Wireless Blog

"We are pleased that the appellate court affirmed the decision of the trial court"

An Illinois appellate court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision that Sprint Nextel Corp. must stop selling Nextel-branded products in parts of the Midwest.

IPCS Inc., a Sprint-branded affiliate, sued Sprint Nextel after the larger company acquired Nextel Communications Inc. in 2005, saying that it was violating iPCS' exclusivity agreement by selling Nextel products in its territories.

Schaumburg, Ill.-based iPCS serves 629,900 wireless subscribers in portions of Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Nebraska. Read more

Mobile service consolidator iPass is letting individuals in on a service that enterprises have used for several years, giving travelers one account and login for a multitude of networks. via The Industry Standard

Leap Wireless, the parent company of Cricket Communications, a leading provider of prepaid cellular services, today announced their first Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum operation, in Oklahoma City. It will include approximately 1.1 million new covered POPs, bringing Cricket’s national covered POPs to approximately 55.1 million.

Cricket’s network consisting of 98 cell sites will be fully operational at launch covering the sprawling Oklahoma City area including the cities of Norman, Guthrie and Shawnee and linking with the existing Tulsa market to create one large Oklahoma calling area.

“With the launch of Oklahoma City, we are entering what we believe to be another major growth phase for our business,” said Doug Hutcheson, president and chief executive officer at Leap. “The AWS spectrum that we acquired in 2006 from the FCC enables us to again double the size of our Cricket footprint and covered POPs.

Cricket rate plans range from $35 to $60 a month, and include unlimited anytime minutes, unlimited U.S. long distance, unlimited text and picture messaging and nationwide roaming minutes.

Cricket Wireless Internet Service will be available for $40 a month, customers who also have Cricket mobile phone service receive a $5 discount and pay just $35 monthly.

Cricket is launching its Cricket service in Oklahoma City with a variety of AWS wireless devices including the Samsung MyShot camera phone, Samsung Spex and UTStarcom 7126 mobile phones, as well as the UTStarcom UM100C wireless modem.

We have a full look at the range of phones Verizon Wireless will be announcing at CTIA. via PhoneNews.com

Greenlight Wireless Corporation’s CEO Kevin Perkins will be on hand at this year’s CTIA WIRELESS 2008^® conference being held April 1-3 in Las Vegas. Mr. Perkins will be available for business development meetings during the conference. To schedule a meeting please contact the Business Development center at +1-949-421-1550 ext. 561.

About CTIA WIRELESS 2008^®
As the largest wireless show in the world, CTIA WIRELESS 2008 brings together all industries affected by wireless technology for three days of intense learning and networking. CTIA-The Wireless Association® is the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, representing carriers, manufacturers and wireless Internet providers. Visit www.ctia.org/ctiawireless.

Posted by Monica Sato

Ever wonder why nobody ever seems to leave comments on DailyWireless? Me too. Tonight I discovered why — they’ve been disappearing through a black hole.

I didn’t realize that there were people making comments until tonight, after Don upgraded Dailywireless to Wordpress 2.5.

Holy smokes. There were a ton of comments archived but never published. They simply got sent to an obscure file (to me) on Wordpress. They were waiting my okay, but I never knew they were there.

My apologies to all those readers who wrote wonderfully insightful, humorous and helpful comments. They simply didn’t appear because I didn’t know they existed. Now the file system is much better.

In the future, I hope we can all participate and benefit from this two-way street — that has been our intention from the start.

Thanks for your understanding.

- Sam (Word Press Dunce) Churchill

The much-awaited iPhone with 3G is coming in May, according to a report by the Bank of America. Both Apple and AT&T, its exclusive carrier partner in the U.S., have said a higher-speed version of the popular device is coming, but they haven't set a date. The BOA's research report was authored by analyst Scott Craig and cited Friday by the Reuters news service.

Three Million in May

Craig told Reuters that there will be "an initial small build in May," and "significant production" in June. Despite the report, AT&T and Apple declined comment. But June would be a good time for the release, as there is an iPhone developers' conference that month, as well as the release of new firmware.

Craig added that he expects production volume to be higher than earlier estimates, even his. He predicted the production run in May will be more than three million iPhones, with another eight million in the third quarter. Previously, he had projected eight million iPhones for all of 2008.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with JupiterResearch, said he expects Apple to refresh the iPhone sometime this year, but he doubted outsiders know exactly when that might be. "Apple keeps it own schedule," he noted.

A refresh of any sort could help Apple meet its target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of this year. As of January, Apple has said it had sold about four million.

3G on the iPhone "would be a nice addition," Gartenberg said, but the real question is what Apple or third-party developers would do with the additional bandwidth that they haven't already done with, for instance, AT&T's EDGE.

Web Sites, Business Users, Europe

The faster cellular bandwidth could give users more reliable access to media-rich Web sites. It could also enable third-party developers to create applications that assume some consistent access to...

The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that global semiconductor sales in February rose 1.5 percent from the year-earlier period to reach $20.44 billion. Though chip revenues fell 4.9 percent from January, the result was in line with normal seasonal patterns, the trade group said.

"Excluding memory products, worldwide semiconductor sales grew by nearly 10 percent year-on-year," noted SIA President George Scalise. Even better, total unit shipments for all semiconductor products "increased by 11.6 percent year-on-year, indicating strength in the end markets that drive demand for microchips," Scalise said.

DRAM's Drag

Despite a slowing U.S. economy, markets outside North America continued to show robust growth in demand for electronic products that drive semiconductor sales, the SIA said. However, the underlying strength in the month's global chip sales was masked by a continued decline in the price of DRAM memory chips, Scalise said.

"DRAM revenues declined by more than 40 percent year-on-year despite a 43 percent increase in unit shipments" and "average selling prices for DRAM chips declined by nearly 60 percent year-on-year," Scalise explained.

The SIA's latest report suggests that the surprising weakness in memory-chip sales that occurred in the fourth quarter is continuing to take the wind out of global chip sales. According to researchers at iSuppli, global DRAM revenue unexpectedly tanked 19.1 percent in last year's fourth quarter, exceeding the research firm's expectation of a 4.7 percent decline.

Moreover, NAND-flash revenue declined 3.9 percent in last year's fourth quarter, causing memory-chip revenue to decline 11 percent overall, iSuppli said. "This was a complete role reversal for memory semiconductors compared to 2006," when memory-chip "revenues helped to prop up the growth of the overall semiconductor industry," observed iSuppli Senior Vice President Dale Ford.

The poor results for memory chips in 2007 ended up restraining market growth, the iSuppli analyst said. "If memory were excluded...

Last week saw the MacBook Air hacked through a Safari browser at the CanSecWest security conference. But before the week ended, Microsoft's Vista Ultimate also fell victim to hackers in the Pwn to Own challenge.

CanSecWest organizers offered a Fujitsu U810 laptop running Vista Ultimate SP1 to any security researcher who could find a way to breach security and gain access to the contents of system files using a previously undisclosed zero-day attack.

Shane Macaulay from Security Objectives won the laptop by exploiting an Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability. The vulnerability was disclosed to Adobe, which is reportedly working on the issue. No other information is available about the Adobe flaw. Macaulay also won a $5,000 cash prize.

At the end of the last day of the three-day hacker challenge, which was sponsored by 3Com's TippingPoint, only the Sony VAIO laptop running Ubuntu (Linux) was left standing.

Shifting Rules

The first day of the contest, hackers were only allowed to hack into the computers over a network. No one was able to claim the prizes. On the second day, the rules changed. Contestants were allowed to use the machines to visit Web sites and open e-mail messages.

That rule change made it possible for Charlie Miller, a researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, to hack the MacBook Air using the Safari browser within two minutes.

But the Vista and Ubuntu laptops seemingly remained airtight. On the third day of the contest, the judges again broadened the rules, opening up the scope beyond just default installed applications on those laptops to any popular third-party application, such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader, the Firefox browser, and voice-over-IP program Skype.

Macaulay installed Adobe Flash on the laptops and proceeded to compromise the system. Macaulay had some help from Security Objectives colleague Derek Callaway and independent researcher Alexander Sotirov.

Means Justifies the End

Contests such as...

"Although the intensifying market competition is a serious challenge to us, the upcoming full services offering will bring enormous business opportunities"

The Associated Press Monday, March 31, 2008 China Telecom Corp. said Monday that annual profits fell 13 percent last year as more customers switched to mobile phones. via WQXI-AM Atlanta