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LTE

Why You Should Care

The next-generation of broadband–Long Term Evolution (LTE)–is upon us with rollouts taking place far and wide. LTE promises to bring new applications to bear through greater speed, and more efficiency. We deliver the latest LTE news here. 

Your LTE phone is just as adept at eating battery power as it is at eating bandwidth. Last week, I wrote about the many ways that LTE devices are far more power hungry than their 3G predecessors. Now let’s look at what’s being doing about it. Read More »

LTE phones are the fastest things on the airwaves, but they can also suck a battery dry in a few hours. Here are five reasons why your new Samsung Galaxy Nexus or HTC Vivid is going dead right after lunch time. Read More »

We’ll have to wait another year for the LTE network Clearwire has long been promising. At its quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, Clearwire CEO Erik Prusch said the WiMAX carrier’s first batch of 5,000 LTE cell sites will be switched by June of 2013. Read More »

FreedomPop plans to give away mobile data access to most of its customers for free, charging only premium users a monthly fee. If can it can make the math work, it could potentially shake up the wireless market, extending mobile data to broad swathes of the … Read More »

AT&T is now claiming that its mobile data traffic is doubling every year, rather than increasing at a more modest 40 percent annual rate. The distinction is important because the faster AT&T’s networks become overloaded the more pressure it faces to find more spectrum. Read More »

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, you would expect LTE to hog the spotlight, but LTE might find itself overshadowed by a less sexy technology: Wi-Fi. As telecom vendors prep their new porfolios for MWC in two weeks, there is a preponderance of Wi-Fi products. Read More »

Cisco has read the mobile data tea leaves again, and it predicts that next year the global population of mobile users will switch to streaming the majority of their content from “the cloud.” This will represent a shift from downloaded and sideloaded content. Read More »

More Must Reads

Is AT&T failing to keep its story straight about the need for more spectrum, or is it just that the popping of the spectrum bubble has taken them by surprise as well? The nation’s second largest operator now sees a data drizzle rather than deluge. Read More »

Telus will launch Canada’s third LTE network on Friday, rolling out the mobile broadband technology in 14 cities from Vancouver to Halifax. It plans to expand the network throughout 2012 to cover 25 million Canadians, 71 percent of the country’s population, by year end. Read More »

At the Super Bowl AT&T’s networks carried 215 GB of traffic, placed 74,204 phone calls and transmitted 722,296 SMS messages. AT&T reported no problems in handling the traffic and had, but in what is now becoming a common refrain, it used the event to lobby for … Read More »

For the first time in six years, Sprint’s aging Nextel and wireline businesses didn’t overwhelm all positive gains from its primary CDMA business in its quarterly results. Still, Sprint is anxious to shed the Nextel albatross and Wednesday detailed its plans to shut down iDEN. Read More »

LightSquared has asked the FCC n to impose future standards on GPS device design, claiming such requirements would allow GPS and its LTE network to co-exist peacefully. While LightSquared would appear to be taking the middle path, the proposal smacks of a political stunt. Read More »

Verizon Wireless will begin selling the latest version of its long-running Droid line on Friday, offering the Motorola Android handset for $200 with a two-year contract. Unveiled at CES, the Droid 4 is a cross-breed of many of the Motorola devices that have come before it. Read More »

It’s no secret that Sprint plans to shut down its iDEN network in 2013, but until recently the details of how it would sunset it were a secret. Over the weekend, new maps appeared on the Sprint website that identify the individual cell sites being decommissioned. Read More »

On average, 100 million people watch the Super Bowl. With connected devices everywhere, we’ll be tweeting about it and sharing thoughts on social networks. So will fans at the game. Here are some staggering numbers showing how Super Bowl 46 is ready for such mobility. Read More »

Mobile data is picking up momentum in Latin America as the number of 3G connections in the region doubled in 2011. Operators in Latin and South America are shutting down their CDMA networks, replacing them with UMTS systems, resulting in a huge surge in data adoption. Read More »

This year’s CES was the biggest in the show’s 44-year history. It boasted 15 miles of exhibit hall aisles, 3,100 booths and 153,000 attendees. It is easy to be jaded by the endlessly repetitive products, but the thousands of innovations point toward a future of connectivity.

Qualcomm and Ericsson have successfully passed a voice call from an LTE network to a 3G one, paving the way for mobile carriers to begin migrating their voice traffic onto all-IP 4G networks. Once that happens, operators can start shutting down their 2G and 3G networks. Read More »

Next month, consumers in smaller towns and cities across the U.S. will have access to their first LTE network as U.S. Cellular ramps ups its commercial 4G service. The regional CDMA operator will start selling a tablet in March and a Galaxy smartphone in April. Read More »

If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions.

Japan’s eAccess isn’t deploying any old LTE network. It’s going for broke, pushing the upper limits of the technology to launch a network that can support speeds of 300 Mbps. That makes Verizon’s LTE network, which can breach 25 Mbps on a good day, seem … Read More »

Did you know that Bulgaria has the highest level of broadband adoption, at 96 percent? Or that the average connection speed in South Korea is 16.7 Mbps versus the global average connection speed of 2.7 Mbps? Some findings from Akamai’s latest “State of the Internet” report. Read More »

We often see third-party device teardowns, but Samsung bucks the trend by showing breakdown of its 5.3-inch Galaxy Note. Those who say Android screens are getting larger mainly because of LTE radio size need to take a closer look at this dissection. I think they’re wrong. Read More »

Wondering why AT&T smartphone data rates just went up? Because the operator was denied its acquisition of T-Mobile – at least that’s what AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson implied Thursday. Ma Bell is still bitter about AT&T-Mo’s failure and it’s taking it out on its customers. Read More »

The AT&T-Mo saga wasted countless dollars and resources, dominating the attention of regulators and the wireless industry for a year, but AT&T’s failure more than made up for those losses. We now have more fearsome regulation and a greater awareness of the mobile market’s precarious competitive … Read More »

After its failed merger with AT&T, T-Mobile’s break-up fee included some choice 4G spectrum it will use to bulk up its HSPA+ network. In a map submitted by a GigaOM reader, you can see exactly where T-Mobile gains new airwaves and how much. Read More »

Verizon plans milk as much revenue off of its 3G and LTE networks as possible, becoming the “premium” mobile data operator, but its plan could backfire. Despite the increase in 4G sales, Verizon is still primarily a 3G operator, and 3G doesn’t justify its steep prices. Read More »

With no more money from its corporate parents forthcoming and few remaining businesses to sell, Nokia Siemens Networks has gone to European and U.S. banks for the funding it needs to restructure and survive. Will $1.6 million be enough to set it on course? Read More »

Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless network to make the best use of its chips. 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 »

The ITU has approved the LTE-Advanced standard, and the web understandably got excited, proclaiming the arrival of ‘5G’. We’re also pretty amped up about LTE-Advanced and the huge gains in speeds, capacity and network efficiency it will deliver, but we also think the party is a … Read More »

Super Bowl 46 is around the corner, and Verizon is taking huge steps to ensure the mobile broadband flows as fast the beer at Lucas Oil Stadium. Here’s a video look at the effort, which includes a 600 antenna Wi-Fi system for up to 28,000 people. Read More »

Carl Icahn has been quietly buying up LightSquared’s debt a rock bottom prices, which would put the activist investor in position to take over the company in the increasingly likely event of bankruptcy. But would there be anything left of LightSquared to salvage? Read More »

The impending SOPA and PIPA bills have the Internet in a tizzy, but Congress has a lot more to think about than just intellectual property. The issues at play in the SOPA debate have broad effects that span everything from the digital divide to international commerce. Read More »

LightSquared accused the commercial GPS industry of “rigging” government tests on the potential GPS interference problems of its LTE network and called for new rounds of tests from independent labs with no participation from GPS device makers. Read More »

Apple is only weeks away from hosting a special iPad event, according to sources speaking to Japanese blog Macotakara Tuesday. The sources claim we’ll see the iPad 3 and iOS 5.1 put on public display as early as the beginning of February. Read More »

Adding T-Mobile support to the iPhone may sound simple, but it’s a much more difficult task than it appears. New bands don’t just necessitate new antennas, but a complete phone redesign. T-Mobile’s Apple moment may come with the iPhone 5, but don’t hold your breath. Read More »

A new report from Bloomberg says Apple’s next iPad has indeed begun production. The new iPad will have a sharper screen, according to the new report, but also “LTE access,” something we’ve yet to hear much about in early iPad rumors. Read More »

Verizon is putting LTE chips in TouchTunes’ new digital karaoke machines, but that’s not all. At CES, Verizon seemed determined to embed its latest wireless network technology into anything that could conceivably need an Internet connection, including ATM machines, robots and photo booths. Read More »

According to a Verizon executive, Big Red will no longer accept smartphones and tablets unless they have LTE connectivity. The revelation shows just how aggressive Verizon is pushing its 4G strategy and almost certainly indicates the next iPhone will have LTE. Read More »

During my CES show floor travels, I swung by Motorola’s booth and see the Droid Razr Max. Why? Because battery technology hasn’t changed much and Moto claims a 21-hour runtime for it’s latest Android smartphone. But it’s still only 8.99 millimeters in thickness! Read More »

Apple isn’t one to talk about its future plans, but that doesn’t always stop partners or potential partners from sometimes spilling the beans. Case in point: T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray told Cnet in an interview Tuesday that Apple’s “next chipset will support AWS.” Read More »

At CES, T-Mobile launched the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G which can take full advantage of the operators HSPA+ 42 Mbps speeds. I sat down with T-Mobile CTO, Neville Ray, to discuss the operators 4G network of today as well as it’s plans for the future. Read More »

The Galaxy Nexus will finally get Google Wallet, though it will have to wait until mid-year when Sprint launches its LTE service. When Sprint unveiled its future LTE device portfolio at CES, it revealed that its Nexus will come with the mobile payments software embedded. Read More »

SNL reports that Google is bidding on T-Mobile. If the rumor were somehow true, then Google is suffering from hubris. Selling software, services and handsets is fundamentally a different business than selling connectivity. Google buying T-Mobile would be a bigger disaster than AOL-Time Warner. Read More »

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