American Tower told analysts last week that it could have an interest in the Verizon Wireless towers if the carrier does decide to sell. The tower portfolio is not officially on the market, but Verizon has reportedly hired the same investment bank that helped...
Samsung is trumpeting a Wi-Fi breakthrough that it says will offer Wi-Fi speeds that could rival the fastest fiber speeds available today. Using the 60 GHz spectrum band and beamforming technology, Samsung says it has achieved Wi-Fi speeds of up to 575 megabytes...
Nokia's 20-year history with China Mobile is paying off as the world's largest carrier builds its TD-LTE network. On Friday Nokia Networks said China Mobile will spend $970 million dollars on Nokia's equipment, software and services this year and next.
This contract news puts some...
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.
There are different ways to implement edge clouds, depending on the access technology. Macro cells vendors embed secured computing and...
NATE joins FCC safety workshop
Two months ago the FCC announced that it would host a tower climber safety and injury prevention workshop in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 14. An industry event this huge seems like something the National Association of Tower Erectors (NATE) would...
The Wi-Fi Alliance has enhanced Passpoint, the multivendor standard designed for seamless identification and authentication of Wi-Fi hot spots. Service providers can now distribute their specific subscriber policies, such as which networks to join and in what order of preference. In addition, users can...
PCIA has won a $750,000 grant from the Department of Labor to establish standards for wireless training programs, and certifications to enable workers to meet those standards. The grant is part of the federal government's broad initiative to fund job-specific training, a program which...
Marriott will pay the government $600,000 to settle an investigation of allegations that it tried to keep hotel guests from using their mobile devices as personal Wi-Fi hotspots. The FCC started the investigation after a former guest at Nashville's Opryland Hotel alleged that Marriott...
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.
One of my summer projects has been to relearn the economics of broadband connectivity. While this column focuses on the...
An interesting LTE race is brewing in Slovenia, primarily between Telekom Austria and Telekom Slovenije — or whoever winds up buying a majority stake in the state-owned Telekom Slovenije.
Slovenia was a bit slow off the LTE mark in auctioning off its “digital dividend,” the sub-1GHz...
Alcatel-Lucent and Accenture have formed the Accenture Alcatel-Lucent Business Group to design and build customer care operations for IP networks. The group will focus on mobile customer care solutions based on Alcatel-Lucent's Motive Line of products. Motive was a Texas software startup acquired by...
HP CEO Meg Whitman has switched gears and now says that spinning off the company's computer and printer businesses is the right move after all. In the process, HP will let another 5,000 people go. That brings HP's total announced layoffs to as many...
The use of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) severely complicates the process of measuring eNodeB power and modulation quality in LTE systems. The difficulties include the fact that spectrum analyzers have just one receiver, while two or more receivers are needed for complete demodulation...
As someone who focuses on mobile networks, sometimes I need to be reminded that apart from the very crucial radio access network and some types of backhaul, most of a "wireless" network is actually wired — and that the trends and challenges that face...
A town in the heart of Silicon Valley looks like a pioneer in facilitating outdoor distributed antenna systems (oDAS). The city council of Mountain View has voted to allow AT&T and DAS provider ExteNet Systems to place antennas atop utility poles, even though it...
OSHA gives 6 citations, company contests
This past March saw the tragic loss of two tower workers in Kansas when two towers they were working on collapsed. Inevitably and rightfully, OSHA has now formally issued six citations to the offending company, Wireless Horizon. This included...
Mobile Minute
AT&T and Amazon are teaming up to offer secure access to the cloud. Together the companies will extend AT&T NetBond to Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud provider by a wide margin. AT&T's NetBond offers companies secure virtual private networks, and already...
I have just returned from attending the latest installment of the Terrapinn event in Dubai. The conference atmosphere was upbeat about the current growth and future opportunities for this region. Although a relatively small conference, the attendees and speakers were of a very high caliber...
Wireless infrastructure services providers see distributed antenna systems (DAS) as logical extensions of their businesses. Like a cell tower, a DAS can be designed to support one carrier's spectrum, or it can support several carriers and create multiple revenue streams for the system owner.
The...
Mobile Minute
Update: Verizon Wireless said today that it will not implement the LTE network optimization that was set to take effect October 1.
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Original story:
October 1 — Starting today, Verizon Wireless customers who use more than 4.7 GB of monthly data on an unlimited plan...
Carrier service revenue is not keeping pace with customer data usage, and that could mean that operators will not continue current levels of infrastructure spending. In addition, the two biggest spenders in the North American market — Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility — are...
T-Mobile US said it has tapped network partner Nokia Networks to expand the reach and capabilities of its LTE network, including the deployment of LTE-Advanced equipment, greater spectrum support for LTE services, and expanded availability of voice over LTE and Wi-Fi services.
The new contract...
Wireless and cable operators have deployed about five million Wi-Fi hot spots as of last year, and that number is expected to double in the next few years. Data traffic offloading from 3G and 4G wireless networks is also expected to rapidly increase, according...
Alcatel-Lucent, currently ranked as the leading vendor of small cell equipment, has a new partnership that will put more small cells on urban "street furniture," such as bus stops, benches and billboards. Alcatel-Lucent has partnered with its neighbor in Paris, JCDecaux, which calls itself...
