WASHINGTON-An upcoming House bill could diminish the Pentagon's role in deciding the terms and conditions governing the transfer of Department of Defense spectrum to the mobile-phone industry for third-generation wireless systems, a move designed to put Commerce Secretary Donald Evans in charge of the...
WASHINGTON-A new Swedish study links analog cell-phone use to brain tumors, a major scientific development that comes as lawmakers prepare to introduce legislation that would earmark federal funds for wireless bioeffects research and repeal a 1996 telecom act provision that bans zoning boards from...
Monopoly claims on Microsoft Corp. might go out the window in the wireless space as major vendors, developers and operators expect to leverage both the software giant's .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition platforms for third-generation Web services, according to industry watchers."The evolution to...
Worldwide rollout of next-generation wireless services went 2 for 1 last week as both Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo and U.K.-based Vodafone Group plc introduced handsets for high-speed data services, while Finnish operator Sonera said it was delaying its rollout due to a lack of...
WASHINGTON-While the wireless industry steadfastly maintains the safety of cell phones, top mobile-phone manufacturers during the past decade have quietly sought-and received-patents to reduce the kind of radiation absorbed by the human head that some research suggests could be linked to brain cancer and...
TORONTO, Canada-France's Sagem SA has contracted 40 percent of its mobile phone manufacturing unit to Canada's Celestica Inc.Under the deal, Celestica will acquire Sagem's Czech Republic production facility.
An overlooked and potentially huge segment of the mobile-phone market is eagerly following the exploits of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. This segment watches PG-13 movies and, in general, must be dragged kicking and screaming to middle and high school.This segment is the...
Paging lit up the wireless industry like a white-hot star.It showed that fistfuls of money could be made using wireless technology. It showed that wireless companies could grow by leaps and bounds virtually overnight. Paging showed the industry that millions and millions of people...
Nextel Communications Inc. privately sold $1 billion of 10-year convertible senior notes in a "drive-by" sale to capitalize on favorable market conditions. The carrier plans to use the proceeds for network expansion, additional spectrum, strategic investments, working capital, debt service and other corporate purposes....
Cell-phone use is distractingDear Editor: Your article "Subcommittee agrees mobile phones distract, wants more data" addresses the hazards of cell-phone use while driving. As the sponsor of the Response Insurance National Driving Habits Survey, a scientifically valid survey of drivers from around the nation that...
WASHINGTON-Sources say Baltimore attorney Peter Angelos will drop an $800 million mobile-phone brain cancer lawsuit but will continue to press ahead with class-action lawsuits to force the wireless industry to supply consumers with radiation-reducing headsets, a development that could have a chilling effect on...
WASHINGTON-If you are a congressman driving one Friday evening to Connecticut while holding a mobile phone in your hand, and your wife exclaims suddenly that you are driving erratically, what do you do?When this happened to Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), he introduced legislation...
While a variety of wireless companies, from vendors to carriers, continue to talk about the benefits mobile commerce will bring, many industry observers agree that the explosion won't happen anytime soon.Last week Nokia Corp. worked to fan the flames of mobile commerce, releasing the...
LONDON-About 44 percent of all U.K. households had a mobile phone in 2000, but this year, 68 percent of U.K. households have a mobile phone, according to the "2001 U.K. Mobile Telephone Customer Satisfaction Study" from J.D. Power and Associates.Nearly one in 10 households...
Wireless companies in the United States are holding their breath, waiting for the widespread use of wireless data products and services, and-according to a variety of recently released reports-those companies will have to continue to wait while carriers, network designers, application and service providers...
WASHINGTON-The wireless industry may be an unwitting accomplice to mass-scale looting of an African mineral used in mobile-phone capacitors, a situation some believe is prolonging war, causing environmental destruction and contributing to human suffering in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.The world's top mobile-phone...
As technologies continue to advance and third-generation becomes more imminent, the mobile phone may be moving back into the place it began-the car.An increasingly mobile work force has led many to believe wireless location-commerce and telematics may be the next best thing for the...
WASHINGTON-Aides to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) last week sent out conflicting signals on whether the two lawmakers will follow up legislatively on a government mobile-phone health report expected to be released tomorrow. In April, RCR Wireless News reported the...
NEW YORK-Wireless data is like a diamond in the rough, waiting for ways to smooth out its rough edges into sparkling facets that will attract growing numbers of consumers into increasing amounts of usage.Where there is a business problem, so too exists a business...
Top players in both the vendor and carrier space are pitching in to advance GAIT-GSM ANSI Interoperability Team-a new network standard that fuses TDMA and GSM technologies to enhance roaming, preserve TDMA and serve as an interim solution in the sojourn to the third-generation...
WASHINGTON-Wireless phone use while driving is a distraction, but should phone use while driving be banned? Not unless more data proves they are the cause of a significant number of accidents, according to a House highways subcommittee hearing held last week."The data is not...
Symbian received an important lift after Nokia Corp. said that half its third-generation mobile phones will use the company's platform by 2004.The move ends speculation on whether Symbian's stakeholders, including Nokia, L.M. Ericsson and Motorola Inc., will actually use the company's operating platform. A...
For the thousands of children who are abducted each year, and for those adults with Alzheimer's Disease or other impairments that can cause confusion and often lead them to become lost, a new wireless device is available to help track and locate their whereabouts.Wherify...
China Mobile Communications Corp., the largest wireless operator in China, recently announced plans to create a wireless Internet setup much like NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service in Japan, but the company faces some significant challenges due to a cash-strapped population, cloudy government regulations and network...
