IPWireless wins first U.S. contract

IPWireless may have failed in its bid to win the Sprint 2.5 GHz contract, but that didn’t end its U.S. market presence. The privately held vendor announced this week its Time Division CDMA (TD-CDMA) technology will be deployed in New York City’s government broadband wireless network. Northrop Gruman won a $500 million contract with New York’s Department of Information Technology for the new public safety network supporting the city’s police, fire and other first-responder and traffic management personnel. Northrop Gruman said it would use the standards-based UMTS technology as the key wireless access component of the network, though no figures on how much of the half-billion-dollar fee would go to IPWireless.

Bango teams with Yahoo for mobile advertising

Yahoo is linking its marketing search engine into Bango’s third-party content platform, allowing businesses to initiate search advertising campaigns over the mobile Internet just as they would over Yahoo’s wired portal. Yahoo already provides such services to mobile operators in the U.K. and Japan, but with the Bango deal, content providers themselves can take their marketing initiatives off the carrier deck, promoting and billing their content independently of a direct operator relationship.

Airvana creates mobile VoIP lab

EV-DO innovator Airvana has created what it terms a ‘mobile VoIP lab’ to trial CDMA 1X EV-DO Revision A’s new IP telephony capabilities. Airvana said the purpose of the lab is to identify and address any issues arising from the convergence of voice and data packets over the same all IP radio access network—one of the key promises of voice. Rev. A brings the uplink capacity and lowers latency to levels deemed acceptable for supporting all IP voice. But while many carriers have committed to launching services which include VoIP, such as video conferencing or push-to-talk, whether the entire legacy voice network will migrate to IP is still in question.

VeriSign bundles acquisitions into new mega-platform

After more than a year of buying up content management and distribution companies, VeriSign announced the Digital Content Services platform, which includes assets if m-Qube, Kontiki and 3United as well as its new Jamster joint-venture with News Corp, its LightSurf messaging infrastructure and its billing infrastructure. VeriSign has been positioning itself as an all-in-one vertically integrated content platform that can handle every aspect of the value train from the underlying technology to transaction settlement. With the News Corp deal in place, VeriSign now also has its biggest customer, delivering the media giants vast stores of mobile content from MySpace to the Simpsons brand.

Global carriers create 4G industry group

Sprint and T-Mobile have joined a handful of other global mobile operators spanning the two major wide-area wireless technologies in creating a consortium to guide mobile technology developments beyond 3G. China Mobile, KPN, NTT DoCoMo, Orange and Vodafone also joined the group, called the Next Generation Mobile Networks Initiative. The group said it would work with standards bodies to guide mobile networks as they advance beyond the EV-DO and UMTS networks of today, developing a guiding set of principles and criteria both technology tracks should meet.

Aeris links to U.S. Cellular

M2M service provider Aeris has signed a resale agreement with U.S. Cellular, giving it access to the sixth-largest national wireless network for its telematics, security and transport communications applications. Aeris runs a nationwide M2M service grid over the networks of more than 30 GSM and CDMA carriers, serving 5.7 connections to home security systems, trucks and containers and other telematics systems. Aeris uses basic SMS for its machine-to-machine communications, but lately has been adding voice and direct data capabilities to its networks.