-
Blogs
-
News
-
Industry
-
Community
-
Topics
China Telecom Corp. plans to start selling a wireless service to U.S. consumers under its own brand early next year, seeking to sign up Chinese-Americans, students and tourists who travel often between the two countries. China's biggest fixed-line provider will offer users of the service handsets with two lines, one that will work in the U.S. and another in China, Donald Tan, president of China Telecom Americas, said in an interview. more»
Bevil Wooding writes to report: "Skype is looking to developing markets to increase its presence and its mobile business in places where smartphone use is less common. While Skype can be used on Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and Windows 6.5 devices, those are not as prevalent in developing countries. To overcome that obstacle, Skype has developed a mobile client for lower-end phones that do not have Wi-Fi or 3G capabilities and hope to win the trust of operators by holding out the benefit that mobile customers will need to buy data packages in order to use Skype over the cellular network." more»
The Egyptian government has disabled most Internet and cell phone services in an apparent effort to disrupt the anti-government protests gripping the country. Egypt's four primary Internet providers all stopped moving data early Friday, effectively cutting off Egyptians from the outside world and each other. more»
Bevil Wooding writes: "There are roughly 175 mobile telephones per 100 persons in the Caribbean island-state Trinidad and Tobago, according to the CIA World Factbook website. But some experts are now asking whether the high number of cellphones per citizen is actually a reflection of deficiencies in the telecommunications marketplace that deny users the true benefits of competition." more»
Josh Taylor reporting in ZDNet: "The CSIRO will tomorrow unveil a breakthrough in wireless technology that will allow multiple users to upload content at the same time while maintaining a data transfer rate of 12 megabits per second (Mbps), all over their old analog TV aerial. The technology, named Ngara, allows up to six users to occupy the equivalent spectrum space of one television channel (7 megahertz) and has a spectral efficiency of 20 bits per second per hertz..." more»
Paul Budde writes: "Two relatively new mobile market entrants, Mobyland and Centernet, have launched Poland and Eastern Europe's first commercial LTE network. Vendor Huawei provided the equipment for the network, which operates in the 1800MHz frequency band. Both Mobyland and Centernet previously offered GSM services in the frequency band before refarming the spectrum to offer LTE. The operators aim to expand coverage to 20% of the population by 2011 by deploying 700 base stations." more»
W. David Gardner reporting in InformationWeek: "The U.S. Commerce department's final American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awards for broadband networks were announced this week. Commerce secretary Gary Locke said that this latest round of grants totaled $206.8 million and that the department has awarded nearly $4 billion of Recovery Act funds for the expansion of broadband." more»
In a unanimous vote today, the FCC has given a green light for the use of "white spaces" in order to deliver broadband connections as super "WiFi". From today's announcement: "The Federal Communications Commission today took steps to free up vacant airwaves between TV channels -- called "white spaces" -- to unleash a host of new technologies, such as "super Wi-Fi," and myriad other diverse applications. This is the first significant block of spectrum made available for unlicensed use in more than 20 years. TV white space spectrum is considered prime real estate because its signals travel well, making it ideally suited for mobile wireless devices." more»
Google has announced the deployment of an experimental broadband network using the TV white spaces. Company says: "This is an exciting new deployment -- the first of its kind for a hospital -- demonstrating the potential of the TV white spaces to improve broadband and spark new applications in healthcare. First responder vehicles, hospital grounds as well as the health department are being equipped with high-speed wireless Internet access. Additionally, the hospital is using the network to manage its outdoor video surveillance system." more»
Sam Gustin reporting in DailyFanance: "As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut." more»
Verizon Business has a message to companies still reluctant to migrate their networks to IPv6: You're better off doing it now than later. William Schmidlapp, Verizon Business's product manager for Internet dedicated access services, says that the advent of 4G LTE and WiMAX-based devices will only increase the need to switch over to IPv6, since each of those devices will require its own IP address... more»
Responding to recent controversies over Google-Verizon deal, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel writes: "Over the past few days there's been a lot of discussion surrounding our announcement of a policy proposal on network neutrality we put together with Verizon. On balance, we believe this proposal represents real progress on what has become a very contentious issue, and we think it could help move the network neutrality debate forward constructively. We don't expect everyone to agree with every aspect of our proposal, but there has been a number of inaccuracies about it, and we do want to separate fact from fiction." more»
Cecilia Kang reporting in the Washington Post: "The Obama administration announced Monday that it will double the amount of airwaves available for mobile broadband to meet the demands of smartphones and other wireless gadgets expected to explode in popularity. Over the next decade, President Obama pledged to make available 500 megahertz of radiowaves for high-speed wireless carriers..." more»
Starbucks Corp. announced today that it will be offering free wireless Internet access at all of its stores through out the United States starting July 1. The move comes six months after Starbucks' competitor McDonald's Corp. began offering free Wi-Fi at 11,500 U.S. locations. more»
Kevin J. O'Brien reporting in the New York Times: "Google came under increased pressure in Europe on Tuesday over its collection of private data from unsecured home wireless networks as a German regulator threatened legal action if the company did not surrender a hard drive for inspection. The German demand underscored the seriousness of the quandary Google now faced after its admission last Friday that it had stored the snippets of Web sites and personal e-mail messages..." more»
