McGinnis said that it will soon offer a similar wallet to customers of its other prepaid brand — Virgin Mobile — and it is considering bringing it to the main Sprint brand as well. Sprint also plans to build on Wallet’s initial batch of services, to create what McGinnis calls “a virtual bank” for its customers.

Today, Boost’s Mobile Wallet can transfer funds between accounts, pay e-bills, wire money to physical locations and, with the help of prepaid Visa card, you can make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs anywhere Visa is accepted. Soon Boost’s wallet will let you scan physical checks, depositing funds directly into your wallet account.

But McGinnis said there are other services in the works. He didn’t provide specific deals, but it’s not hard to imagine features like virtual checking accounts or peer-to-peer payments such as those offered by PayPal, Venmo and now Google and Square.

Sprint doesn’t want to become bank itself — that would put it under the regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Treasury, which Sprint wants to avoid, McGinnis said. Instead, Sprint is working with Wipit, a mobile payments provider focusing on people without bank accounts and credit cards, to provide the financial services infrastructure.

“From the customer’s point of view, it’s kind of a bank in the sky that is Boost backed,” McGinnis said.

Sprint’s wallet is unique because it focuses on what the financial industry calls the unbanked – households that deal almost entirely in cash. Most other wallet and financial services apps are linked to bank accounts, credit and debit cards. This approach to financial services has had a huge impact in other parts of the world and has made Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom the biggest bank in East Africa.

The U.S. isn’t Kenya, of course, but according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study (pdf), 8.2 percent of U.S. households have no bank account whatsoever, while an additional 20.1 percent of U.S. households have a bank account but also make use of alternative financial services such as check cashing and payday loan companies.

Of the major providers, Sprint is in an ideal position to serve those customers. People who rely primarily on cash naturally gravitate towards prepaid mobile phones, and Sprint is one of the most aggressive carriers when it comes to prepaid. It runs three prepaid brands (Boost, Virgin and Assurance Wireless) and offers pay-as-you-go options on its primary Sprint brand as well. At the end of the first quarter it had 16 million customers on prepaid plans.

While Mobile Wallet’s initial focus will be on those unbanked customers, McGinnis said there is a lot of potential for the app for customers who have traditional bank accounts, especially as Sprint and Wipit add new features to the app. That’s one of the reasons McGinnis thinks Mobile Wallet will be a good fit for Sprint’s contract customers.

Sprint already is working with Google on mobile payments, but McGinnis pointed out that Google Wallet is really a point-of-sale transaction technology linking to credit cards or bank accounts. Meanwhile, Sprint’s Wallet is intended to be a replacement for or a supplement to those accounts and payments cards — just without the actual bank.

“There’s nothing broken with plastic in retail today,” McGinnis said. Sprint, he added, just wants to make that plastic available to more people.

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Mobile Wallet was developed by Wipit, a mobile payments provider for people without bank accounts and credit cards. Its platform therefore makes an ideal fit for many Boost customers who rely on cash to make pay for their wireless service. The approach seems to emulate the mobile payments revolution going on Africa and South Asia, where mobile operators are become bigger financial services providers than the traditional banks.

Mobile Wallet allows you to pay bills and send money to family or friends in 135 countries through Ria’s cash transfer network. Soon Boost will also offer a digital check cashing service, which lets you scan in a physical check and deposit the funds in your wallet account. You can also transfer money between different accounts, and top off your Boost Mobile plan within the app.

What you can’t do is use the Wallet App to make a payment at store. But Boost and WiPit have gotten around that problem by issuing a Visa prepaid card to any customer that signs up for a premium account. The card draws directly from the Wallet account and is accepted anywhere where Visa is. Google reportedly considered adopting the same approach for its digital wallet but dropped the idea.

Of course, all of these services come with fees, many of which are rather steep. Paying bills costs anywhere from $2 to $5 per transaction, while Ria money transfer fees vary depending on amount and destination. Even loading money into the account costs $3, though once the money is there, you can spend it freely using the Visa card. Until the check cashing service goes live, customers can only load money into the account at authorized Boost dealer locations.

The app is available to Boost’s Android customers and is downloadable in Google Play, but initially Boost is only enabling accounts for customers in Los Angles, San Diego and parts of New Jersey. The company is planning a nationwide rollout by the end of the year.

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Nvidia is showing that even though it’s new to the radio silicon market, it’s keeping up with the technical prowess of the competition. The 150 Mbps benchmark is the most cutting edge LTE device currently available (in industry parlance it’s know as category 4 LTE), meaning the Tegra 4i can go head-to-head to with the superchips designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor.

Nvidia’s 150 Mbps demo at CTIA Wireless

But also like its competitors, Nvidia is been playing fast and loose with its marketing. It’s calling its modem “LTE-Advanced,” a benchmark no chipmaker in the industry is even close to matching. These chips are still 150 Mbps shy of meeting even the most minimal definition of LTE-Advanced. Nvidia and its peers are clearly abusing the term.

Nvidia has long made powerful applications and graphics processors for smartphones and tablets, but its momentum in the market has always been hampered by its lack of an integrated processor-modem. Integrated chips take up less space, draw less power and are generally cheaper, making it difficult for Nvidia to compete against mobile silicon giant Qualcomm in everything but the highest tier of the smartphone market.

Nvidia rectified the situation in 2011 by purchasing software defined wireless radio maker Icera. It gained an impressive modem to match its impressive multimedia processor, but it still needed to spend two years integrating the two into a single tight package. The Tegra 4i was the result.

When Nvidia first announced the chip back in February, however, it appeared that Nvidia was still having trouble keeping up with the competition. It’s processor was cutting edge, but the LTE modem was still an iteration behind – using category 3 LTE — making it a third slower than the other chips then hitting the market. Nvidia said it was able to rectify that quickly by utilizing Icera’s software defined radio architecture: it upgraded to category 4 with a simple firmware update.

Networks that support category 4 speeds don’t yet exist, though we could start seeing in them appear in the next year or two. That timing, though, works out well since Nvidia and other silicon vendors won’t have their superchips ready for commercial devices until late 2013 or early 2014. In the meantime, Nvidia is demoing Tegra 4i’s 150 Mbps throughput at CTIA over a simulated network, not a real one.

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CTIA’s eponymous spring conference used to be the biggest mobile and wireless event in North America, providing the latest showcase for new phones, services and technology. But in the last five years or so the event has been overshadowed by the CEA’s Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas and the GSM Association’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Not only do both shows take place right before CTIA each calendar year, but shifting trends in the industry made CTIA less and less relevant. CTIA is a carrier-driven event, but as the smartphone opened up the mobile ecosystem to a wealth of new third-party apps, OSes and devices; the role of the carrier has shrunk. Meanwhile, the importance of the smartphone as a high-powered connected computer has gained primacy, which made CES a natural fit for new device and app launches.

CTIA’s other big focus was on the arcane world of network infrastructure, in particular the CDMA technologies used by a good deal of operators in the Americas. But as global carriers consolidated under a single GSM-driven 4G technology, LTE, CTIA’s networking influenced dwindled. MWC, which originally focused on European operators and GSM standards, became a much more worldly conference.

While CTIA didn’t specifically cite the competition in its announcement, the big reason for placing its unified super show in the fall can only be to put some distance between it and CES and MWC. The first merged event will be held the week of Sept. 9 in Las Vegas, which positions CTIA to catch new device launches for the holidays.

CTIA’s exhibitors and members have been clamoring for a single-show format for years, but I wonder if the move is a bit too late to restore the conference’s luster. As I’ve said before, the biggest problem with CTIA is that, as a conference, it has functioned more as a big podium from which carriers talked down to the industry. That was fine 10 years ago when carriers were the alpha and the omega of mobile, but since then the industry has outgrown the operators.

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I’ve always been more of a networks and technology guy than a gadget guy, so the new device launches don’t excite me the way they do my peers. What I like about CTIA is that it brings together a bunch of smart people from interesting companies who are excited by the future of wireless networking.

At CTIA I can sit down with Kyocera to discuss how ceramics can transform phone audio. Then 30 minutes later I’m chatting with the original Symbian creator Psion about its new efforts in open-source hardware, followed by a conversation with startup Mesaplexx about how a tired old cell site component–the radio frequency filter–can be transformed through advanced mathematics (more on those two in a later post).

CTIA is also a great show for measuring the progress of the industry. This year, U.S. operators started discussing small cells and the heterogeneous network in earnest, dragging it out of the labs and demo booths and into the cold light of their network roadmaps. AT&T revealed it will begin rollouts of small cells later this year, but Sprint was even more aggressive, detailing specific plans to install tens of thousands of picocells in buildings and high-traffic outdoor areas in the next two years.

Those small cells will eventually be woven into operators’ macro networks and Wi-Fi networks, creating complex HetNets that allow our devices to connect to multiple nodes – in some cases simultaneously. I don’t want to oversell the concept, but this marks a true transformation in network design, moving away from network topologies focused primarily on coverage to topologies that supply enormous sums of capacity. There are still plenty of obstacles to hurdle before mall cells and HetNet will work, but the important thing is that the operators are now actively trying to overcome them – and technologies like these make CTIA Wireless truly great.

The dark side of CTIA

But there was also plenty about the show that wasn’t so great, namely the politics and the backbiting. AT&T’s very public fight with the Federal Communications Commission carried over into the conference with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski lashing back at Ma Bell’s accusations that the denial of AT&T-Mo forced AT&T to raise prices (check out Bloomberg Businessweek’s priceless sendup of the argument here.)

The operators took any opportunity they could to foretell the doom of the impending capacity crunch in order to justify their consolidation ambitions. And even some pettiness came out as their CEOs bickered onstage about whose network was fastest and what technologies truly constitute 4G.

While the issues behind those debates are important – the proper allocation of spectrum resources, the effectiveness and performance of different technologies –this was hardly the most elevated forum for discussing them. Trust me, not much was done to further the dialogue.

The problem is the carriers

The biggest problem with CTIA Wireless isn’t its placement on the calendar. Rather, it’s the carriers. CTIA is the trade and lobbying organization for the largest U.S. operators, so those carriers have always set the agenda of their show. That may have worked fine 10 years ago when the carriers were the be-all-end-all of mobile – when they controlled all services and revenue and were largely responsible for mobile innovation. But in recent years, the mobile industry has outgrown the operators.

Third-party developers, big Internet companies like Google and Facebook and device hardware makers like Apple are now just as important as the operators — many would argue more important. Yet CTIA hasn’t evolved to reflect that reality. That’s why the GSM Association – which has a much broader membership and mission – has managed to turn Mobile World Congress into an event of far more importance to the overall U.S. wireless industry. It’s much more inclusive.

CTIA has tweaked the show to give it the appearance of a broader tent. This year it extended keynote slots to companies like Spotify, Mozilla and Electronic Arts, but you get the impression they were being summoned to the feet of kings. Many of the biggest mobile players in Silicon Valley don’t feel they have a place at CTIA, and some long-time CTIA loyalists have decided they no longer need the event: Microsoft, Samsung and Nokia weren’t entirely absent, but none of them exhibited.

I’m not saying the operators have no place at their own show.  The dialogue about small cells and  the launch of new services like AT&T’s Digital Home initiative make the show far more significant than any mere gadget showcase. But the carriers need to lay off their agenda. They need to start talking with the larger mobile industry instead of talking at it. It would help if CTIA would eliminate the self-aggrandizing keynotes the carriers deliver every year.

Last year’s keynote panel of the big carrier CEOs was a big hit because AT&T had just announced its plans to acquire T-Mobile – antics ensued as CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer pressed them on the merger’s implications. But this year the session returned to its usual lackluster format: Canned questions from Cramer and contrived answers from four guys talking down to the rest of the industry. I didn’t write up the keynotes because there wasn’t any content to cover, but in case you’re wondering, here’s my (rather loose) interpretation of the affair (for a more detailed play-by-play check out Ina Fried’s live blog on AllThingsD):

• T-Mo’s Philipp Humm: I’m the fastest!
• AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega: No, I’m the fastest!
• Verizon’s Dan Mead: Guess how much I can bench press?
• Sprint’s Dan Hesse: LTE Rocks! [winks for the ladies]
• Jim Cramer: Everyone in the Arab Spring used cellphones to text and tweet, ergo cellphones caused the Arab Spring, ergo cellphones create democracy (ignore China). Dan Hesse, how many cellphones are necessary to create democracy in North Korea?
• Hesse: LTE Rocks! [winks for the ladies]

It’s the carriers’ party; they can cry, complain or strut if they want to. But the best parties are those where the hosts don’t make themselves the center of attention.

Blame image courtesy of Flickr user Simone Lovati

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