Back in October Mobile WiMax operator Open Range Communications filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At collapse Open Range still owed $73.5 million om a $267 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Utilities Program (RUS) designed to improve rural connectivity. With a Congressional inquiry launched into what the company did with the money, somehow Open Range thought it was a good idea to threaten to sue the FCC for failing to give the green light to LightSquared. Now the Denver Post reports that Open Range is still billing dozens of customers:The Better Business Bureau has also been fielding complaints from users about a non-existent company billing users for nonexistent service -- but has nobody to contact because technically the company no longer exists. Company equipment has been auctioned off and sold, yet somehow someone's still running the phantom billing machine.

Open Range Communications former CEO Bill Bearns still exists on LinkedIn, which still lists Open Range as his current employer. The company's bankruptcy filing lists contact phone numbers and e-mail addresses which don't work.

LightSquared is taking their battle with the GPS industry to a new level. Just a few weeks after the company accused the GPS industry of essentially rigging the testing process used to determine whether their planned hybrid satellite/LTE network will interfere with GPS equipment (a recent report says it does horribly, and the problems are not fixable), LightSquared is asking regulators to develop entirely new rules for GPS receivers.

Sprint unveiled their earnings this morning -- the first to be released since Sprint announced they'd finally be carrying the iPhone last October. According to Sprint they posted a loss of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter, up from a loss of $301 million one year earlier.

Frontier just got done swearing to the heavens they were dedicated to the FiOS TV customers they acquired from Verizon, after socking those customers with huge price hikes and whopping new $500 installation fees. The company can't afford to be in the TV business or expand fiber to the home services, but couldn't acknowledge as much pre-merger to regulators when they were busily promising new jobs in order to get the deal approved. Frontier's now reducing about a quarter of their Fort Wayne FiOS installation staff, something workers say will extend customer wait times -- which a local installer claims is already ten days for a technician visit. Verizon's other big deal with Fairpoint, which both companies also claimed would create jobs, has resulted in significant job losses for locals.

AT&T technician Andrel Reid has only been on the job six months installing AT&T's U-Verse service, but those six months have already been immensely eventful. The tech recently saved the life of a customer's baby, which during a site installation visit began passing out and choking. "I put the baby in a position that I was taught in training, put the baby in my palm, flipped her over and gave her a light thrust to her back and that's when everything came up and the baby actually started laughing and smiling at me," Reid said. While some techs (particularly among Comcast subcontractors) find themselves in the news for all the wrong reasons, others often act heroically. The CPR training given to many installers has saved more than a few lives over the years, and hopefully never gets cut for the sake of quarterly earnings.

Georgia is the latest state to try and impose restrictions on communities eager to deploy their own broadband after regional duopolists Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink convinced state legislators to erect roadblocks designed to keep the state's broadband market just how they like it: utterly uncompetitive. Such bills had fallen out of favor in recent years as locals realized they're crafted solely to protect regional incumbent ISP profits.

• Defunct, now non-existant OpenReach still billing customers [denverpost.com]
• Do users really care whether the web is open or not? [gigaom.com]
• DDoS now protesters' weapon of choice [theregister.co.uk]
• Wireless crunch faces political 'solutions' [sfgate.com]
• Amazon close to deal with Viacom; last step in plan to launch Netflix competitor [reuters.com]
• Hacker releases Symantec source code [reuters.com]
• Apple’s iTV and the carrier question [gigaom.com]
• Bill Shock & Awe case #493: Canadian man gets a $10000 data roaming bill after stay in USA [neowin.net]
• 4G Phones Are Really Fast — At Draining Batteries [slashdot.org]
• Engineers Boost Computer Processor Performance By Over 20% [ncsu.edu]
• Silicon Valley recovering faster than rest of nation [wsj.com]
• Nokia axes 4,000 [theregister.co.uk]

• Rep. Lamar Smith: Enemy of the Internet? [techdirt.com]
• The Perpetual War: Pirates and Creators [nytimes.com]
• Dish: This year's Lightsquared? [lightreading.com]
• Apple Might Lose A $1.6 Billion Lawsuit For Using The Word 'iPad' [businessinsider.com]
• Lightsquared opens another front on GPS debate [kansascity.com]
• Ohio governor announces &10 million, 10-fold boost to state's broadband network [physorg.com]
• Elevate aims high, agrees to become Sprint's newest MVNO [engadget.com]
• U.S. online spending hit $50 billion last quarter [cnet.com]
• Study credits 'app economy' with 500,000 U.S. jobs [cnet.com]
• Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux computer on track to launch later this month [arstechnica.com]
• Judge denies EMI's bid to halt resale of digital music [cnet.com]
• Apple in early discussions to open stores inside of Sam’s Club locations [9to5mac.com]
• Apple eyes ISPs to sell 'iTV' [reghardware.com]
• Fewer Wireless Companies Could Mean Lower Prices - Wait, What? [multichannel.com]
• Super Bowl XLVI Drove Internet Traffic Down As Much As 20% [multichannel.com]

The latest numbers from Instat suggest that just 7% of potential customers use in-flight Wi-Fi. Though that number is still up from 4% in 2010, usage is still low enough that making the services profitable continues to be an ongoing problem. Customers have grown increasingly used to getting free Wi-Fi from coffee shops, their ISPs, and even in airports courtesy of Google -- and most seem to feel that the price for in-flight service remains in the luxury range. Instat notes availability remains limited with just 16% of the North American commercial fleet being wired for Wi-Fi service in 2010. Airlines collected $155 million in charges for onboard Internet service in 2011, and are expected to collect $225 million in 2012.

When Sprint first announced they'd be spending between four and five billion dollars to retrofit all of their antenna base stations (and upgrading to LTE), the company noted that plan involved the slow phasing out of the formerly-Nextel iDen network, with that effort starting in 2013 and the network being shuttered completely by 2017. The company this week launched a new website that gives more detail on the company's base station consolidation and iDen network shutdown on a region-by-region basis. As iDen gets shut down, Sprint plans to use that 800 MHz spectrum to help supplement capacity for their new LTE network. According to Sprint, their new "next-generation" Push-to-talk coverage footprint will increase to nearly 2.7 million square miles and is expected to cover a population of 309 million, up from the iDen network's the iDEN network’s 908,370 square miles covering a population of 278 million.

Yesterday Verizon announced that they'd be partnering with RedBox on a new streaming video service. Verizon had been considering such a project for some time, at one point even considering some kind of over-the-top live subscription TV play to be offered to customers outside of their traditional FiOS footprint. Eric Bruno, Verizon’s SVP of consumer product management, tells Multichannel News that it's "to be determined" whether they'll offer Live TV. "From a FiOS perspective, we participate in about 30% of the marketplace," Bruno said. "We want to compete in 100% of it… From a Verizon perspective, this lets us compete on a national basis." Given Verizon's cozy new relationship with the cable industry, and their walled-garden approach on the 360, expecting anything too disruptive to traditional TV would be a tall order.

It's fairly amazing to realize that this year was the first time the Superbowl was streamed online, despite the significant spread of faster broadband (DOCSIS 3.0, FTTH). However, the reviews of NBC's effort weren't particularly good, with users complaining of very poor stream quality, lag, and limited viewing options in the age of interactive Internet video.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail, Canadian providers Rogers and BCE will be among the first ISPs to partner with Apple on their upcoming television sets. Apple's new televisions have been rumored for some time, and are expected to integrated the Siri voice command functionality found in the iPhone 4S. Like Microsoft's XBox Live video offerings, it sounds like Apple is signing on numerous partners for content. However as we've noted a lot lately, Apple doesn't have a magical formula to bypass the entertainment industry's restrictive licensing, which has been responsible for keeping numerous companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) from truly revolutionizing Internet video.

In the latest version of "The Mother of All Network Benchmark Tests," Signals Research finds that AT&T's LTE network performs "markedly better" that Verizon's LTE network in early tests in several markets, while noting that LTE performance overall lags somewhat due to an immature ecosystem and lower-quality early LTE devices. "Once normalized for channel bandwidth and MIMO, not to mention taking into consideration network loading, the performance differences across all technologies were relatively modest in the downlink," notes the report. "In a few cases, DC-HSDPA outperformed LTE, even without making these adjustments and EV-DO Rev A outperformed HSPA+." The firm noted that LTE upstream speeds are where the technology tends to notably outperform predecessors.

Back in 2010 we noted that Cablevision was tinkering with some kind of mobile phone service that relied on Wi-Fi, which would obviously be partnered with the company's significant investment in offering Wi-Fi to its subscribers along metro NYC commuter lines. "We are trialing phones that switch from Wi-Fi to cellular and back as you move in and out of Wi-Fi and cellular zones," then Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge said in a 2010 earnings call. Fierce Cable has since spotted some additional information in some patent filings, which note the cable company is working on a service called "Optimum Mobile" but has yet to iron out kinks such as getting suitable roaming partners in place for when users are outside of the range of Wi-Fi.

Last November Verizon Wireless launched a new promotion offering new LTE users double their usual data allotment for wireless data plans, something Verizon admitted was both to push users toward new LTE phones -- and away from their EVDO network in order to ease any possible iPhone congestion issues. The deal recently ceased, but was part of the reason AT&T raised their caps ever-so-slightly (unfortunately, their prices increased as well). Now, in addition to the launch of the Droid 4, Verizon plans to bring the deal back starting February 10. As of Friday, anybody that buys a new LTE smartphone can once again get double data for their selected plan, which for most of you means $30 for 4 GB of monthly usage.

• Cablevision develops technology for WiFi-based mobile phone service [fiercecable.com]
• Is the Open Web Doomed? Open Your Eyes and Relax [techpresident.com]
• MPAA Sues LimeWire Back From The Dead [torrentfreak.com]
• Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year [readwriteweb.com]
• Cricket Wireless has the music industry feeling chirpy: MuveMusic helps labels tap vast underserved audience - people who can't afford computers [latimes.com]
• WiFi in flight has yet to soar [pcworld.com]
• Wireless Firms Live Or Die With Smartphone Strategies [investors.com]
• Simplexity MVNO Services will launch wireless service with Sprint [cnet.com]
• Motorola seeking 2.25% of Apple's mobile sales for 3G patent use [techspot.com]
• Antitrust hearing planned for Verizon-Time Warner deals [jsonline.com]
• Hackers wanted $50,000 to keep Symantec source code private [cnet.com]
• Woman fights copyright suit by claiming porn can't be copyrighted [torrentfreak.com]
• Verizon's double data promotion reappears Friday [cnet.com]
• HUD Google Glasses are real and they are coming soon [9to5google.com]
• EU takes its data privacy seriously; why won't the U.S.? [fiercetelecom.com]

• Copyright lawsuit targets owners of non-secure wireless networks; Failure to secure routers may let others download copyrighted content [computerworld.com]
• Global broadband snapshot: Hong Kong throttles the rest of the world [networkworld.com]
• Voice and Video Calls Via Wi-Fi From 30,000 Feet? [cio.com]
• Sprint details IDEN's death [lightreading.com]
• Powerline Carrier – Close,but Likely No Cigar [networkworld.com]
• Solving the Snowballing Wireless Data Problem [ecommercetimes.com]
• Android nabbing more than half of new smartphone buyers [cnet.com]
• CheapAir.com First to Tell Travelers Which Flights Have WiFi, TV and More [prnewswire.com]
• Prepaid iPhone Set to Disrupt Industry [wirelessweek.com]
• Portable gaming: Is mobile the future? [fiercewireless.com]
• Qualcomm is exploring the last 4G frontier: The sky [gigaom.com]
• Amazon in the Process of Launching a Retail Store [goodereader.com]
• SOPA/PIPA Opponents Tell Hill To Scrap Legislation, Period; All Efforts, including OPEN Act, Should be Deep-Sixed for a Do-Over [multichannel.com]
• CableLabs: VOD Advertising Technically Ready To Roll [multichannel.com]

Last summer major ISPs including Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Cablevision signed off on a new plan by the RIAA and MPAA taking aim at copyright infringers on their networks. According to the plan, after four warnings ISPs are to begin taking "mitigation measures," which range from throttling a user connection to filtering access to websites until users acknowledge receipt of "educational material." The plan, as with most plans of this type, was hashed out privately with the government's help -- but with no consumer or independent expert insight.

Anonymous investors tell The New York Times that billionaire hedge fund manager and LightSquared backer Philip A. Falcone didn't have a very good 2011. Falcone's hedge fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, lost 46.6 percent of its value last year as LightSquared ran face first into political headaches and GPS interference concerns. "The investors who remain in the fund are not happy with the results, but at least some who spoke on condition of anonymity saw it coming," says reporter Azam Ahmen. "One felt that the valuation was overly rosy for too long." LightSquared's fortunes don't look to be improving anytime soon, and Falcone continues to face several SEC investigations.