Mobile music reaches tipping point 

By: By Rich Karpinski

Days before Apple’s iPhone gains 3G capabilities courtesy of AT&T -- seemingly enhancing its ability to access over-the-air music downloads -- Verizon Wireless this week took a big step away from OTA music to link its mobile music ambitions closer to the PC...

Am I missing something here? 

By: By Carol Wilson

At something called the Personal Democracy Forum held this week in New York, Columbia Law Professor Tim Yu expressed his support for a national broadband policy by decrying what he called the high price of broadband in the U.S. ...

New iPhone, old-style subsidies 

By: By Rich Karpinski

By now, you’ve seen all the coverage of the iPhone 2.0. But for our industry, the news behind the news is AT&T’s changing relationship with Apple...

Time to get ready 

By: By Carol Wilson

Years ago, before the advent of cell phones, a friend of mine used a calling card to call home from a phone booth after her car broke down. When the next phone bill came, she discovered her one-minute emergency call cost more than a 30-minute Mother’s Day call to a far-distant state...

Who knew? 'Open' Web players turn to 'walled garden' models 

By: By Rich Karpinski

Major Web players, so quick to be critical of the ‘closed’ telecom industry and its walled-garden approaches to services, are now turning to exactly the models it criticized -- even as they tout open user profiles and so-called data portability...

SMBs are going mobile 

By: By Steve Hilton, Yankee Group

Does anyone work 100% of the time from the desk anymore? I doubt it. Small- to medium-sized business employees become more mobile every year, and the technology tools needed to support them must change at a faster pace...

Are MVNOs banding together? 

By: By Kevin Fitchard

The latest scuttlebutt has Virgin Mobile and Helio discussing a merger deal. The world is a dangerous place for MNVOs considering the rash of bankruptcies and closures in the last two years. Apparently the remaining ones are considering forming packs in order to survive...

Carrier femtocell pricing doomed? 

By: By Danny Briere, TeleChoice

I’ve been a proponent of the femtocell concept since the first rumblings of the concept came out of the startup community. We like femtocells -- everything about the topic. And really, what’s not to like about something that gives you a “five bar” wireless experience inside your home? ...

Cheaper! Faster! Slimmer!  

By: By Sarah Reedy

In a research note released last week, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi is recommending a carrier subsidy on the iPhone to bring the price down to the $200 level. He predicts this will lead to a significant boost in sales...

Going green: From fringe to mainstream 

By: By Stefan Bewley, Altman Vilandrie & Co.

Although the mobile industry has adopted a variety of environmental initiatives, significant opportunity exists to more tightly integrate environmentally sound practices with standard business operations to strengthen brand and increase competitive advantage...

Wireless' Pivot point 

By: By Sarah Reedy

The demise of Pivot, Sprint's joint venture with leading cable companies to offer subscribers wireless services, has had many ceding the market to telecom service providers...

MDU Odd Couples 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...

Devices drive data usage, operators find 

By: By Rich Karpinski

A funny thing happened on the way to the 3G mass market: carrier data revenues turned out to be just as dependent -- if not more dependent -- on the devices they offer than the availability or even the speeds of the data services themselves...

Shoe on the other foot 

By: By Carol Wilson

When the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off...

Rallying behind mobile TV 

By: By Sarah Reedy

The CTIA Wireless show and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) both held in Las Vegas this month are inherently different shows. One focuses solely on the (albeit increasingly harder to define) wireless industry, while the other narrows in on the digital media and content market...

Mobile banking’s global currency 

By: By Sarah Reedy

Still a nascent service, mobile banking is expected to reach 32.9 million users worldwide in 2008 and grow to 103.9 million in 2011, according to a study released this week by Gartner...

Landline replacement as a service 

By: By Joan Engebretson

Considering how many people are foregoing a landline phone in favor of wireless, I've been thinking that there's an opportunity for a wireless operator to create an offering specifically positioned as a landline replacement service...

Knight Rider, ad writer 

By: By Ed Gubbins

The latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore...

Not satisfied on customer satisfaction 

By: By Carol Wilson

One thing that must be said about global telecom executives is that they aren't overly self-satisfied. At least that's what a global survey, done by The Economist Intelligence Unit for Oracle, would seem to indicate...

Millennials drive mobile ad acceptance 

Even more than the enterprise user pushing data limits or early adopter downloading cutting-edge applications, it is the 10-year-old text message fanatic and the video game–obsessed 16-year-old who are driving the demand for handsets that can truly do anything. At a Motorola roundtable discussion at CTIA, Lewis Ward, research manager of wireless communications research for IDC, defined this category of users as the millennial generation: those born after 1980 who grew up with information technology and have an innate trust of the Internet...

CTIA: The end of an era 

By: By Sarah Reedy

LAS VEGAS--The Smartphone Summit kicks off CTIA today, but one company noticeably absent from the excitement is Motorola. Just one week after announcing the planned spin off of its handset business, Motorola will most likely keep a low profile the entire week of the wireless conference following its CTIA preview telebriefing last week, which was largely drowned out by the noise of the planned business separation...

The case for videoconferencing 

By: By Carol Wilson

As someone who has recycled diligently for the past 15 years and rides public transportation to work even during Chicago's brutal winters -- and this has been one of those -- I was feeling a little smug when I logged onto a Web site promising to determine my carbon footprint...

Just what are we opting-in to? 

By: By Kevin Fitchard

Every week, I engage in the same evening ritual. After sorting through my mail, I find an envelope from AT&T, which I open assuming it's a bill or perhaps a letter complimenting me on the fine journalism I do here at Telephony. But with one exception each month, it is always junk mail: a check enticing me to sign up for home phone service or a pamphlet extolling the virtues of DSL...

Bundling shifts from voice to data -- will it work? 

By: By Kevin Fitchard

If you wanted any more proof that data is the future for wireless network operators, just look at the recent shift in so-called unlimited plans. Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and, this week, Alltel have all unveiled unlimited voice plans for about 100 bucks a month...

Priority at a price 

By: By Sarah Reedy

SMS text messages have become as pervasive as cell phones themselves. Once reserved for younger users keen on digital shorthand, it is now an accepted mode of communication for parents, businesspeople and users of all ages. In the past two days alone, SMS text has been making headlines for its growth potential, new applications and ability to unveil a scandal...