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So AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion by the government to build out a wireless first responders network for FirstNet. I guess they'll just take a little bit of that and give it back. Yeah, this will probably end well.

This.

Sprint Admits Deceptive 'Half-Off' Deal Really Offers Only 20 Percent Off: http://www.cio.com/article/285...

Sprint Counts on Ignorance with New Half Price Plans: https://www.wirelessweek.com/b...

No, Sprint isn’t really cutting your phone bill in half: http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...

The story pretty much says the same thing.
AT&T has said that it will cost them $39 Billion to buy TMobile. It has also claimed to investors that it will save them $10Billion.
The justification is that it will enlarge Wireless coverage in USA.
The leak now claims that the expanded network coverage will cost only $3.8 Billion http://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2011/08/unredacted-ATT-filing-shows-high-price-tag/
So AT&T Pays $39 Billion, saves $3.8 Bilion in network costs and $6.2 Billion in non-network costs (say closing and selling stores/laying off duplicated jobs). Assume that Sprint is worth the same as TMobile intrinscially - which is approx. $10B. The remaining $19 Billion premium paid must then be the cost of eliminating competition or the cost of keeping sprint from expanding.

Apple has a substantial lead?

(Note: the title of the first article is misleading; according to the article, Apple as a single hardware vendor is in the lead, but Android as an OS has twice the market share as iOS)

I think you really underestimate people. I think the general public understands that movies consume a lot of data, and I certainly think most smart phone owners do. Even if some of them didn't, people generally don't stare at their shrinking wallet as drool drips of their chin. They can learn.

Entities like youtube can adapt too. If people feel constrained by their data limits, they will demand that content providers be cognizant of this. Many content providers already are, simply because it's too fucking slow to watch hi-quality videos on a cell phone (because of people like you who use 10 GB a month!!).

AT&T is planning on putting a cap at 2GB a month. According to AT&T, 98% of their customers use less than that (and 65% use only 200 MB!). http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/2010/06/Business-ATT-Data-Use-New-Plans-Data-Services/

Wait a second here. Wasn't the lack of multitasking a feature that made the iPad and iPhone so great? It allowed you to relax and compute!

What are they doing? Why is Apple taking all of the zen out?

Well, Nokia uses the Micro USB connector. And Sony Ericsson seems to be on board as well.

Just by market share alone those two make up more than 45% of the world wide market for new phones.

Get any of LG, Samsung or Motorola to sign up for this, and you're looking at more than 50% of the market for new cell phones.

But even with 45% of the market for new phones, it's still a massive incentive for the rest of the market. You could end up with a situation where new phones don't come with a charger, and you pay maybe 10 bucks for a new one if you need it. After all, with 45% of new cell phones needing this kind og charger, that's a huge opportunity for selling them separately.

I, for one, would like to see something similar happen to laptops as well, even though my 95W power brick is over sized for a netbook, it'd be nice not to have to pay a minor fortune to find the right one.

Not for long. Sprint purchased Nextel and is migrating them off of Motorola's proprietary iDEN network over to CDMA REV-A. The combined network is too big for the 10.x.x.x address space.

http://www.wirelessweek.com/article.aspx?id=76946

http://mrtmag.com/mag/radio_pt_cellular_works/

What was your altitude at the time you believe he may have been "Recieving a call"?
Do you remember your speed?

"The biggest problem with a phone signal sent from the air is that it can reach several different cell sites simultaneously. The signal can interfere with callers already using that frequency, and because there is no way for one cell site to hand off calls to another that is not adjacent to it, signals can become scrambled in the process. That's why wireless calls from jetliners don't last long, says Kathryn Condello, vice president of industry operations for CTIA. The network keeps dropping the calls, even if they are re-established later." http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA160201.html? spacedesc=News

AT&T Wireless has had its own version of this for a while now, #ID. http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA521810.html. Looks like this offering is from MusiKube as mentioned in the linked article.

Note that from a PC you could always use http://www.musicbrainz.org/ if you're trying to fix those ID3 tags.

Friggin' disgrace he is.

Bill Gates is the Osama bin Laden of the Internet and should be locked up for all the harm he's done, which by the way exceeds the economic damage caused by the real Osama bin Laden.

MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.

What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.

To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contributions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or are fictional Enron style accounting.

Ok. So what's left? His philantropic seem to be based on getting matching funds for purchases of expensive medications manufactured by the multi-national pharmaceuticals he has invested heavily in. The targeting of the so called gifts can also be questioned as they have the appearance of an agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.

He should be locked up.

Friggin' disgrace he is.

MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.

What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.

To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contriutions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or fictional Enron style accounting.

Lock him up.

In other words, no income for the government from them.

So in other words if you count the lost productivity due to M$ viruses, worms, trojans, and general interoperability problems, it's a liability for the U.S. to have M$ in the country. Oh, yeah and arrays of cracked MS-Windows machines cranking out spam for damage of over $58 billion per year

So no income from MS, great expense from MS, and it's largely MS pushing the sw patent issue. So who's going to gain from sw patents in Europe except the portfolio companies? They might gain, but they sure don't produce or develop software.

Europe uses GSM and now UMTS, and there's no option to use something better, because GSM/UMTS is The Law.

Oh fuck. I better tell all these providers that GSM/UMTS is the law. Especially Portugal.

Or how about Sweden launching rural 3G in Sweden and Norway using 450MHz CDMA. Shit. I better ring them too. That was close!

Question: what products -- especially "high-tech" products -- from a century ago would you want to use today on a regular basis, given the alternatives? Not their decendents, e.g., modern jet aircraft, hybrid power-plant automobiles, digital cameras, etc., but the ones actually built a century ago? I suspect the list will be a rather short one, including buildings, furniture, typewriters (multipart forms, you know) and artwork/antiques.

My point is, planned obsolesence or no, technology does continue to advance, and it makes very little sense to design some products to endure more than a few years in normal use. Those "well-built" analog cell phones from just a few years ago will be nice paperweights in another couple of years when the carriers start phasing out their analog service.

As Sun says, the network is the computer. We're not going to have phones as computers until the phones are on the Net, and I don't mean 2400 baud GPRS.

Give me, in a Treo package (i.e. with thumbboard), a 320x480 screen (like a Tungsten, not a 160x160 like the Treo 600), high-speed Internet, and a video recorder with sound (because the failure of the mainstream media demands that the citizenry does its own reporting). Give me that now. Don't wait for the translation. Don't wait for 1X EV-DV.

This will be using licensed frequency blocks, and won't interfer with the 2.4GHz unlicensed frequences used by 802.11.

All this really is, is warmed over MMDS. MMDS was going to be the next big thing in the 90's - Sprint, in particular, was active in MMDS (you might remember it was called Sprint ION). As with a lot of new technologies, it was rolled out into a few markets, lost a lot of money, and was shut down.

Flash forward a couple of years - 802.11b/g (WiFi) is hot (hence the name - WiMax), broadband Internet usage popular, and the equipment is better/cheaper, so wireless companies are going to give it another go - except this time it will be sold as broadband Internet + VOIP, instead of a replacement for cable TV and also broadband Internet.

From browsing the user reports in the DSL Reports forum, it looks like, despite Sprint's best efforts to feck it up, most people really were happy with their ION performance, and very sad to see it shut off.

I commend timothy, a so-called "editor" at Slashdot, for trying to write a summary of his experiences at CES. However, the following reviews are done by more qualified journalists. I recommend them instead.

Wireless Week, High Fidelity Review, Stereophile, CNN.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Media-Savvy Internet Pundit

Also, contrary to this post's title, Wal-Mart still plans a major implementation of the technology in its distribution centers.

In a recent article by WirelessWeek.com, the last paragraph mentions: "the 3585 CDMA 1x handset which should begin shipping to Sprint PCS as soon as next week." J2ME, Polyphonic ringtones, and greyscale LCD.

WirelessWeek: "Until recently, it seemed as if Verizon Wireless had turned up its nose at Java in favor of BREW. But the carrier has changed its attitude and recently confirmed it plans to offer Java-based applications, which it expects to hit the market in early 2003.

Ironically, the word comes as Verizon started giving its customers a sip of BREW, Qualcomm's binary runtime environment for wireless. The company began selling BREW applications to its 2G customers in San Diego in the first quarter as part of the first phase of a nationwide BREW deployment."

Read the rest here:
Verizon's Change of Heart

Forget Aeron chairs, check out the stuff in their auction.

Forget Aeron chairs, check out the stuff in their auction.

Something I wrote elsewhere once upon a time:

This year, I've been wearing a pager in hospital, while my digital PCS phone sits either freezing or melting in my car... stashed safely in the parking lot. It's due to the familiar fact that hospitals have those gigantic signs posted everywhere, screaming about how any device that transmits RF might cause a massive explosion or result in patient deaths. We commonly have this explained to us by the fact that "cellular phones and other RF transmitters may interfere with sensitive medical equipment." Aren't these sensitive pieces of equipment RF shielded in any way to prevent this, let alone to prevent the multitude of walkie-talkie conversations and telemetry broadcasts permeating the hospital hallways from upsetting the various electronic doodads? I've even seen docs answer their mobile phones right in front of me, ON HOSPITAL PROPERTY, thumbing their noses at the dictum that "PHONE IN HOSPITAL BAD."

I, procrastinating my own reading, did a quick search online for an answer to this question which has plagued me and my colleauges for some time now. Here are a few highlights from different points of view:

Digital Cellular Phone Interference with Cardiac Pacemakers
Is There an Effect of a Cellular Phone on Pacemaker Function?
Is it time for Cellular Bill of Rights?
Medical Center Goes Wireless
EM interference of external pacemakers... study
Effect of mobile phone on life-saving and life-sustatning systems
Interference to medical equipment form mobile phones.
Initial experience with a wireless PDA as a teleradiology terminal...

--- [DrPsycho] Coping with reality since 1975.

Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.

Here they use them in Bosnia.
Here they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers.
Here's the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity.
Here is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph.
Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers."

It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.


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