Sprint gives LightSquared one more chance, they have until March to get the FCC’s blessing

Sprint and LightSquared are both facing an incredibly tricky situation. Starting with Sprint, they were America’s first operator to launch a “4G” network, but they made the mistake of betting on WiMAX technology while the rest of the world chose to wait for LTE equipment to hit the market. It took a few years, but Sprint finally decided to switch to LTE after seeing that the industry couldn’t have cared less about supporting WiMAX. If everything goes according to plan, Sprint should have several cities blanketed with LTE coverage by … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Japanese operator maxes out the 4G LTE standard, builds 300 Mbps network

Japanese fixed line and mobile operator eAccess has just finished testing their soon to be launched 4G LTE network. What makes their 4G LTE special compared to say AT&T’s or Verizon’s 4G LTE is that eAccess is maxing out the technical capabilities of the LTE standard. They’re using 40 MHz worth of spectrum (2×20 MHz configuration) and devices with four antennas inside, which gives them up to 300 megabits per second down and 75 megabits per second up. That’s all theoretical though, in the real world users can expect to … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

AT&T sends a letter to the FCC that confirms they’re interested in working with Dish

Dish Network, the budget satellite television company, sits on 40 MHz worth of spectrum in the 2 GHz band. They’ve already stated that they want to build an LTE-Advanced network using that spectrum, and now they’re just waiting to get the thumbs up from the FCC to go ahead and start building. Now we all know that AT&T failed to acquire T-Mobile. That made a lot of consumers happy since fewer operators almost always translates to higher prices. Still, that doesn’t change AT&T’s problem, which is their hunger for spectrum … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Vodafone launches LTE in Portugal, offers two data plans that differ in pricing based on speed

The state of 4G LTE in Europe is pretty dismal compared to the United States, but that’s not really a bad thing since most 4G LTE equipped smartphones can’t seem to last more than a few hours under heavy use; the Droid RAZR MAxx is an exception. Anyway, today we’d like to highlight Vodafone’s new 4G LTE network in Portugal. The operator won a total of 123 MHz worth of spectrum in the country late last year, in multiple bands, but they’ve decided to launch using the same 2.6 GHz … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

The FCC wants to hear your thoughts about LightSquared’s proposed 4G LTE network

LightSquared, the wireless operator run by a hedge fund, has been wanting to launch their network for the past 18 months. There’s a slight problem though. The spectrum they want to use to launch said network sits way too close to the same spectrum that GPS devices use to get a satellite fix and calculate where they are on the planet. Early testing showed that GPS was effectively knocked out in anything that happened to be within 20 miles of a LightSquared cell tower, to which the company responded by … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Rumor: Samsung to release a Galaxy Nexus with a better graphics processor?

Very few people remember this, but when Samsung announced the Galaxy S II back in February of last year the spec sheet said it was running a dual core 1 GHz processor. By the time the device actually hit the market in May however, that got bumped up to 1.2 GHz. Could something similar happen to the Galaxy Nexus? Right now the world’s first and only smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Google’s operating system, ships with a Texas Instruments OMAP4460 clocked at 1.2 GHz. That particular … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Rumor: Today’s Windows Phones will not be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, codename Apollo

Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system is 15 months and 10 days old, and while it has failed to gain any meaningful traction in the smartphone market, one thing that we appreciate is Microsoft’s willingness to make sure that everyone’s device is up to date. In other words, if you picked up a Windows Phone on launch day then you’ve thus far received all the updates that the platform has received. Something tells us this will also be the case for Tango, the version of Windows Phone that’s slated to be … Read more

1 week ago

Stefan Constantinescu

T-Mobile UK launches “The Full Monty” unlimited everything plans, prices start at £36 per month

T-Mobile UK has done the unthinkable. In today’s world of constrained networks and operators looking to buy up as much spectrum as they can, these nutters just announced the return of unlimited everything plans. They’re called “The Full Monty,” which conjures up some disturbing flashback from the film of the same title, but they really do give you everything you could possibly want … at least sometimes. Let’s start with the basic plan, which goes for just £36 per month. That gives you unlimited talking, texting, and data, but “only” … Read more

2 weeks ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Nokia to start pushing out Symbian Belle on February 8th?

Someone in Nokia’s Vietnam offices is about to get in a whole lot of trouble. Apparently a website that wasn’t supposed to go live accidentally did, and said website announced that Symbian Belle was going to be available for Symbian Anna users starting on the 8th of February. Note that we’ve already known for a while now that Belle would come out in February, we just didn’t have an exact date. The update requires that you connect your device to a computer, which is a minor niggle, but there are … Read more

2 weeks ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Samsung to start mass producing their Cortex A15 based chips in Q2 2012, destined for tablets this year

During Samsung’s latest financial earnings call we got some news about the Exynos 5250 chip that was announced back in November of last year. For those who need a refresher, it has a dual core ARM Cortex A15 processor that can be clocked at up to 2 GHz, it has an as yet to be announced graphics processor that promises to be 4x faster than the GPU inside the Galaxy S II, and best of all it’s made on a 32 nanometer process so it should run cooler than Samsung’s … Read more

2 weeks ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Rumor: Windows Phone Tango to support 120 languages, native C++ applications

Windows Phone Mango, the current version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system, is due to get two updates this year. One of them called Tango has been rumored to be all about supporting low end devices and additional markets. Karthik Ragubathy, who was in attendance at a Microsoft developer event in India over the weekend, heard some information about Tango that’s yet to be released to the public. He says that Mango currently supports 35 different languages, iOS supports 34 languages, Android supports 55 languages, and that the desktop version of … Read more