Wow, just several days ago, I wrote that Sprint will launch Femtocells this year. Well, they didn’t wait that long did they? Sprint Nextel has quietly started selling the AIRRAVE femtocell product in parts of Denver and Indianapolis to provide better cellular coverage and flat-rate calling at home. Sprint Nextel plans to start selling the [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Wireless category.
Qualcomm gets a breather in patent fight against Broadcomm and stay on Ban on importing 3G cellular handsets
Qualcomm got a breather now, and so did a number of its key customers. The Ban on the importation of new 3G handsets containing Qualcomm chips is stayed while an appeals court reviews the merits of the case. The United States International Trade Commission had imposed the ban in June as a remedy to its [...]
Soon you may be able to access an ATM from your cellular phone
Diebold and NCR Corporation, leading players in the automated teller machines market, are developing technologies to enable cell phones or PDA’s/Smartphones to transact with an ATM. NCR has been developing technology for linking hand-held communications devices with ATMs since 2001. NCR already uses such technology in Denmark and Singapore. Over the past 18 months, Diebold [...]
Sprint to Launch Femtocells This Year
Sprint is planning to formally announce a femtocell product by the end of the year, according to Manish Mangal, the company’s Director of Signaling and Control Technology Development. A femtocell is a low-power, low-cost cellular base station that plugs into a broadband connection for backhaul into the cellular network (looks like a WiFi Access Point). [...]
T-Mobile to launch MyFaves in Europe
T-Mobile, the mobile arm of Deutsche Telekom, has announced plans to launch the MyFaves service in Germany this October. Similar launches will happen in the U.K. and Czech Republic some time in the fourth quarter. MyFaves was developed by T-Mobile’s U.S. subsidiary, where it has attracted more than 2.5 million users. The U.S. MyFaves service [...]
Will Jaxtr upstage Skype?
Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. Jaxtr’s registered user base has been doubling every month since its March launch. Most recently, it jumped from 500,000 to 1 million in just 27 days. So, it’s no [...]
European iPhone partners to be out soon
When we first talked about Apple going with T-Mobile as the wireless service provider for the iPhone in Germany, it was just a rumor. Now, T-Mobile, the wireless arm of Deutsche Telekom has confirmed that they have had talks with Apple about selling the iPhone in Germany. Discussion of the iPhone’s arrival in Europe intensified [...]
4th Generation Wireless services may be around the corner
Airvana, a wireless equipment vendor, has successfully completed a multi-carrier CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision B (Rev B) call in its lab, which a major step towards commercialization.Rev B is a multi-carrier system that combines multiple 1.25 MHz channels into one super channel, allowing users to share the compounded capacity of the combined spectrum. Several months ago, [...]
FCC shoves mobile roaming down large cellular carriers throats
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission recently enacted rules dictating that mobile carriers provide roaming services on a nondiscriminatory basis. That is, cellular telephone service providers must allow customers of competitors to connect to their networks at a “reasonable” cost, when the equipment is technologically compatible. The new rule stopped short of setting roaming rates or [...]
Nokia Rubs Salt in Old foe Qualcomms wounds
Qualcomm has lots of friends, but Nokia is not one of them. In fact, Nokia is almost an arch enemy; this club includes Texas Instruments (TI), who with Nokia, was trying to develop CDMA chips for Nokia phones (mostly), but this didn’t work out because Qualcomm apparently was charging too much to license its patents [...]
