Softbank certainly has the money to counter Dish’s offer, but Dish has much more to offer than cash, namely valuable spectrum and a huge TV network. Read more »
Free Mobile continues to gouge large chunks out of the French mobile market. It added 805,000 subscribers in Q3, bringing its total subscriber base to 4.4 million in just nine months. Meanwhile, France’s big three are still growing but at a much slower pace. Read more »
Everything Everywhere will take advantage of its early LTE launch to garner half of all 4G connections in the UK in 2014, according to Wireless Intelligence. UK carriers are also expected to charge premium rates for LTE access, distinguishing them from their US counterparts. Read more »
All’s fair in love and war. Only yesterday T-Mobile was lobbying hard to halt Verizon’s acquisition of the cable operators’ 4G spectrum. Today it’s unopposed to the deal. What changed? T-Mobile and Verizon now plan to swap the same spectrum they’ve been fighting over. Read more »
The FCC is curious why Verizon bought a bunch of 4G spectrum back in 2008 but now plans to sell it. The FCC is asking Verizon some poignant questions, and though the word “warehousing” is never mentioned it’s certainly the direction the FCC is heading. Read more »
France’s Free Mobile launched with enormous hoopla in January, but it sat on a key component of its innovative mobile strategy until today. Free has opened up 4 million Wi-Fi hotspots to its smartphone customers, creating the world’s largest carrier-run mobile data offload network. Read more »
FreedomPop is even more ambitious than we had imagined. It’s not just giving away gobs of free data; it plans to create the carrier equivalent of Web startup and in the process turn 4G capacity into a currency that can be earned and traded. Read more »
The Rural Cellular Association on Tuesday welcomed its newest member, T-Mobile USA. Even by the largest stretch of the imagination, T-Mobile can hardly be considered a rural operator, but in this age of mega-carriers the distinctions between rural and urban hardly matter anymore. Read more »
Last month we reported on the wireless revolution Iliad’s Free Mobile was leading in France. Now the first casualty reports are in. France Telecom’s Orange reported on Wednesday it lost 201,000 net subscribers in a little more than a month, fleeing to Free’s ultra-cheap plans. Read more »
Comcast claims it tried but failed to build a wireless business multiple times before it sold out to Verizon. Assuming Comcast is being honest, its failure has big implications for U.S. mobile competition. If Comcast can’t make wireless work, what hope is there for a newcomer? Read more »
