France’s Bouygues Telecom is working with virtual hotspot network Devicescape to give its smartphone customers seamless access to 8 million open Wi-Fi access points globally, replicating – at least fractionally – one of the key differentiators Iliad’s Free Mobile has on the competition: a 4 million-node offload network. Read more »
As promised, hactivist group Anonymous organized demonstrations on Saturday in 16 cities throughout India, protesting the governments Internet laws and the ISPs’ blocking of popular file-sharing sites. Protesters donned Guy Fawkes masks and amassed at cricket grounds and other outdoor landmarks from Chennai to Delhi. Read more »
There are an awful lot of active iPhones in the market, and according to a new report from Ericsson, those devices are having an outsized impact on the world’s 3G networks. Traffic from the iPhone is nearing 50 percent of all data traversing carriers’ HSPA networks. Read more »
Sierra Wireless believes that laptop PCs too thin even to support an Ethernet port would be ideal candidates for an embedded LTE connectivity. On Thursday it unveiled its latest LTE module, which, at 2.5 mm in thickness, Sierra claims is the world’s thinnest 4G wireless module. Read more »
Desktop virtualization and cloud computing vendor Citrix Systems is expanding into the mobile infrastructure market, announcing on Thursday it plans to acquire mobile traffic optimization company Bytemobile. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but they expect it to close in the third quarter. Read more »
Verizon recently has aggressively pursued its LTE-connected-car strategy, buying up Hughes Telematics and on Wednesday launching a new initiative with foreign car manufacturers. But not all automakers are necessarily on board with Verizon’s dream of embedding 4G into every car. Read more »
Trying to give the still nascent mHealth sector a motivational kick in the pants, the Federal Communications Commission has begun working directly with startups and universities to help bring new wireless telemedicine and healthcare technologies to market faster. Read more »
You can already access music subscription service MOG on your smartphone, tablet, PC, and many home entertainment appliances. Now it’s moving onto the biggest gadget of them all, the car. MOG is launching on Ford’s Sync connected car platform. Read more »
Clearwire may be preparing to transform itself into an LTE operator, but that hasn’t stopped it from selling its WiMAX service to other carriers. The latest to jump on Clearwire’s bandwagon is MVNO Jolt Mobile, which is making the odd pairing of GSM with WiMAX. Read more »
It took 12 years for 3G technologies to touch half of the world’s population, but getting to 85 percent coverage will only take another five, according to wireless infrastructure vendor Ericsson. In addition, Ericsson projects LTE networks will cover half the globe’s population. Read more »
As mobile app usage explodes, wireless equipment vendors have been forced to not only keep pace to with radio technologies scale the Internet infrastructure behind them. Cisco has built a new mobile core to handle the enormous data loads the smartphone has heaped onto wireless networks. Read more »
In the last few months, Nuance Communications has launched Dragon TV, Dragon Drive and even an Android version of Dragon Go. Now we have a new Dragon to contend with: Dragon ID, a voice identification application that allows you to unlock your phone with your larynx. Read more »
Netflix is rolling it’s own content delivery network, inviting ISPs to either connect directly to its video libraries at global peering sites or cache its content within their own networks. Called Open Connect, the service will help Netflix cut the umbilical cord to commercial CDN providers. Read more »
You thought it was hard to get cellular coverage in your basement — try getting it in the rain forests of the Congo. RascomStar plans to ensure that remotest communities in the Republic of the Congo get mobile service using the smallest access node imaginable: the femtocell. Read more »
There are a lot of new mobile virtual network operators popping up lately, from Republic Wireless to Ting. MVNOs practically went extinct in the last decade, but recently they’ve enjoyed a big resurgence. According to Wireless Intelligence, there are now 812 of them globally. Read more »
Verizon’s new video app Viewdini has escaped onto Android smartphones – at least the LTE ones. The video portal allows 4G smartphone customers to browse, search and view videos from multiple content services. What the app doesn’t allow you to do is skirt Verizon’s mobile data caps. Read more »
There may be more to Apple’s new deal with Leap Wireless than meets the eye. Apple could be using Leap as a guinea pig carrier to test if American consumers are ready to pay full price for their iPhones, according to a BTIG analyst. Read more »
Verizon’s ambition to connect more than homes and phones just zeroed in on the automotive market. It announced on Friday it is buying Hughes Telematics for $612 million in cash, gaining the company’s crop of machine-to-machine (M2M) connected car technologies and services. Read more »
Carriers like Verizon and AT&T are trying to convince Netflix to pay for the bandwidth its subscribers consume on their networks. Rather than fork over the money, Netflix is giving its iPhone customers the option of turning off cellular access to Netflix completely. Read more »
In its attempts to kill Verizon’s mega-spectrum deal with the cable operators, T-Mobile has begun challenging Verizon’s claims that it is the most efficient user of mobile spectrum in the country. But T-Mo is countering Verizon’s fuzzy math with equally fuzzy math of its own. Read more »
State Farm is sidestepping some of the actuarial science that goes into calculating your auto insurance premiums. Instead of determining through statistical analysis how much someone of your age, gender and residence typically drives, State Farm wants to go to the source: your car. Read more »
Social dining network Grubwithus has raised $5 million in Series A financing, which the startup will use to expand its basic business premise: getting likeminded strangers together in a physical restaurant to share a meal. Read more »
Intel is adding a feature to its Ultrabooks and tablets that will make them stand out from its competitors’ netbooks and slates: automatic access to a global Wi-Fi network. The silicon vendor is using DeviceScape’s connection manager technology to link to millions of open hotspots. Read more »
Reports are coming from Japan that Amazon is forming an MVNO. If true, it would be an interesting experiment for Amazon, expanding its mobile business beyond selling devices, apps and e-books to selling connectivity itself. But I suspect this is nothing more than an experiment. Read more »
Sprint has officially started the countdown for taking its Nextel iDEN network offline: T minus 13 months and 2 days. Sprint plans to turn off the Nextel network’s key push-to-talk Direct Connect capabilities as soon as June 30, 2013, effectively shutting down all iDEN services. Read more »
Soon, a stay in intensive care will no longer mean being physically tethered to every monitoring device imaginable. The FCC has designated a slice of radio airwaves for medical body area networks, which will allow hospitals to cut the cord on bulky vital-signs monitoring gear. Read more »
Pizzerias love the mobile Web. Why? There’s a feature embedded in many of their sites called click-to-call that allows a hungry mobile surfer to initiate a phone order directly from the Webpage. An astonishing 35 percent of site visits result in a click-to-call order. Read more »
Nvidia took a big step toward becoming a complete smartphone silicon vendor, announcing today AT&T has validated Nvidia’s new LTE chipset for its 4G network. The news paves the way for Nvidia’s first LTE phone, but competitor Qualcomm still has one key advantage. Read more »
“Operators treat partners like vendors.” That quote comes form Google director of global android partnerships John Lagerling, who said it at a Dublin conference where it was captured by Light Reading. It’s a telling statement — one that sums up a big problem facing the wireless industry. Read more »
A new survey from Informa finds that 60 percent of all global carriers plan to deploy LTE by the end of 2013. That may come as a bit of shock to our non-North American readers, given global operators haven’t exactly been enthusiastic about the technology. Read more »
It looks like we were right about AT&T sunsetting its 2G networks to make way for more mobile broadband capacity. On Wednesday, Ma Bell announced it would ‘refarm’ PCS spectrum in New York City currently used by its GSM voice networks for “3G and 4G” services. Read more »
Apparently The Boston Globe didn’t get the memo that it’s an app-only world when it comes to mobile. The Globe says at paidContent 2012 its website is doing very well in mobile — more than 30 percent of visitors come through a phone or tablet browser. Read more at paidContent »
Verizon Wireless revealed a new incarnation of its old V Cast streaming mobile video service on Tuesday. Called Viewdini, the Android app aggregates content from premium video services like Hulu and Netflix and could represent Verizon’s first attempts to charge content providers to carry their traffic. Read more »
The Windy City is famous for one big giant startup Groupon, but the folks at Chicago’s newest incubator Catapult believe there will be many more, and — for a short while at least — it hopes to play host to the next big Web sensations from the Midwest. Read more »
Yet another app has joined the growing ranks of over-the-top mobile VoIP services, but Sidecar is offering up a twist on the usual VoIP format. The startup is using the voice call merely as the starting point from which users can share video, location and contact info. Read more »
Nuance wants you to converse with your car via the cloud. The speech recognition company already powers many of the voice technologies embedded into today’s automobiles, but today it unveiled Dragon Drive, which moves beyond simple voice commands into the realm of natural language understanding. Read more »
Psion, Mesaplexx and Nujira live in the guts of the phone and on the fringes of the network. While filters, amplifiers and ruggedized devices may not sound like exciting stuff, all three of these U.K. companies are innovating in mobile in ways you should know about. Read more »
Dish Network has taken possession of it’s 4G spectrum and it’s ready to deliver its competitive mobile broadband network – in 2016. In a filing with the FCC, Dish basically asked the FCC for the granddaddy of all extensions for turning in its LTE homework assignments. Read more »
Verizon Wireless apparently isn’t done talking about its controversial plan to phase out “grandfathered” unlimited data plans, issuing a statement Thursday explaining the new policy. What it boils down to is this: You can keep unlimited, but don’t expect Verizon to subsidize your device. Read more »
No more need for price speculation, folks. Facebook just put out amendment S-1 filing number 8, which sets its IPO price at $38.00 a share. Get your checkbooks ready. Read more »
