Disqus
Contact Us
We love getting feedback from our readers - we'd love to hear what you liked or disliked, what you'd like to see in the future, or simply what you think of IntoMobile. No suggestion or critique is too small or overlooked.
Contact UsLatest Infrastructure News
America’s smaller wireless operators seek to stop a bill that would strip the FCC of their powers
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doles out wireless spectrum every few years using an auction process that anyone who has ever used eBay is already familiar with. Several of the FCC’s responsibilities are to make sure that the right people are allowed to join said auctions, that the wrong people are not allowed to participate, and to put rules on the spectrum being sold in order to create some competition in the market. There’s a new bill in the House of Congress right now called the “JOBS Act, H.R. 3630″ … Read more
Stefan Constantinescu
Russian operator awards guy who used nearly half a terabyte of data in one week
As operators around the world look to curb people’s data usage by rolling out confusing pricing plans or just simply raising their rates, things are going a little bit differently in Russia. MegaFon, the third largest operator in the country, recently held a contest whereby the person who could use the most amount of data would be awarded with a 150,000 ruble ($5,000) vacation overseas. With the way temperatures have plummeted across all of Europe, Thailand looks like the place to be right now. Anyway, the winner was someone who … Read more
Stefan Constantinescu
Qualcomm and Ericsson demo a Voice over LTE call successfully handing off to WCDMA
Ever wonder why smartphones with 4G LTE connectivity have such terrible battery life? The answer is rather simple. While most phones usually have only one cellular radio on at the same time, devices using 4G LTE need to have two radios on simultaneously. One of those radios, the one that does that 4G LTE, can only really do data. Voice and text messages are sent over a second cellular radio that connects to a legacy 3G network. Now this is solely the case on Verizon’s network, with AT&T things go … Read more
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
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
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
Stefan Constantinescu
Nokia Siemens Networks scores a 1.2 billion Euro loan, because Mom and Dad said no
Nokia Siemens Networks, one of the world’s largest providers of the infrastructure equipment that enables our mobile phones to actually connect to the internet and do useful things, has just secured a 1.2 billion Euro loan according to Retuers. The goal was to raise 1.5 billion Euro, but “due to market turmoil”, which is a fancy way of saying the global economy is being flushed down the toilet, they had to settle with 300 million Euro less. What’s the money going to be used for? Mainly to pay off the … Read more
Stefan Constantinescu
The ITU approves the successors to LTE and WiMAX, how long until we hear about 5G networks?
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has just agreed on the technologies that are deemed worthy enough to earn the “IMT-Advanced” designation: LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced, the latter being more widely known as WiMAX 2. They don’t want to call it 5G, but you can expect AT&T’s marketing department to already be in the process of drafting up some ads. Nearly two years ago we wrote an article titled “4G in America: Lies, Lies, and More Damn Lies” explaining why HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE didn’t deserve to be called 4G technologies, but … Read more
Stefan Constantinescu
Rumor: Verizon to rollout nationwide VoLTE in 2013, two cities currently in trials
When Verizon launched their 4G LTE network back in late 2010 we wondered how long it would be until we saw the first 4G LTE smartphones hit their network? Three months later, in March 2011, we got our answer with the HTC Thunderbolt (pictured above, sans battery cover). Not long after that we were flooded by a wide range of 4G LTE phones available at nearly every price point. We also saw AT&T catch up and launch their own 4G LTE network last summer, but that’s a whole other story. … Read more
Stefan Constantinescu
Sprint puts LightSquared payments on hold
Well, this didn’t take long. It was only a couple of days ago when Sprint gave LightSquared a 30-day extension as both companies await the fate of its 15-year agreement it struct this past summer, which the folks in Washington have yet to make a decision on (deadline was December 31st). Now, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says that the third largest carrier in the United States will put its payments in a partnership with LightSquared on hold as it painstakingly awaits a ruling from DC. So what’s the hold up? … Read more
Charles West
500,000 TD-LTE cell towers to be up and running by 2016, WiMAX is pretty much dead
Analysts from ABI Research have come to the conclusion that WiMAX is officially going the way of the dodo thanks to TD-LTE. They say that by the end of 2016 we’ll see more than half a million TD-LTE cell towers deployed all over the world, with the majority of them being in China. “It was only two years ago that nearly every WiMAX operator, including operators with unpaired TDD frequency spectrum, were planning to deploy WiMAX 2. Today, almost all of them have switched plans and are deploying TD-LTE instead.” … Read more