advertisement
In talks about unlimited data plans, Virgin Mobile is rarely tip of tongue.
“T-Mobile has anointed itself as the value leader in wireless,” Bob Stohrer, Virgin Mobile USA’s vice president of marketing, complained in a press release this morning. “Yet they’ve conveniently left Virgin Mobile out of their comparison set, so we’re crashing their party.” (more…)
Sprint’s 25th 4G smartphone is also its cheapest. This morning it announced the Aug. 21 availability of the Samsung Conquer 4G—a WiMAX phone with Android 2.3, a 1GHz processor, front and back cameras and a $100 price tag, after rebate. (more…)
When Nokia Siemens Networks first revealed its intention to buy Motorola’s commercial networks division last July, CEO Rajeev Suri said he had no plans to scale back the business unit’s considerable staff (CP:NSN keeping Moto Networks local). That was then. This is now: NSN will cut as many as 1500 positions globally in the wake of the acquisition, according to Bloomberg. (more…)
You can still buy a mobile broadband access plan from Leap Wireless if you want to, but Leap isn’t going to bend over backwards to sell it to you. In the second quarter, Leap’s Cricket Communications lost 132,000 subscribers, and it wasn’t sorry to see them go. Leap is trying to winnow down the number of customers that subscribe to its 3G-modem driven laptop broadband service due to the high amount of bandwidth they consume. Instead, it wants to focus on more profitable—and more network friendly—smartphone plans. (more…)
That a company of Google’s wealth and magnitude should go looking for public sympathies — or work to color itself as the industry ‘good guy,’ implying there are bad guys — surely says something about the incredible amounts of cash now at stake in the smartphone market. (more…)
Sprint has decided to act as a middleman between its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) partners and Clearwire’s 4G network, wholesaling the WiMAX service it already buys wholesale from Clearwire (Briefing Room: Sprint Becomes First U.S. Wireless Carrier to Make 4G Available to Wholesale Customers). Sprint said this week it will be the first wireless carrier to make a 4G service available to virtual operators, who until now have been stuck with the operators’ 2G voice and 3G data networks. (more…)
It turns out that the sell-off of Nortel’s wireless and related patents wasn’t the end but just the beginning of industry wrangling over their impact. The winners – including Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion – may ultimately use that intellectual property to expand their wireless ambitions or thwart rivals, perhaps most notably Google (CP: Nortel patents go for $4.5 billion to consortium). But first it looks like they’ll have to overcome some government scrutiny. (more…)
CTIA is asking Obama administration to clear unused government spectrum below 3 GHz for mobile broadband. A letter CTIA sent to President Obama today and signed by CTIA’s carrier members asks him to direct the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the government’s frequency manager, to make reallocating unencumbered spectrum a priority in order to fuel the wireless industry’s “virtuous cycle.” (more…)
Riding Groupon’s huge success in the daily deal space, numerous companies have come out of the woodwork to apply the social coupon model to mobile, taking advantage of smartphone technologies like GPS and push notification to tailor and target marketing campaigns. Ping4 is no exception, but it is utilizing those technologies in exceptional ways. It is using GPS location to geo-fence businesses offering such deals, allowing it to actively push what it calls “the deal of the moment” to customers. (more…)
Advertisement
Advertisement