Hello!And welcome to a special edition of our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. As 2007 draws to a close, I'm going to see if the year unfolded like we thought it would. Look below to see how accurate our prophecies for this year...
Both Nokia Corp.'s and Qualcomm Inc.'s stocks were down a few percent each on news that the United States International Trade Commission had rebuffed Qualcomm on its complaint that Nokia infringed on three Qualcomm patents regarding GSM technology.The two parties are in arbitration, under...
CompUSA, a leading consumer electronics retailer and purveyor of unlocked mobile phones, is going out of business, the company announced. The announcement did not cite a reason for CompUSA's sale. But the electronics retailer, founded in 1984 in Dallas, had announced last fall that...
Google Inc. and the upcoming 700 MHz auction seem to have sparked an "open" movement among U.S. carriers. Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility have been preaching their new "open" message from the public pulpit, and the mainstream press has embraced the carriers' new mantras,...
Better late than never.Handsets that didn't arrive by "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday"-the ultimate days for in-store and online shopping, respectively-may still make an impression on harried shoppers.Nokia Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. announced that Nokia's 6263 will be available online, adding a seventh...
Wireless patent licensor InterDigital Inc. said it won confirmation from a federal judge that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. owes it $134 million in royalties for sales of GSM and GPRS/EDGE devices between 2003 and 2005.InterDigital's stock climbed more than 20% to $20.47 by midday.Samsung...
The following list details this week's infrastructure awards for the cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX industries. The contracts are broken down by transmission technology, country and vendor. The value of the contract is included when available.Cellular--India: Idea Cellular has chosen L.M. Ericsson to supply a...
As major media outlets deliver their take on the departure of Motorola Inc.'s CEO Ed Zander, two camps are forming. Anointed CEO-to-be Greg Brown is the right man at the right time. Or he isn't.Since joining Motorola in 2003, Brown has led the company's...
VERIZON WIRELESS' DECLARATION LAST WEEK that "any application, any device" will run on its network next year was clearly an overstatement, though executives acknowledged later that itsCDMA network allows only CDMA-based devices. The juxtaposition of overstatement and subsequent qualification in a way reflected many...
VERIZON WIRELESS LAST WEEK confirmed what executives from its parent companies have been hinting at for some time: the carrier will move away from CDMA technology for its next-generation network, and embrace the OFDM-based Long Term Evolution technology. In essence, the service provider concluded...
FOLLOWING VERIZON WIRELESS' ANNOUNCEMENT that it will use Long Term Evolution technology for its fourth-generation network, many who follow the industry immediately began to peg some infrastructure vendors as winners and others as losers.The bulk of the 'loser' chatter was directed at Qualcomm Inc.,...
A world of overlapping fourth-generation wireless technologies is still years in the offing even by the most optimistic observers, yet there's already a growing market for companies looking to prepare for the next frontier in mobile.Long Term Evolution, WiMAX and Ultra Mobile Broadband each...
Verizon Wireless' two major announcements this week laid out not only a vision of open access for devices and applications on its current network, but augmented that vision with the carrier's technology choice for its next-generation network. "We see 4G really being the enablement...
Verizon Wireless announced it will use Long Term Evolution technology for its fourth generation network. The carrier said that it and parent company Vodafone Group plc will begin testing LTE technology next year with equipment suppliers Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola Inc., Nokia- Siemens, and Nortel...
Verizon Wireless' declaration this morning that "any application, any device" will run on its network next year is clearly an overstatement-Verizon's CDMA network allows only CDMA-based devices, in use by 60% of subscribers in the United States market, but only 20% of the global...
The following list details this week's infrastructure awards for the cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX industries. The contracts are broken down by transmission technology, country and vendor. The value of the contract is included when available.Cellular--China: Alcatel-Lucent won contracts with China Mobile and China Unicom...
More than 1 billion W-CDMA handsets are expected to ship between 2006 and 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 22%, according to a report from IMS Research."The growth is fuelled by both the GSM and CDMA markets," said Bill Morelli, the report's...
THERE HAVE BEEN BIGGER wireless deals before the Federal Communications Commission this year, but perhaps none as controversial and potentially precedent-setting as its consideration of Verizon Wireless' proposed $2.67 billion purchase of Rural Cellular Corp. as it affects one state of the many involved...
Dropping vowels from the name of a wireless handset, apparently, may never die. Same with dropping names. AT&T Mobility said that the SLM (hmm . as in "Slim"?) would be on shelves Nov. 23-the day after Thanksgiving, historically the biggest single shopping day of...
While mobile-phone carriers and manufacturers face a key hearing-aid compatibility deadline in early 2008, Apple's Inc. wildly popular iPhone will get a pass on a major government disability access mandate that wireless companies already have spent significant resources to meet.The situation does not sit...
THE MOBILE BANKING SPACE saw several shifts last week, as Qualcomm Inc. announced that it will acquire mobile banking company Firethorn Holdings L.L.C. for $210 million, and AT&T Mobility launched a Firethorn-supported platform that will be preloaded on its handsets starting later this year.Analysts...
Hello!And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There's a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWirelessNews.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We...
Over the past week, a wide breadth of telecom companies have completed Long Term Evolution tests.Nokia Corp. announced results last week from the first phase of a trial that the company claimed achieved 100 megabit-per-second data transfer speeds. The trial was conducted by the...
AT&T Mobility launched a mobile banking platform that will be preloaded on its handsets starting later this year. The offering is now available for download to more than 30 of the carrier's devices, which account for about 30 million wireless handsets in the market.The...
