Microsoft has used to CTIA this week to expand on its Windows Marketplace for Mobile strategy and its Windows 6.5 upgrades, but entertainment and devices president Robbie Bach used his keynote today to outline how it all fits together. Enabling the connected experience is an important goal for the software maker, invested heavily in IPTV through its Mediaroom middleware, wireless through Windows Mobile and, increasingly, netbooks on the PC side. (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…)

As Yahoo reorganizes its business with a new CEO and talks of a Microsoft acquisition still in the air, the software company today brought its mobile strategy to the forefront. Yahoo Mobile, its open, personal mobile portal to the Internet, now has a place in Apple’s iPhone app store and on 300 handsets via the mobile Web. The company also used CTIA to preview a Yahoo Messenger app for the iPhone, which will bring the online chatting service to the handset. (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…)

Research In Motion today opened the doors to its long-awaited BlackBerry App World, the hardware maker’s effort to stay on par with Apple and others and to woo third-party developers with its well-established business users and rapidly growing consumer base. Co-CEO and president Mike Lazaridis officially unveiled BlackBerry’s app strategy at his keynote today, just one day after Microsoft offered more details on its version, Windows Marketplace for Mobile. (more…)

T-Mobile’s expanding 3G network, which today covers 130 cities, will cover 100 more, doubling its reach to 207 million consumers, by the year’s end, said Robert Dotson, CEO of T-Mobile USA. In his keynote presentation kicking off CTIA today, Dotson reiterated T-Mobile’s commitment to its 3G rollout, as well as advanced high-speed services, HSPA+ and long-term evolution. (more…)

Alcatel-Lucent is taking the development of the long-term evolution (LTE) packet core out of the hands of its mobile networks division, choosing instead to leverage the skills of its wireline IP routing group to build the next-generation IP architecture. The company introduced its evolved packet core (EPC) architecture, which is built on the back of the 7750 Service Router, 30,000 of which already sit in the wireline networks of operators around the world. (more…)