Of any vendor, Samsung probably has the most fingers in the WiMAX pie here in the US. Not only is its network division building a substantial portion of Clearwire’s WiMAX network in the US, its PC division is embedding WiMAX chips into laptops and its handset division just released a stand-alone WiMAX data device, the Mondi—all to support Clearwire’s launch. (more…)

Wireless may be getting a partial pass in the down economy, but the industry’s biggest trade show certainly isn’t. CTIA reported attendance at CTIA Wireless dropped 15% this year, short of the worst case scenario, but definitely an indication that recession isn’t bypassing mobile industry. (more…)

Adding the green theme to this year’s CTIA Wireless, Former vice president and Nobel peace laureate Al Gore today commended the wireless industry on its efforts to combat global warming, but said there was still much more work to do. Delivering the final keynote to this year’s conference, Gore said while he believes strongly in the profit motive as the driving force of the economy, some of the most successfully companies are those willing to pursue higher goals than dollars and cents. (more…)

Main Street America has tapped Alvarion as a vendor for its rural broadband access deployment in the southeastern US, one of the largest Rural Utilities Service-funded initiatives in the US. Alvarion will deploy its BreezeMAX broadband gear in an unspecified number of Main Street’s 129 RUS-funding-eligible communities in Florida and Georgia. (more…)

AT&T revealed new elements to its mobile strategy at CTIA Wireless today, announcing plans to launch a consumer-driven beta application program and pursue netbooks and other new devices that don’t quite fit the definition of phone or computer. (more…)

Abandoning the WiMAX versus LTE rhetoric that have characterized this latest round of technology wars, Clearwire co-chairman Ben Wolff lauded 4G industry as a whole in his keynote at CTIA Wireless today, saying that both LTE and WiMAX would be the technologies that bridge the gap between wireline broadband data consumption and wireless consumption. While placing the two standards on equal technical footing , Wolff was also quick to point out Clearwire’s superior spectrum holdings compared to other operators, giving it implicit an advantage in any large-scale mobile broadband rollout. (more…)

Motorola promised a demo of long-term evolution’s raw capabilities at CTIA Wireless, and it delivered. In the two weeks before the show Motorola set up two ad hoc LTE networks using its new eNode B base station and Andrew Corp antennas, its aim to give customers and applications developers a taste of how LTE would perform in real-world conditions. (more…)

Continuous Computing is designing a unified broadband femto gateway with the help of TeamF1, a networking company that develops the security gateway components for residential broadband gateways. By combining TeamF1’s technology with its own, Continuous Computing has created a reference design for an all-in-one femto gateway, incorporating the femtocell, Wi-Fi router, broadband modem and firewall into a single device. (more…)

In the latest breakthrough from its labs, Qualcomm has perfected a new version of its system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology that can be embedded into animals, turning them into living, breathing highly mobile femtocells. By creating biological femtocells, Qualcomm is allaying one of the critical weaknesses of the wireless network: while the devices on the network are mobile, the infrastructure of the network is static. By turning the family dog, for example, into a femtocell, the issues of dead zones and coverage gaps disappear as coverage moves with you wherever you—and your dog—go. (more…)

Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg today did a little crystal ball gazing, using his keynote address at CTIA Wireless to describe a mobile future in which wireless connectivity became so pervasive that as many as 5 wireless connections would exist for every man, woman and child in the US. (more…)