Author: Kevin Fitchard

Verizon will start building LTE network No. 2 this year
Now that Verizon has closed its blockbuster spectrum deal with the cable operators it’s ready to break ground on its second 4G network. In an interview with FierceWireless, Verizon Wireless CTO Nicola Palmer said Verizon would deploy 5,000 LTE cellsites this year in the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) band, layering mobile data capacity onto the 4G network it’s already built in the 700 MHz band.

In 2014, Palmer added, Verizon will start building a much broader footprint in the new band. What’s more, Palmer said that Verizon would start selling its first AWS compatible devices in the next few months.

“You can’t have the network without compatible devices,” Palmer told Fierce’s Sue Marek. “We have already given the OEMs guidance on that strategy. The first half of this year we will see AWS-compatible devices in our lineup so when the network comes online in the second half, we will take advantage of that.”

There are some major implications in Verizon’s move:
- Verizon is now ready to start focusing on capacity instead of coverage. Palmer said Verizon’s 700 MHz LTE network will cover 90 percent of the U.S. population this year, meaning there will be few populated places where Verizon customers can’t get a 4G signal. It has enough AWS spectrum to double its LTE capacity nationwide, and almost everywhere east of the Mississippi it can triple it. That means it will be able to support more 4G subscribers and more 4G devices and eventually it will be able to boost 4G speeds.
- The AWS band uses 1700 MHz and 2100 MHz frequencies, which make it an ideal spectrum for urban deployments. The lower the frequency, the further radio waves propagate, so while 700 MHz was perfect for Verizon’s coverage network, you can expect Verizon to be more selective about where it builds the second network. It will likely target cities and other high-traffic areas and it may even USE AWS for its first indoor and outdoor small cells.
- By moving to AWS, Verizon will actually have a 4G band in common with other North American carriers. T-Mobile’ and the Canadian operator use the band. AT&T owns AWS licenses as well and is already sells devices that support those frequencies (the iPhone 5 is one of them). Network fragmentation has been a huge problem in the U.S., requiring handset vendors to make different variants of their devices for different carriers. With the operators coalescing around AWS, we could get a step closer to a smartphones that work across all carriers’ networks.
Other operators have plans to launch LTE over a second band as well: AT&T will make use of its newly minted 4G band in the 2.3 GHz frequencies, while Sprint will refarm the 800 MHz airwaves currently occupied by its Nextel network for LTE. Both operators are still at least a year away from making those plans reality.

By putting LTE into a second band, Verizon could also become the first U.S. operator to start down the path toward the next-generation of mobile technology called LTE-Advanced. The first LTE-Advanced technique we’re likely to see is called carrier aggregation, which bonds two disparate spectrum bands together to create a single super-fast air link. Verizon could choose to merge its two LTE networks, effectively doubling the uplink and downlink speeds available to its customers.

Several U.S. operators — from Sprint and T-Mobile to Clearwire and Dish Network — have talked a big game about LTE-Advanced, abusing the term to make their networks seem more sophisticated than they are. Ironically, Verizon has never made any boasts about LTE-Advanced, but it might well be the first U.S. operator that commercially implements the first LTE-Advanced technique.

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March 13, 2013
2013: The year mobile data revenue will eclipse voice in the US
For all of their emphasis on smartphones and data plans, carriers are still mainly in the business of talk. Ever since the first analog brick phone, operators have made their money and built their profits on voice and later SMS. This year, however, the balance will shift.

According to a new report from Chetan Sharma Consulting, data accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. operators’ service revenue in the 4^th quarter, and the rapid transition from dumb phones to smartphones is driving that number upwards. Meanwhile, unlimited talk plans are proliferating even as voice plan pricing is falling. That’s causing average voice revenue per subscriber to drop.

Eventually the rising data line and falling voice line will intersect on the industry’s revenue graph. Sharma plots that meeting point in the 4^th quarter of 2013, at which point operators will start to look more like ISPs than phone companies.

I wouldn’t expect an overnight transformation once they pass that halfway mark, but it’s fair to say carriers will start behaving differently as the economics of the mobile market shift. Operators will most likely attempt to accelerate their gains in data, while de-emphasizing voice even more.

Voice revenues are actually declining faster than data revenues are growing. For every 48 cents in new data revenue operators raked in the fourth quarter, they lost 64 cents in voice revenue, Sharma found. To make up for those losses, they will try to upsell their customers on data plan tiers and — in the case of AT&T and Verizon at least — try to force more of their customers off grandfathered unlimited data plans. They will also try to swing more of their customers toward smartphones and tablets and migrate more subscribers to new LTE networks — both of which will drive more data use.

Carriers won’t have to prod their customers too much. While the 4G-connected tablet market is still slow, smartphones accounted for 84 percent of fourth quarter handset sales in the U.S. In just two years, Verizon has moved 21.6 million subscribers over to its LTE network. Simultaneously the typical consumer’s hunger for mobile data is only increasing.

“The smartphone data consumption at some operators is averaging close to 1 GB/mo,” Sharma wrote in the report. “Some devices are averaging close to 2 GB/mo. As we move into 1GB range along with the family data plans kicking in, you can expect the data tiers to get bigger both in GBs and dollar amount.”

The swift decline in average voice revenue per subscriber will matter less and less to operators as data takes over, as voice will account for far less of their overall revenue. In fact, you’ll probably see a complete shift in the way operators treat voice and data in their pricing plans from what we saw five years ago. When voice and SMS were king and queen, operators had variety and sophistication in their pricing tiers, while data plans were a commodity — for an additional $15 to $30 a month you got as much as you wanted.

Now voice and SMS have become the commodity, increasingly available only in unlimited packages, while data plans have become more and more granular. Verizon and AT&T have taken the ultimate step toward commoditizing voice and SMS, making them unlimited-use features standard in their family plans, just like voicemail. I suspect that this trend will not only continue, but voice prices will drop further as carriers put all of their chips into selling data.

We won’t just see more and increasingly larger data tiers, but operators will begin creating specialty plans to differentiate between different types of data, just as they created nights-and-weekends and friends-and-family plans in the boomtown days of voice. Customers will be able to buy plans that give them unlimited access to IP communications services or social networking. They could choose to pay extra fees each month to access faster speeds than their neighbors.

If there is a way to slice and dice data into an appealing tiered plan, operators will figure out how to do it. Once they pass that halfway mark, there’s no looking back. They will become mobile ISPs with voice businesses on the side.

Eclipse photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Igor Kovalchuk; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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March 13, 2013
T-Mobile-MetroPCS sails through FCC without even a vote
The T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger is apparently so uncontroversial that the Federal Communications Commission didn’t even find a reason to vote on it. Instead of having the FCC’s five commissioners review the merger, the agency’s staff approved the deal in what is known a bureau-level decision, usually reserved for routine transactions.

So far the T-Metro deal has sailed past regulatory obstacles. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to initiate any antitrust review last week. The deal’s biggest remaining hurdle is a vote by MetroPCS shareholders on April 12. The MetroPCS board has already unanimously approved the deal, but institutional shareholders are opposing it, trying to hold out for a better terms.

The lack of a full commission review and vote is sure to earn the ire of the Communications Workers of America, which anticipated the FCC’s move earlier this week and tried to stop it. The “full Commission has voted on much smaller transactions, including the $72 million Guam Cellular/DoCoMo Guam transaction and the $2.8 billion AT&T/Dobson deal,” CWA said in a statement Monday. “There is no reason that the full Commission should not fully evaluate and assess all the elements of this $30 billion deal.”

Considering the deal would merge the country’s fourth and fifth largest carriers, you’d think the deal with merit the commission’s full attention. But in its declaratory ruling, the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau staff said that the benefits of the deal for competition and the public interest were numerous:

… we find that the transaction is not likely to result generally in competitive or other public interest harms. In addition, to the extent there may be some possible competitive harms in selected geographic areas, we find that these possible competitive harms are outweighed by certain public interest benefits likely to result from the proposed transaction. Such benefits include the facilitation of Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) deployment, the expansion of the MetroPCS brand into new geographical markets, the development of a more robust, national network, improved quality of service, and the strengthening of the fourth largest nationwide service provider’s ability to compete in the mobile broadband services market.

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March 12, 2013
Testing shows voice-over-LTE power drain is improving, but it’s still no 2G
VoIP calling over 4G networks may be the wave of the future, but as wireless and testing measurement company Spirent discovered last November, voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) technology still has a lot of kinks to work out before it can match the power efficiency of our old reliable 2G networks.

Tests of MetroPCS’s new VoLTE service found that 4G calls drained twice as much as regular CDMA ones. At the time, however, Spirent Global Director of Insights Amit Malhotra predicted that VoLTE’s power efficiency would improve as both VoLTE network and handset technology progressed. Fast-forward four months and Malhotra’s prognostication appears to be coming true.

Spirent recently performed a new batch of tests using Metro’s newest generation VoLTE handset, the LG Spirit 4G, and found that the current drain from a VoLTE call had dropped by 33 percent compared to LG’s first-generation VoLTE smartphone, the Connect. Improving power efficiency by 33 percent is a tremendous number when it comes to cellular battery life, which tends to measure progress in tiny increments. But there is still one big qualification to that good news: 2G is still a more power-efficient technology.

With its latest generation handset, LG improved the overall radio performance of the phone by using an integrated CDMA-LTE radio, rather than the dual chips used in the older Connect (it also beefed up the Spirit with a much larger 2150 mAh battery). That resulted in an 18 percent current drain improvement for CDMA calls in addition to the improved performance in VoLTE. Even with its efficiency boost, VoLTE still ate up far more juice than a CDMA call on either the new Spirit or the old Connect.

Spirent’s tests concluded that the LG Spirit would support 875 minutes of talk time in CDMA mode, but only 575 minutes when solely making 4G calls. The Spirit’s bigger battery (with 38 percent more capacity than the Connect) gives the device a big boost in single-charge lifespan, but that 300-minute differential is still huge.

The bottom line is that while VoLTE’s battery drain is improving it still has a ways to go before it can match the power efficiency of 2G. CDMA and GSM technologies went through more than a decade of optimization to reach their current efficiency levels. Hopefully VoLTE can close that gap in a much shorter interval. The big improvements LG and MetroPCS demonstrated in a single generation of handsets is a good sign that it can.

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March 12, 2013
Nuance targets enterprise IT with new voiceprint recognition technology
Nuance Communications will put voice recognition in just about anything — smartphones, apps, cars, even TVs. Now it’s bringing speech interpretation to the enterprise IT department in the form of biometric identification.

Nuance aims to automate what is an increasing headache for IT managers: resetting passwords on corporate computers or software. Anyone who has every worked for a big company is familiar with the situation – too many failed login attempts or letting a password expire suddenly locks you out of your laptop or email. The next step is a call to the IT help desk to get your account privileges reinstated and a temporary password issued.

Nuance proposes to automate that identification process with a new service called FastReset, which allows an employee to authenticate their voice against a biometric print on file. The software can either be embedded directly into a Windows PC and accessed through the computer’s login screen or implemented externally, requiring an employee to call an automated system.

While Nuance is most famous for providing the core natural language understanding technology behind Apple’s Siri, it’s been branching out into security as of late. Instead of trying to interpret words and meaning from the tremendous variety of human speech, it’s using the unique characteristics of each individual’s speech as a kind of vocal fingerprint. Nuance is already supporting similar technology in the consumer mobile market, using voice ID as a means of unlocking handsets.

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March 12, 2013
Report: AT&T bests Verizon in raw 4G speed but still lags in LTE coverage
If unadulterated bandwidth is what you’re looking for in 4G phone, then AT&T is your best bet for a mobile provider, according to a network tests conducted by RootMetrics. AT&T continued to put distance between itself and Verizon Wireless in LTE performance, clocking average speeds of 18.6 Mbps on the downlink and 9 Mbps on the uplink.

Verizon averaged 14.3 Mbps down and 8.5 Mbps up, according to Root’s new report, but what it lacked in raw speed, Verizon made up for in coverage. Of the 77 markets in which Root performed its own measurements, Verizon had an LTE network up in every one. Meanwhile AT&T’s 4G service was present in only 47 of the 77 at the time Root performed its tests last year. These maps, compiled from Root’s crowdsourced data, show just how far Verizon’s LTE network reaches compared to AT&T and Sprint:

What’s more, Verizon’s coverage within its LTE footprint was much more consistent. When in a Verizon LTE market Root testers found themselves connected to a Verizon LTE signal 93.2 percent of the time, while for AT&T the number was 81.7 percent. We’ve started to see that trend in Root’s city-specific reports: Big Red is reaching further into the suburban and exurban regions of its launch markets than Ma Bell.

But AT&T was quick to point that it has added many more cities since Root compiled its data (Root measured different markets at different times in the second half of 2012). Of the 30 cities where Root found no LTE network, AT&T has since launched networks in 26 of them, AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom said.

Root’s most recent results for New York City, where AT&T boasts the fastest LTE connections.

Sprint only started its LTE rollout last summer so it’s still far behind AT&T and Verizon. Root’s staggered testing regime found LTE networks in only five of the 77 markets measured last year and in even in those five markets it caught an LTE signal only half the time. When Root did find LTE, Sprint averaged 10.3 Mbps down and 4.4 Mbps up. Sprint’s speeds are generally lower because it is using half the spectrum for LTE that AT&T and Verizon are tapping for their rollouts.

T-Mobile won’t launch LTE until later next year, but Root did measure its HSPA+ network performance. T-Mobile averaged 7.3 Mbps on the downlink and 1.5 Mbps on the uplink.

RootMetrics uses both crowdsourced data — drawn from smartphones loaded with its CoverageMap iPhone and Android apps — and professional testing conducted both in vehicles and indoors (For a detailed look at Root’s methodology, check out our video of a recent Root test in Chicago). Root is also working with GigaOM this week at SXSW in Austin to measure the impact that a large conference of mobile savvy users has on city’s mobile data networks.

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March 11, 2013
A car that knows where your kids are: BMW invests in Life360
The first wave of connected car apps centered on music and audio streaming. It looks like the second wave of in-dash services may revolve around location sharing.

We’ve already seen location-sharing app Glympse make it into its first connected platform, Ford’s Sync AppLink. Now BMW’s strategic investment arm i Ventures is partnering with family locator service Life360 to develop in-car technologies that would allow family members to locate one another and coordinate their activities. i Ventures is also making an undisclosed investment in the San Francisco startup.

While an app like Glympse allows you to selectively share your location with anyone for a set period of time, Life360 creates a permanent share between a close-knit group such as a nuclear family. That allows Life360 to build services on top of that presence data.

“Imagine you want to meet your wife at your kids’ soccer game,” said Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360. “Right now you have to call her, get an address and then program it into your navigation system to get directions. That’s a lot of unnecessary friction.”

What Life360 proposes is an in-dash app that automatically keeps tabs on your family members’ activities. To find your wife, as in Hulls’ example, you merely have to tap on her portrait in the app, and her location is automatically fed into the car’s vehicle nav system.

BMW isn’t the only automaker that thinks Life360 shows promise in the connected car. One of the startup’s lead investors is Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology fund founded by Bill Ford, the executive chairman of his namesake company. The company recently closed a Series A round of $3.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage and EchoVC Partners.

As you might expect, Life360 as apps in the works for both Ford and BMW’s connected car platforms, but Hulls said its working with other automakers as well, including Mercedes, General Motors and Hyundai. While Hulls wouldn’t reveal which automaker’s platform would be the first to launch Life360’s app, he said the app would go live in a least one connected car system this year.

We’re already starting to location finding its way into more connected car apps and not just in the form of navigation software. Roximity and BeCouply are using presence data to push location-based deals and recommend nearby activities for the amorously inclined.

And while location-sharing isn’t a feature in most in-vehicle nav systems it’s starting to make it into many mobile mapping and navigation apps. Telenav recently announced an update to its iOS software that can share not only a user’s current location but also your intended destination, allowing friends to coordinate their activities on a map.

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March 8, 2013
PayPal revamps developer program with new iOS SDK, retooled APIs
PayPal readily admits it hasn’t been the most developer-friendly company, but the online payments giant claims it is now ready to start actively courting the developer with a bevy of new tools it is launching at SXSWi.

First off, it’s launching a new iOS software developer’s kit (SDK), which allows app makers to code PayPal’s payment processing tools directly into their apps, instead of opening up a PayPal authorization and payments page. PayPal devs can also embed credit card scanning software from Card.io, which PayPal bought last summer. While it’s starting with iOS, PayPal said it would expand to other mobile platforms “soon.”

For quick integration, PayPal has developed Javascript buttons that can be embedded into a desktop or mobile website by adding five lines of codes. The payment feature can also be programmed into a QR code, allowing retailers to trigger transactions from outside of the device. Finally, PayPal is also retooling its application programming interfaces (APIs) around more modern and open frameworks such as REST, OAuth and JSON.

Previously, PayPal’s development platform ran over parent company eBay’s X.commerce, but PayPal is taking its developer efforts independent, launching a new development website that houses its sandbox, tools, documentation and other resources in a single location.

“This is just the beginning,” PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote on the company’s blog. “We will be releasing new APIs and capabilities throughout 2013, while continuing to support our existing developer tools through this evolution. We will continue to listen to the developer community and rapidly respond to their feedback.”

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March 8, 2013
FreedomPop’s home broadband service goes live. Can you survive on 1 GB a month?
FreedomPop launched its home broadband service on Wednesday, taking the freemium model it uses for mobile data to the residential broadband market. FreedomPop is offering 1 GB free of charge to any user who signs up for service and buys its $89 home WiMAX router.

Anyone who does more than check email on their home PC is surely going to use more than a single gigabyte in a 30-day spell, but as with its mobile service, FreedomPop is offering ways for users to earn more free data and selling premium data plans with bigger buckets of data. The bottom line though is heavy home broadband users aren’t going to sign up with FreedomPop – these plans aren’t designed for Netflix or file sharing — but the virtual network operator is making a compelling case to casual data users, selling home connectivity for as little as $10 a month.

FreedomPop is offering four tiers of service, all of which tap into Clearwire’s WiMAX network available in 70 cities (as an MVNO FreedomPop resells Clearwire’s WiMAX capacity today and will soon resell Sprint LTE connections as well). The first tier costs nothing, giving customers 1 GB of monthly data with speeds throttled to under 1.5 Mbps. Every additional megabyte beyond the one-gig cap costs a cent, so going way over that cap could be a mighty expensive proposition. For instance, Streaming a 2 GB HD movie would cost you an additional $20.

But FreedomPop is being perfectly up front that this plan is meant for basic web surfing and email. In any case, the low-speed connection would prevent you from engaging in many bandwidth-sucking activities. As with its mobile service, FreedomPop allows free users to earn more data in 50 MB chunks by engaging the FreedomPop social network, using FreedomPop’s IP services and participating in promotions. It’s not yet clear if FreedomPop will allow customers to share their unused data with other home users like it allows mobile users to swap megabytes.

The next tier up is a $10 monthly plan, which ups the cap to 10 GB while keeping speeds limited to 1.5 Mbps. From there, the cap stays at 10 GB, but for $5 or $8 more a month you can boost speeds to 3 Mbps and 8 Mbps respectively. In the paid tiers, FreedomPop is charging a half-cent for every megabyte overage.

Even still, 10 GB isn’t much for a home connection. In July, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham took a detailed look at how different households consumed broadband, and found even sparse users of streaming services still consumed well over 10 GB each month, to say nothing of 1 GB. But once you turn off that multimedia spigot, usage drops considerably. Stacey interviewed one user in Atlanta who averaged 500 MB a month for three straight months when she took a hiatus from streamed video.

You might think of these of your grandparents’ home broadband plans (though in this day and ages, grandparents are becoming increasingly sophisticated in web communications tools), but FreedomPop seems to be positioning as a means of bridging digital divide, offering cheap, and even the possibility of free, service to people who normally couldn’t afford home broadband or just want minimal connectivity. There are still millions of dial-up users left in the U.S. It would be interesting to see if FreedomPop can reach them with this service.

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March 6, 2013
Justice Department: T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger is fine by us
The T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger may be encountering vocal objections from Metro shareholders, but the companies aren’t hearing a peep out of the U.S. Department of Justice. On Wednesday, T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom said the DOJ has let the antitrust clock run out – typically a 30-day waiting period – without invoking its powers to investigate or block the merger.

That’s one major hurdle overcome to closing the deal, which would make T-Metro a publically traded company majority owned by DT, though it still faces regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission as well as vote from Metro stockholders.

The DOJ’s tacit blessing, however, isn’t a trivial matter. The Justice Department has become much more actively involved in U.S. telecom deals ever since it joined forces with the FCC to kill AT&T-Mo in 2011. Since then it has thrown up a roadblock to Sprint’s mammoth deal with Softbank, citing national security issues. It also played a big role is shaping Verizon’s spectrum acquisition and partnership with the cable providers, though it eventually let that deal slide through despite its potential impact on broadband competition.

The fact that T-Metro’s paperwork passed through the DOJ’s offices without a word is a good sign that the deal will surmount its remaining regulatory hurdles without a hitch. While the DOJ has frowned on consolidation among the Big 4 U.S. operators, this deal would combine the smallest nationwide operator with the biggest regional operator and put T-Mobile in a much stronger spectrum position. Since AT&T-Mo, regulators have been, first and foremost, concerned with maintaining the four-operator equilibrium at the top of the mobile market.

The combined spectrum of T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS as compiled by Mosaik

MetroPCS has set a vote for on the deal on April 12. The hedge funds opposing the deals want MetroPCS to negotiate better terms with DT – creating either a less debt-laden final company or giving Metro shareholders a better payout – but so far they only represent a little more than 10 percent of the voting shares of the company. But DT seemed worried enough about their influence to issue a warning Wednesday to those stockholders.

“The MetroPCS board unanimously recommends that stockholders vote their shares FOR all of the proposals relating to the proposed combination with T-Mobile,” DT said in a statement. “The failure to vote or an abstention has the same effect as a vote against the proposed combination. If stockholders vote against the proposed combination, there is no assurance that MetroPCS will be able to deliver the same or better stockholder value.”

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March 6, 2013
Google puts is data-crunching powers to use mapping white spaces spectrum
Google on Monday began trialing a new kind of database. This one isn’t tallying ad impressions or tracking websites. Instead this database is cataloging white spaces spectrum, the unused airwaves in between TV channels that one day could be used for wireless and even mobile broadband links.

The reason such a database is key is because the TV spectrum in question has to be allocated dynamically. When a broadcaster or other licensed user is present, nobody else can touch it. Such databases, which have been or are being developed by Ericsson, Microsoft, NeuStar Spectrum Bridge (see disclosure) and several others, would create central repositories detailing which airwaves are available for white space broadband use at any given moment or location. Devices capable of transmitting in the white spaces airwaves would check those databases on a regular basis and pick their transmission channels accordingly.

Google is building its database – which is currently being tested by the FCC — as you would expect Google to build any data tool, as a browser-based app that allows anyone to search the white spaces in their area. Here’s what the channel map in my neck of the woods, Chicago, looks like:

The different colors represent the concentration of broadcasters in different airwaves. As you can imagine, Chicago is a pretty cluttered market when it comes to TV stations. But as you move outside of the cities, more channels clear up, which is one of the reasons a principle focus of white spaces broadband is on rural underserved areas. This search centered on Rockford, Ill., shows that contrast between Chicago’s and Milwaukee’s crowded airwaves and the large swathes of white spaces in rural Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa:

Google may have more interest in white spaces than becoming a simple database administrator. Lately Google has sought permission to conduct a bunch of wireless technology trials using mysterious gear that hasn’t yet made it into any commercial network. I’ve postulated that Google is experimenting with the idea of a heterogeneous network, or HetNet, that combines advanced Wi-Fi, super-dense cellular clusters and largely unlicensed airwaves. If that proves to be true, then white spaces could be a key component of its strategy.

Disclosure: Spectrum Bridge is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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March 4, 2013
Open Garden unleashes the full force of its crowdsourced mobile mesh app
Since it first debuted in the tech world, Open Garden has been experimenting with its mobile mesh-networking app, getting a user’s personal devices to link to together seamlessly and share their Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity. Its end goal, however, was for its app to move beyond personal networks and create vast webs of linked devices all working collectively to find the best and cheapest link to the Internet.

On Monday, Open Garden released version 2.0 of its app, which supports multi-hop Wi-Fi mesh networking and channel bonding. In English that means your PC or Android tablet won’t just link to your smartphone and then to the Internet. Instead, it will also link to your neighbor’s smartphone, which in turn will link to the next smartphone over and so forth. The Open Garden software installed on all of those handsets and PCs will then determine which devices have the best connections to the Internet – be they 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi or Ethernet – and route all traffic through them accordingly.

After more than a year of testing how its app performed more controlled single-hop environment, Open Garden co-founder and CEO Micha Benoliel said that the company is ready to see how its app performs in the more random world of unimpeded crowdsourcing. Open Garden waited until now because it didn’t have the density of users to make large-scale mesh networking feasible.

With about 2 million installs to date, it’s still unlikely that one Open Garden user is going to encounter another at a mall in Omaha. But Benoliel said the platform has scaled enough that users are starting to bump into one another in New York and San Francisco as well as in parts of India.

“We’re started to notice that in San Francisco bytes are being exchanged between users even without multi-hop activated,” Benoliel said. What Open Garden hopes is that communities of users will form to maximize the potential for large-scale crowdsourced networks. For instance, Benoliel said he is working with a farmers’ collective in India to use Open Garden’s software to create vast meshes of thousands of nodes at local markets.

Co-founder Micha Benoliel

Of course by expanding the scope of the network mesh, Open Garden also increases the potential for abuse. Open Garden’s algorithms are designed to spread traffic among multiple connections, favoring cheaper and faster links like Wi-Fi, but there’s always the chance that some users will use others’ connectivity without ever sharing their own.

Benoliel said that due to the nature of Open Garden’s current user base he believes those abusers are still rare, but he acknowledged they will become a growing problem as more people adopt the service. Eventually Open Garden will put controls in place to prevent that kind of freeloading and to help cellular users stay under their caps.

For instance, a user might set a maximum of 100 MB a week to share with Open Garden Community. Or the company might dictate that users can only consume a certain quantity of bandwidth from other people’s connections before being forced to share their own. But Benoliel said Open Garden wants to be careful about placing too many restrictions or creating too much complexity while the community is still young.

“The purpose of those controls is to avoid free-riders,” Benoliel said. “Introducing those controls too early would stop our expansion.”

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March 4, 2013
Sprint, T-Mobile believe in shared data plans too — just not for consumers
Both Sprint and T-Mobile have dissed the decision of their larger competitors TO move to shared data plans, claiming consumers would rather have big data buckets or unlimited use available through their individual plans. But apparently that logic doesn’t apply to business customers.

T-Mobile has said it plans to offer shared data pools to its business customers, and on Friday Sprint officially began selling buckets of communal data to its small business customers. The plans are only available through its business sales channels and support a maximum of 30 LTE smartphones, tablets and data modems. Like AT&T and Verizon, Sprint is charging a monthly per-device fee, for instance $40 for a smartphone with unlimited talk and text included. The pricing of the data plans themselves start at $140 a month for 20 GB split between up to 10 devices. At the high end is a 60 GB / $320 plan supporting up 30 lines.

Sprint is also offering a set of shared plans targeting data-only tablets and modems — an interesting use case brought on by the BYOD trend. As employees make their personal smartphones their business handsets, companies may opt to make the tablet or a wirelessly connected laptop the only mobile work tool available to their employees. Sprint is charging $10 a month to connect a tablet, $20 to connect a modem, and offering shared data plans starting at $60 for 10 GB and topping out at 60 GB for $320.

Since last summer Sprint’s mantra has been “Say no to sharing data,” and it has launched advertising and web campaigns that attempted to show how consumers could save money by adopting its individual unlimited plans. Both Sprint and T-Mobile have maintained that not only do subscribers get a better deal with their unlimited plans, but also THAT the lack of A cap makes everything so much simpler.

Why the change of heart when it comes to business plans then? Likely, Sprint and T-Mobile are realizing that the same arguments that work with consumers aren’t going to work with businesses. Small companies value simplicity as well, but they’re willing to take on some complexity if it means saving some cash each month. And on account with 20 or 30 devices, those savings could be substantial.

Buying two unlimited plans at $30 a month for unlimited data might make sense for a family of two, but paying $500 to $600 a month to attach 20 smartphones to the unlimited spigot makes little sense if you can buy an enormous bucket of gigabytes for half the cost. Keep in mind, as well, that neither T-Mobile or Sprint offer unlimited plans for tablets or modems, so any business owner connecting anything besides smartphones would have had to manage caps under the old pricing plans anyway.

I don’t think Sprint and T-Mobile are swallowing the data-sharing pill just yet. For them unlimited is still a key differentiator in the consumer market, but they are likely very concerned that Verizon and AT&T will steal their business customers with these new shared pricing models. That has forced them to respond in kind.

In Sprint’s case at least, it isn’t just responding, it’s attacking. Sprint’s new plans undercut Verizon’s recently launched small business tiers. For instance, Verizon is charging $375 a month for 50 GB of shared data between, while Sprint is offering 60 GB for $350. Sprint and T-Mobile may be forced to play the data share game, but it looks like they’re going to maintain their reputations for offering cheaper service.

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March 4, 2013
Shareholder opposition to T-Mobile-MetroPCS tie-up mounts
T-Mobile is anxious to close out its merger with MetroPCS so it can begin the swallowing the regional operator’s spectrum into its 3G and 4G networks, but MetroPCS’s biggest shareholder, hedge fund Paulson & Co., isn’t eager to see the deal rushed.

In a statement distributed to financial media, hedge fund manager John Paulson said it would vote its 9.9 percent stake against the merger deal as it stands today. The complex deal would see Deutsche Telekom merge its U.S. arm into MetroPCS, creating a new publicly traded company and paying Metro’s shareholders $1.5 billion in cash. According to Paulson, that just isn’t enough.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Paulson said he would reconsider his position if Deutsche Telekom and MetroPCS could restructure the final company’s debt, lower its interest rate, pay more cash to Metro shareholders or give them a bigger portion of the merged company. Paulson said he believes there are potentially more lucrative deals in the offing, based on interest shown in Metro by Dish Network and Sprint.

Paulson now joins hedge fund P. Schoenfeld in opposing the merger. Together they own about 12 percent of the company, which isn’t enough to derail the deal, but if they can attract other investors to their cause, the Metro board could have a problem on their hands.

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March 1, 2013
Ericsson CEO: We’ve got 4G networks. Now what do we do with them?
The first two letters of LTE may stand for “long-term,” but there’s not much long-term about the status of the mobile network technology today. Operators have built more than 60 LTE networks worldwide. The networks are in place, but according to Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, operators are now wrestling with new questions: how and what do they charge for these fancy new 4G services?

In an interview with GigaOM, Vestberg said that 4G business models, not infrastructure or devices, was the far bigger theme at Mobile World Congress this year – it’s what he’s spending time talking about in Barcelona this week with Ericsson’s hundreds of carrier customers

“We’re at this inflection point where we’ve built the networks, but we still haven’t worked out the business models,” Vestberg said. “Some of our customers are taking very different directions.”

European operators are testing the potential of 4G being a premium-priced data service, charging more for a megabyte of LTE than a megabyte of HSPA. In the U.S., AT&T and Verizon are barreling ahead with shared data plans. Vestberg says he’s witnessing many more business models emerging as operators start experimenting with enterprise and machine-to-machine data plans as well as continuing to tinker with their consumer data pricing.

Carriers are still debating whether they should be big pipes selling mobile broadband by the gigabyte, or applications and data services providers that inject something tangible into that bitstream, Vestberg said.

Many operators have begun to think beyond smartphones and focus on the internet of things, Vestberg said, connecting everything from tablets to cars to home appliances. At Mobile World Congress, for example, AT&T and General Motors announced plans to embed LTE into millions of future cars as an upgrade to GM’s OnStar service. Several other carriers were demonstrating connected home and connected city applications at MWC, sticking LTE radios in smart utility meters, public transit and healthcare devices.

“What devices can we connect that will create a more efficient life for people?” Vestberg said. “[Carriers have] already identified a lot of those devices. It’s more a question of who and how and when they’ll monetize them.”

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February 27, 2013
Meet OneAPI, the technology that could make carriers relevant in mobile apps
Carriers have devised a new way to insert themselves into the mobile apps value chain. They want to become the identity managers for mobile services that require user registration or authentication. Just as many apps today allow you to log in using your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter credentials, carriers are hoping customers will start registering for services with their phone numbers.

To accomplish this the GSM Association launched a new initiative called the OneAPI Exchange at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The idea is to create an application programming interface (API) that any mobile app developer can use to authenticate new users against a carrier’s subscriber identity data. So far AT&T, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone have all signed on to the program, and together they represent a healthy chunk of the world’s mobile subscribers.

At first glance, the initiative seems like a nifty idea. If there is one thing every mobile subscriber in the world has it’s a phone number, making it ideal as a universal credential. But operators are also hoping to be more than just a username replacement. In a demo at Mobile World Congress, the GSMA showed off a bike rental app, in which carrier data was used not only to identify the user, but verify location and charge the rental to the customer’s mobile bill.

Obviously carriers are looking to make themselves relevant once again in the applications market and take a cut from any mobile transaction. This time they actually stand a chance of succeeding. Unlike previous API initiatives, the GSMA has actually figured out a way to make OneAPI near universal. Instead of tapping into separate APIs and crafting separate business agreements with every operator, developers just have to build to one API and strike one carrier deal, but the identity feature will work across all carriers’ networks.

The development house that built the OneAPI Exchange, Apigee, wasn’t able to eliminate the widespread fragmentation among carriers’ API platforms, but it rather ingeniously found a way around it. Apigee’s head of marketing, Dave Jordan, explained that the exchange acts as universal bridge between the operators’ disparate network interfaces.

A developer just picks a single operator to deal with and then builds to that operator’s API, Jordan said. If the app is downloaded on a different operator’s network the exchange will automatically map that carrier’s API onto the app, he said. For instance, if a developer were to pick AT&T’s API, any Orange or Telefónica customer could log in to the app using his carrier’s credentials, but AT&T would federate all of the transactions across those networks.

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February 26, 2013
Cricket to spin off Muve Music, licensing the service to other carriers
Cricket Communications plans to capitalize on the success of its Muve subscription music service by spinning it off as a new company and licensing the platform to carriers around the world. The company already has one international licensing deal in place with an unnamed carrier, but Cricket feels more operators would find Muve attractive if they weren’t forced to buy it from another carrier, said Bill Ingram, EVP of Strategy for Cricket’s parent company Leap Wireless.

In the two years since it launched, Muve has attracted more than 1 million subscribers, making it the second-largest music subscription service in the U.S. behind Spotify – that’s despite the fact that Cricket is only a regional carrier mainly serving smaller U.S. cities.

In June, Cricket began packaging Muve into all of its smartphones plans, which explains why subscriptions ballooned by 500,000 in the last six months. But Ingram said that Muve has been a key feature in attracting new subscribers to the Cricket network, and expects between 40 and 50 percent of its customer eventually will sign up for a Muve plan.

Speaking at a Cisco System’s event at MWC, Ingram said the spin-off company would offer the music distribution, discoverability and licensing platform as a managed service, though operators would be free to name it whatever they liked as well as set their own rates. While Cricket includes the Muve subscription in the price of its plans, other operators may choose to make it an add-on service or offer more limited subscription plans.

There are a lot of mobile users that can’t afford or are simply unwilling to pay $1 or more per song, which is the digital music model iTunes established, Ingrams said. Muve’s flexibility would allow operators to start pricing music in much more accessible ways, for instance selling subscription for 10 cents a day or restricted plans for as low as 50 cents a month, Ingram said.

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February 26, 2013
T-Mobile’s M2M provider Raco goes international with Sprint, Telefónica deals
Raco Wireless, the networking specialist that powers T-Mobile’s machine-to-machine business, is expanding its technology and coverage footprint both in the U.S. and abroad. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona it announced deals Sprint and Telefónica to tap into their networks.

Raco is one of the players supplying the backend connectivity for the internet of things, linking everything from agricultural harvesters to ice machines to the cellular networks. While it’s worked exclusively with T-Mobile in the past, the deals expand its scope both to CDMA technologies and Telefónica’s extensive networks across Europe and Latin America.

According to Raco President John Horn, the two new deals, combined with a similar tie-up with U.K. operator Everything Everywhere, allow to Raco to go after the internet of things on an international scale. For instance, Raco could not serve shipping companies wanting to track their vehicles or containers as they cross borders, or appliance makers that want to avoid signing connectivity deals with a separate carrier in every new country.

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February 26, 2013
Now that’s “fast” roadside assistance: AT&T’s LTE will power GM’s OnStar
General Motors’ OnStar system is going to get a turbo boost. AT&T and GM revealed at Mobile World Congress that starting in 2015 the automaker would embed LTE chips in millions of vehicles allowing them to connect back to AT&T’s 4G network. The deal would add considerable heft to the typical OnStar connection, which today utilize 2G connections.

GM said it would use the increased bandwidth to offer new infotainment features such as audio and video streaming direct to the car in addition to the usual complement of OnStar navigation, security and emergency services.

The deal is a bit puzzling because it contradicts the bring-your-connectivity strategy GM has adopted of late. While GM cars are all linked via cellular networks for its low-bandwidth telematics services, GM has relied on it customer’s smartphones to provide the heftier connections necessary to support infotainment services.

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February 25, 2013
Nokia Siemens makes mobile apps and cellular networks play nice
Nokia Siemens Networks and IBM wouldn’t be the first to put a content delivery network into a mobile network, but’s the first to put a CDN at every cell tower. At Mobile World Congress, NSN unveiled a new mobile services architecture, called Liquid Applications, designed to push a host of applications – ranging from video to location-based services and mobile gaming – to the furthest edge of the cellular network.

NSN is partnering with IBM to embed the latter’s WebSphere applications hosting servers into its future base station design, with the idea of turning the radio access network into both a baseband processing and computing platform. Putting content closer to the consumer isn’t a new concept in mobile – Ericsson and Akamai teamed up two years ago to do just that – but NSN is talking about a lot more than just caching video or routing traffic more efficiently.

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

The architecture could also produce some noticeable increases in performance, say, if a subscriber was playing a network-based game. Instead of reaching across the many nodes of the backhaul, transport and core networks – as well as the Internet itself – a game hosted at the base station would have near zero latency, making the possibility of network-hosted fast-twitch real-time action game feasible.

Ironically, Liquid Apps is going in the opposite direction of NSN’s overall network strategy. In the last few years, NSN has promoted the concept of a cloud-based architecture, called Liquid Radio, where much of the intelligence and raw processing power of the network leaves the cell-site and becomes a virtualized set of shared resources. At NSN’s press conference on Sunday, mobile broadband chief Marc Rouanne said that the two approaches actually complement, rather than contradict, one another.

“We need computing capacity at both ends,” Rouanne said. “That’s what operators love about it.” NSN’s Liquid fabric has never called for excising processing capabilities completely from the cell site. Instead Liquid Radio is redistributing the intelligence of the network throughout the edge and core, allowing – as its name implies – to flow to wherever its most needed. Rouanne said, NSN now is taking the same approach to applications: relocating a portion of them from the core to the network fringes.

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February 25, 2013