Monday Evening Links07:02PM Monday Dec 14 2009 by Revcb5 comments Last week AT&T suffered through yet another week of bad press. Comments by CEO Randall Stephenson were interpreted to mean AT&T was not only complaining about people actually using the AT&T 3G network -- but blaming consumers for AT&T's inability to prepare for iPhone bandwidth demand. story continues..21 comments We were starting to wonder why we'd gone a whole month without someone having to take out a second mortgage to pay their wireless broadband bill. Not to disappoint, the UPI notes how a 13-year-old boy racked up a $21,917 Verizon Wireless bill. story continues..128 comments Customers in the United States won't get their first commercial taste of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology until next year, when Verizon deploys the technology in thirty markets. But Sweden's TeliaSonera became the planet's first carrier to commercially deploy the technology this week. According to the Wall Street Journal, the carrier is charging customers eager to test the 20-80Mbps service 4 Swedish Kronar (just fifty cents a month) with a free modem. That price tag quickly jumps to 500 Kronar ($70 a month) once the users are finished being paying open beta testers. 23 comments story continues..44 comments When you call any company for broadband customer support, there's a fairly solid chance you're entering the twilight zone. If you get a new or poorly trained support representative, the information you get is not only quite often wrong, but sometimes it's just bizarre. story continues..52 comments For a while there, it looked like TiVo was going to change the world with a cute interface and a few beeps and boops. But as cable, phone and satellite operators started doing a better job building their own DVRs (and now networked DVRs), things started getting less certain. story continues..66 comments If there has been one constant in the ever changing broadband landscape over the last decade, it has been that rural broadband users get the short end of the stick. When you're not busy getting sold by massive incumbent ISPs who don't think you're worth serving, you're getting gobbled up by smaller ISPs who think 5 gigabytes of monthly consumption is some kind of cardinal sin. story continues..23 comments Google has opened the information flood gates for their new phone, AKA the "Nexus One." Engadget has photos of the new device. While Google will partner with T-Mobile to sell the phone, they'll primarily be trying to sell it directly to consumers. Google obviously sees a more lucrative future in the European style of cell phone sales, where users purchase unsubsidized handsets first -- then take them to the carrier of their choice. Here in the states consumers are used to buying subsidized handsets from carriers, which allows the carriers to lock customers into long-term contracts -- but it also allows the carriers to have more strict control over the device and the specific kind of content offered. The new Google phone is on tap for early 2010. 102 comments
Monday Morning Links08:34AM Monday Dec 14 2009 by Revcb1 comment
Friday Evening Links06:55PM Friday Dec 11 2009 by Revcb32 comments It's the weekend, so talk it out in the comment section below. 85 comments For years now, every few months the rumor surfaces that AT&T or Verizon are considering buying DirecTV, frequently with no evidence to support the rumor. Last month, Reuters indicated that both AT&T and Verizon have recently met with DirecTV owners Liberty Media Corp, once again reheating the rumor. But Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says that "there's nothing to that," and that "we don't have any strategic need." Last month, DirecTV's appointment of Pepsi International CEO Michael White fueled rumors that White was simply a place holder executive until the company could be sold. 19 comments story continues..50 comments Yesterday Cox announced that they were launching 50 Mbps broadband service in Las Vegas. In the announcement, local Las Vegas Cox executive Marilyn Burrows did something strange: she explained the Cox network in reasonable, realistic terms -- addressing its "non fiber" aspects and plainly exploring how DOCSIS 3.0 allows coaxial based infrastructure to achieve new heights. story continues..77 comments Earlier this year Canadian regulators the CRTC, who frequently fail to protect smaller Canadian ISPs from mega-carrier anti-competitive behavior, protected those same mega-carriers by blocking a new competitor named Globalive from entering the Canadian Wireless market. According to the CRTC, Globalive simply wasn't Canadian enough to do business in Canada and an old and sometimes enforced law, lobbied for by Canada's incumbent companies, that prevents any company from doing business in Canada that wasn't majority-owned by Canadians. story continues..37 comments You might recall that before snoopvertising agency NebuAD flamed out spectacularly, cable operator Wide Open West (WOW) tested the user-tracking technology on their customers -- without telling anybody about it. When asked by the press about the tests, WOW of course denied to comment. story continues..14 comments After doing the same thing last year and earlier this year, Sprint appears poised to tinker with their wireless user fees early next year. According to a memo obtained by Phonenews, Sprint's "regulatory line charge" will double to forty cents per line. The fee, like most such fees, isn't an official government fee -- but is dressed up to look like one so you get mad at Uncle Sam, not the carrier. It's simply a cost of doing business added below the line, and such fees allow carriers to effectively slowly raise prices on consumers without changing their advertised rates. According to the memo, Sprint will also be adding a new $4.99 fee for Account Spending Limit (ACL) customers. As is usually the case, such changes constitute a significant enough change to your contract that you should be able to cancel service without paying an early termination fee. 43 comments
Friday Morning Links08:15AM Friday Dec 11 2009 by Revcb1 comment
Thursday Evening Links07:17PM Thursday Dec 10 2009 by Revcb25 comments ·more stories, story search, most popular ..
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