Wireless Blog

Verizon Wireless announces global wireless service offerings for the Qualcomm Gobi module embedded in upcoming Notebooks.

Lenovo have announced their entry to the ever-growing netbook market, the IdeaPad S10.A Based on Intel's N270 1.6GHz single-core Atom processor, the S10 has a 10.2-inch widescreen WSVGA screen with LED ...

Federal regulators have approved Verizon Wireless ' purchase of Rural Cellular Corp.

Motorola's mobile-phone division has been bleeding money since the start of 2007, reporting losses of $1.9 billion and falling to third in global sales. The company moved to turn things around Monday with the announcement that it is hiring a top executive away from Qualcomm to run the mobile-phone business.

Sanjay Jha will become co-CEO along with Greg Brown -- an announcement that sent Motorola stock up for the first time in more than four years. Under Jha's leadership, Qualcomm became the world's top maker of chips for cell phones. Brown will be CEO of Motorola's healthier broadband business, which makes cable TV set-top boxes and wireless networking equipment. Brown had announced plans to split the company in March. The split division will occur in the third quarter of 2009.

Analysts hailed the move. "They needed someone high profile with engineering talent, and certainly this guy fits the bill," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan & Co. analyst. "The only downside is that he doesn't necessarily have any consumer products expertise."

Meeting the iPhone Challenge

Jha's first order of business: developing a device to compete with Apple's best-selling iPhone. Motorola had a hit with the Razr, which sold more than 110 million units, but has been unable to come up with a follow-up product and has lost customers to Apple, Nokia and Samsung.

"In terms of actual products hitting the street, you're not going to see [Jha's] impact before 2010," McCourt said. "Probably his biggest impact will be the level and type of engineering talent he will attract to the company over time."

But Motorola will need more than just a winning phone, according to Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies.

"Motorola will only be successful if this new team creates a complete solution that includes hardware, software and services similar to Apple," he...

If actor Kevin Bacon is reading this, he may want to urge people to expand the game bearing his name -- by playing it with Microsoft's Messenger.

A new study of Messenger's instant-messaging traffic by Microsoft researchers found that the minimum length connecting 180 billion different pairs of users was usually seven or less fellow users.

This supports a popular folk legend that says any two people in the world are connected by "six degrees of separation," which was the title of a popular 1990 play by John Guare and a 1993 film. Similarly, a trivia game known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon requires users to connect any film actor in history through the actor's personal connections or history to Kevin Bacon.

Milgram and Travers Study

The play, movie, and Kevin Bacon game were based on the work of academic researchers Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers in the 1960s. They asked people to pass on a letter to another person they knew by name, in order to get it to someone they did not know in another city. In their original research, about 300 people in Boston and Nebraska were asked to get the letter through their acquaintances to a Boston stockbroker.

The average number of people through which a letter passed when it was successfully delivered, Milgram and Travers found, was 6.2 people. Calling it "six degrees of separation" was added later in the play, movie and folklore. But only 64 of the original 296 letters successfully reached the stockbroker target, suggesting that a universal fabric structure for connecting people was not revealed. Additionally, all of the participants were in the United States.

However, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz told the Washington Post that his results indicate there may be "a social-connectivity constant for humanity." He added that, while many people have intuitions...

Randall Stephenson, the recently christened AT&T chairman and CEO, is the mastermind behind the $199 Apple iPhone 3G. He's also the architect behind an extended exclusivity deal with Apple.

USA Today is reporting that Stephenson, the man who agreed to pay Apple about $300 per device to help keep the retail price of the iPhone reasonable, has inked a deal that will give AT&T some breathing room to profit from the phones.

AT&T has reportedly extended its agreement with Apple to remain the exclusive retailer of the iPhone through 2010 to compensate for the diluted earnings in the initial years of the contract. Stephenson took a risk, and it looks like it might pay off for AT&T under the new deal.

"The iPhone has repositioned AT&T as the premier wireless brand in the world," Stephenson told USA Today. "We're all about wireless. We're not betting on handsets. We're betting on Jobs."

Exclusivity: A Moot Point

There's been plenty of talk on online job boards about AT&T's move. Some smartphone users are frustrated that the exclusivity deal has been extended because they want to use the phone with their carrier of choice.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Forrester Research, said it wouldn't make much of a difference for U.S. consumers anyway.

"Because of technology challenges in the U.S., the only other carrier the iPhone is compatible with is T-Mobile," Gartenberg said. "The wireless technology is so radically different that Apple would have to come up with an entirely new phone in order to have a product that would work on Verizon or Sprint's network."

The issue goes even deeper. If Apple decided to offer an unlocked, open version of the iPhone that was unsubsidized tomorrow, consumers still wouldn't enjoy the maximum iPhone experience with any carrier besides AT&T. "T-Mobile's 3G network is very different than AT&T's," Gartenberg said....

While the Federal Communication Commission voted 3-2 to punish Comcast for its alleged poor network-management practices, concerns are being raised about the FCC's legal authority over the cable-TV and Internet services provider.

On Friday, the FCC ruled that Comcast had been monitoring and blocking subscribers' use of peer-to-peer file sharing, specifically with BitTorrent P2P software.

Two of the three commissioners, Republicans Robert McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate, said the FCC's decision against Comcast was based on unclear rules and voted in favor of Comcast. McDowell said the FCC does not have any rules in place governing an ISP's network management.

But FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who voted against Comcast, said the Supreme Court recognized the FCC's power to enforce its policies under its ancillary authority based on Internet policy adopted in 2005. The FCC policy says Internet users have the right to use legal Web applications, services and devices of their choice.

David Sohn, general policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said what Comcast did is a significant problem, but added that the group is concerned about the FCC's broad jurisdiction. "Our position is that what Comcast was doing in the particular tactics they had chosen by singling one particular application -- that is a serious problem and poses real risks for innovation on the Internet," Sohn said. "We do have concerns of the scope of the FCC's authorization to step in and address this problem."

Comcast Considers Legal Options

Comcast said it will comply with the FCC's ruling and provide the agency with an outlined plan of its network-managing practices. But Comcast added it does not believe the FCC has the legal right to control management of its network. "There were not formal rules in this area, so the basis for action they are taking may be questionable," said Sena FitzMaurice,...

The Linux Mobile Foundation has announced that 11 new companies have joined the global consortium for the open-source mobile platform.

In particular, new LiMo member Movial said it intends to open-source its Browser D-Bus Bridge technology, which translates standard HTML and JavaScript commands to Desktop Bus commands to facilitate inter-process communication (IPC) between Web 2.0 applications and services.

"Movial's open-source contribution should enable application developers and operators to innovate and create a new range of services and applications exploiting unique features of mobile devices," said Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances at longtime LiMo member ARM, which makes processor cores for mobile handsets.

Enabling Web 2.0 Apps

Through the use of Movial's innovative technology, handset makers and Web developers will be able to create new user interfaces and Web 2.0 services for LiMo. Movial said it expects to deliver the code within 90 days.

Another new LiMo member, VirtualLogix, will begin extending the application of its VLX virtualization technology into the mobile-handset space.

VLX is designed to enable low-cost Linux phones based on a single-core processor (ARM, Intel XScale or Intel Atom) by eliminating the need for an extra application processor and associated hardware. VLX also features a standards-based security architecture for financial transactions, mobile commerce and the secure distribution of DRM-protected content.

"VirtualLogix is committed to providing developers the opportunity to complement the LiMo specification with enhanced features and security for deployment on low-cost platforms," said VirtualLogix Executive Vice President Michel Gien.

Latest LiMo Handsets

LiMo also announced the rollout of seven new LiMo-enabled devices from Motorola, NEC and Panasonic, boosting the total number of handset models available on the open-source platform to 21.

"With such a variety of industry players cost-effectively adopting the LiMo platform ... more development resources are being devoted to enhancing the consumer experience," said LiMo Foundation Chairman Kiyohito Nagata....

Motorola Inc. on Monday named Sanjay Jha, the chief operating officer of Qualcomm, to head its handset division.

India’s Tata Communications, formerly known as VSNL is planning to expand its WiMAX coverage from the current 60 towns to 115 this financial year.

The company has outlined some US$2 billion in CAPEX over the next three years. About half the expenditure will be on a WiMAX network which will cover 15 cities by 2009. Currently, WiMax services are available only in Bangalore, where some 600 base stations have been deployed.

“The government has announced that it will auction spectrum. Once the spectrum is alloted, we plan to take the broadband-WiMax services to four-five cities,” Tata Communications CEO and MD N Srinath told shareholders yesterday.

In South Korea, KT, which controls more than 90 percent of the fixed-line telephony market and about 44 percent of the broadband sector, had gathered about 206,000 customers for WiBro by the end of June, while SK Telecom’s presence is comparatively miniscule with around 2,000 subscribers.

Although the numbers are more than double the 100,000-plus WiBro subscribers at the end of last year, they still don’t come close to the government ambitions to have 8 million subscribers by 2010. Part of problem may be that Korea’s flavor of WiMAX doesn’t allow telephony.

KT is also expected to introduce an advanced WiBro service, dubbed “WiBro Wave 2,” in Seoul and the neighboring metropolitan area by the end of the year. The new version is designed to double the speed of the current WiBro services that provide an average download speed of 3 megabytes per second (mbps) and may provide voice.