Wireless News

LTE still lacks a voice

By Tim Conneally on July 9, 2009, 12:31 PM

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Despite what mobile carriers have been saying about LTE's readiness , there is still a fundamental problem with the deployment of an all-data packet switched network: its incompatibility with the old circuit-switched networks. Though LTE will support a tremendous jump in data transmission speeds on our mobile devices, it still cannot support voice and SMS functionality because those are built on the old circuit switched architecture.

Currently, there are a few ways this problem can be tackled. There is IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the 3GPP-endorsed way that delivers voice and SMS through IP architecture, sort of like a big VoIP system. There is network hybridization, where the 4G network would only handle data and the legacy 2G/3G networks would handle voice and SMS. Finally, there is VoLGA, or Voice over LTE via Generic Access, a spec based upon 3GPP's GAN standard , which allows circuit switched traffic to be piped into LTE packets.

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AT&T: Without a landline phone, you could die

By Tim Conneally on July 8, 2009, 12:05 PM

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AT&T and an associated group of telecommunications companies under the name "National Emergency Number Association" (NENA) released the results of a June survey which concludes that Americans need to have an emergency communications plan based around a landline connection.

"A big part of this is knowing about the options available for dialing 911," NENA Chief Executive Officer, Brian Fontes said in a statement. "The more choices you have to reach 911 in an emergency, the better, and a corded landline phone should be one of those options. It provides the security of a home phone line connection to 911 so that in most cases first responders know your home address."

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Bolt: the dark horse mobile browser

By Tim Conneally on July 6, 2009, 12:53 PM

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In the roughly six months since Bitstream's Bolt mobile browser debuted in beta at Mobile World Congress, it has been installed more than a million times, its developers said today. Like Skyfire, which also reached a million installs before RTM, this cross-platform mobile browser is designed to accelerate the browsing experience on resource-constrained devices.

Bolt is compatible with any mobile handset that supports the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0, the Java spec for embedded devices. Page rendering takes place outside of the phone on Bolt's servers, and content is heavily compressed for consumption, so even 2G freebie phones can handle full Web browsing. The app itself is only 140 Kb in size. Included in the huge list of supported devices are handsets from Research in Motion, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. There are versions specifically designed for BlackBerry and for entry-level phones.

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Comcast goes WiMAX

By Tim Conneally on June 29, 2009, 5:14 PM

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Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast.

Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its "High Speed 2go" WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be further rollouts in Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia later this year as well. The plan is similar to the Sprint 4G service the carrier announced last March.

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Myth-busted, or, Would AT&T have forgiven Savage's bill if he wasn't a TV star?

By Carmi Levy on June 29, 2009, 10:07 AM

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You've got to feel some serious empathy for Adam Savage.

The co-star of the popular Discovery Channel television show Mythbusters found himself on the receiving end of a huge bill after a recent vacation to Montreal, Canada. He had tethered a cellular modem to his laptop, and ended up racking up $11,000 in charges before returning to the US. Upon his return, AT&T, claiming he had used over 9 gigabytes of data during his foreign surfing adventure, helpfully shut his account down. Only when he called them to complain about the outage did he learn he had been hosed.

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Clearwire snags WiMAX leftovers

By Tim Conneally on June 25, 2009, 2:33 PM

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WiMAX operator Clearwire has acquired the remaining WiMAX licenses from Oneida Communications for an undisclosed amount. Last year, Oneida sold the majority of its licenses to Sprint, but held onto an unspecified number, which now belong to Clearwire. The company did not divulge how many licenses each company obtained or which markets will benefit from the acquisitions.

In 2005, Oneida Communications Group was formed with the purposes of acquiring licenses in the 2.5 GHz spectrum, known as Broadband Radio Service (BRS) licenses, which are crucial to the implementation of point to multi-point WiMAX networks. That spectrum range has been found ideal for high-bandwidth, non-line of sight installations, and has been dominated by Sprint and Clearwire.

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Big changes to cellular networks to be demonstrated next week

By Tim Conneally on June 19, 2009, 2:35 PM

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Next Tuesday at the Femtocells World Summit in London, chipmaker picoChip, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and Continuous Computing will give the first live demo of a new 3GPP standard critical to the deployment of IP Radio Access Network-based femtocells.

What's that again? 3GPP is the Third Generation Partnership Project, the international consortium that lays down specs for telecommunications standards. Femtocell is a system for increasing 3G cellular coverage with small, indoor distributed antenna systems. They are sort of like tiny cell towers, hence the femto- prefix which denotes 10 -15 , making the name roughly mean "really really small cell."

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Everyone but you is being rude with their mobile gadgets

By Angela Gunn on June 19, 2009, 7:24 AM

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Self-awareness, etiquette and Internet polling probably shouldn't even appear in the same sentence, but now and then they combine for a good laugh. For instance, Intel this week revealed the results of an online poll they commissioned from the pollsters at Harris Interactive, which asked 2,160 US adults about behavior -- theirs and other people's -- on their mobile phones and other devices one uses in public.

The study defined various alleged etiquette breaches ranging from speaking too loudly on phone calls to being rude to cashiers (by chattering during a transaction) and texting in the presence of others. Some so-called faux pas were the sort of thing it's hard to fathom people actually doing (using a laptop in a public restroom, really?).

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Twitter grows up: Lessons from the Iran experience

By Carmi Levy on June 18, 2009, 2:37 PM

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It was do or die for Twitter last week. To its credit, it didn't die.

Every promising new technology reaches a point in its life cycle when it either grows up and becomes part of the everyday landscape, or it flames out and becomes a footnote to history.

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Are cell towers ugly? Ericsson may have an alternative

By Tim Conneally on June 17, 2009, 5:39 PM

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Where wireless communications company Ericsson usually deals in products meant to be unseen, it has taken a different approach with its new Capsule cell site, and designed a mobile broadband base station that is meant to be seen without standing out.

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Boku aims to bridge micropay gap with mobile-phone ease

By Angela Gunn on June 17, 2009, 8:48 AM

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A just-launched payment service would allow users to make purchases for virtual goods via their mobile phone, rather than by credit card or online payment service. Boku follows a model familiar to many mobile-phone users: an approved charge appearing on one's mobile bill.

Forget your late-'90s memories of Beenz and such; the pay-by-mobile model is already quite popular in Asia, and virtual goods -- an $8 billion annual market, according to Boku -- are a good fit.

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Largest US WiMAX deployment is official

By Tim Conneally on June 16, 2009, 4:58 PM

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As Clearwire announced just one month ago Atlanta, Georgia's WiMAX network has officially launched, and is the biggest United States deployment of the 4G technology to date, covering some 1,200 square miles with more than 400 cell sites.

Like Clearwire's Portland WiMAX network, Atlanta's core network equipment from access points to consumer equipment has been supplied by Motorola. Future deployments, however, will be built upon Cisco equipment, Clearwire announced early last May .

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'Computer, on screen!': A look at Google's voice recognition engine

By Tim Conneally on June 16, 2009, 3:08 PM

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Google's voice recognition technology took to the mobile sector with voice-powered search applications for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Naturally, Google's own mobile operating system Android has begun to reap special benefits of the powerful technology with some new voice-enabled features.

Yesterday, an unforced update to Android's native Google Maps application endowed the software with speech recognition capabilities. Addresses, business names, and attractions can all be searched by spoken word. The app is now one of several that tap into Google's speech recognition engine, such as the voice-to-text app which recently turned up in the Android Market, simply named Voice Text for Android . That app allows the users to dictate text messages.

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Virgin Media downloaders to 'pay it forward' for Universal Music

By Tim Conneally on June 15, 2009, 11:02 AM

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Many legislators believe the cornerstone to halting the illegal trade of copyrighted music, movies, and software is to work with ISPs . Now, rather than debut a new punishment for downloaders, like the controversial HADOPI law in France , British ISP Virgin Media will offer downloaders the option to pay up front.

Virgin Media announced today that it has partnered with Universal Music Group to launch a new tiered music download service. For a reported £10-15 a month, Virgin Media broadband customers will have unlimited MP3 downloads from an ISP-provided catalog. With that service in place, there will be a diminished need to resort to illegal downloading.

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Some EU roaming charges could plunge 80% or more in July

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 9, 2009, 11:48 AM

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With what European telcos have been charging their customers for mobile movie downloads, they might have been able to fund the entire movie. Smartphone users in Ireland, for example, were being charged as much as €6.82 ($9.55 USD) per megabyte of bandwidth, when their phones roamed outside their service areas. Telcos had been blaming the high cost of interstate commerce for these extraordinary roaming rates.

But an agreement announced yesterday between the European Council of Ministers -- the coalition of telecom ministers of the EU's member states -- will effectively force those states to find a way around that problem. Starting Wednesday, July 1, telcos may only charge no more than €1 per megabyte (about $1.40 USD) for roaming download charges. In addition, SMS messaging charges across service boundaries (which usually means, across countries' borders) will be capped at €0.11, which is about one-third of what some Portuguese customers have been paying.

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Sprint CSO: Palm Pre data tethering will be possible, iTunes feature may break

By Nate Mook on June 6, 2009, 1:50 AM

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Although the early reviews were out Thursday, we still learned a few things during Sprint's special invite-only launch event for the Palm Pre Friday. We spoke with Sprint Chief Service Officer Bob Johnson about the new phone and the carrier's rollout plans starting Saturday. Here are the takeaways:

-- Johnson said that data tethering is possible with the Palm Pre and said that Sprint -- unlike Verizon and AT&T which charge extra -- will allow customers to connect it to their laptops in order to surf the Web over Sprint's 3G network. However, this information conflicts with what we have heard elsewhere (Engadget was told the opposite), so we are following up. Sprint initially advertised data tethering as a feature of the Pre in February, but soon removed the reference.

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Palm Pre a hit at special event for top Sprint customers

By Nate Mook on June 6, 2009, 12:41 AM

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The Palm Pre officially goes on sale via Sprint at 8am Saturday morning, but the carrier held special invite-only events in 10 cities Friday evening, giving selected Sprint Premier customers early access to the iPhone rival. Only those eligible to upgrade were invited, with around 120 RSVPs at Sprint's Washington, DC store we visited.

Sprint has prepared all of its nationwide stores for the Palm Pre launch tomorrow, with actual phones available for customers to play with and video screens detailing the features. Through its "Ready Now" program it launched last September, Sprint will make sure all buyers have their phones fully setup by the time they leave the store -- a marked difference from the iPhone launch.

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Ericsson and Intel: Carrier-subsidized netbooks are the future

By Tim Conneally on June 4, 2009, 9:45 AM

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The popularity of the netbook is undeniable. In just two years it has risen from a product of uncertain necessity to a killer gadget that makes up as much as thirty percent of all notebook sales for its leading manufacturers.

But where is the form factor headed?

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AT&T announces 7.2 Mbps HSPA upgrade

By Tim Conneally on May 27, 2009, 2:37 PM

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It has been one year almost to the day that AT&T completed its initial HSPA rollout, adding 800 Kbps HSUPA. As was promised on the operator's roadmap, the company announced its next network upgrade will begin later this year.

This upgrade will increase HSPA's maximum downlink speed from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, which will pull AT&T up into the majority bracket of HSPA operators (or those whose speeds max out at 7.2 Mbps or higher), and consequently increase the global average speed due to the company's ballooning subscriber base of more than 78 million.

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Is Motorola saving money by skipping Windows Mobile 6.5?

By Tim Conneally on May 26, 2009, 3:55 PM

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According to documents purportedly leaked by AT&T , a Motorola handset originally slated to run Windows Mobile has changed Operating Systems mid-stream, and will be released with Android by the end of 2009's third quarter. The "Iron Man," or "Heron" as it's called on the AT&T document, includes all the Windows Mobile specs (IE6, Pocket Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync) with the caveat "Specifications subject to change due to move to Android."

Both Motorola and AT&T declined comment today.

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