the locks off of its Watson speech application programming interfaces, allowing any developer to use them to add voice commands and natural language understanding to their apps. Read more »
Regulators should view Verizon planned pact with cable as a merger, not as a joint venture, argues the Consumer Federation of America. Seen in that light, the CFA said, the government will have little choice but to reject Verizon’s acquisition of the cable operators’ 4G spectrum. Read more »
BMW will be the first the automaker to incorporate Nuance Communications’ new voice command and control platform into its dashboards. The German car manufacturer said today it is using Nuance’s Dragon Drive voice messaging technology in its luxury and compact sedans. Read more »
Verizon Wireless is hauling COWs and COLTs to Kansas City and Detroit but not to any livestock show. These COWs and COLTs are cells on wheels and cells on light trucks. Carriers have long been using temporary cells. What’s interesting about these is they’re 4G. Read more »
Let’s assume that sometime in the future every car has Wi-Fi and every car has a cellular data connection. Wi-Fi is essentially free, while cellular data is expensive. Is there a way to maximize the “free” connectivity of Wi-Fi while minimizing the costs of mobile data? Read more »
Nokia EVP Michael Halbherr thinks that the next set of sensors in our smartphones will track humidity and pressure, which will used to generate more accurate crowdsourced weather forecasts. He believes as our devices become more sophisticated, they’ll be increasingly enlisted to serve the public good. Read more »
Verizon Wireless new LTE network may be experiencing the biggest growing pains among U.S. operators, but T-Mobile’s brief network outage Monday night showed that even an established technology like HSPA+ isn’t free from problems. Read more »
Mobile apps may not be shipped on galleons or via airfreight, but they are definitely crossing oceans. According to data from VisionMobile’s recent developer survey, a big market around the import and export of apps has emerged globally. Read more »
Tellabs CEO Rob Pullen died Monday morning of colon cancer, succumbing to the disease after several months of chemotherapy and a recent surgery. Pullen, who was 50, was one of the major figures of the U.S. telecom industry, leading Tellabs for the last four years. Read more »
Anyfi has developed a tunneling technology that allows ordinary access points and residential gateways to spawn virtual Wi-Fi networks anyone can log into. The Swedish startup is betting this is the answer operators are looking for to build huge ubiquitous Wi-Fi offload networks. Read more »
The Escoffier School for Culinary Arts has one hell of a namesake to live up to. Auguste Escoffier is the closest thing the cooking world has to a deity. The school’s owners believe they can impart the grand master’s wisdom via an intensive online course. Read more »
The iPhone kicked off the mobile data revolution. The astonishing thing is Apple succeeded where the rest of the wireless industry had failed. Carriers, network vendors, handset makers and OS developers had the same vision as Steve Jobs and Apple. They just failed to execute it. Read more »
Note-taking service Springpad wants access to your Facebook profile. Why? It wants to scrape all of those random “likes” of movies, music, restaurants and TV shows scattered throughout your Timeline and organize them into notebooks, which you and your friends can search and share. Read more »
One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight carriers in Northern and Central Europe. Read more »
