Happy Friday, cheeps! A few quick housekeeping notes: First, my summer vacation starts next Tuesday, so Cheapskate duties will be in the hands of my super-savvy CNET colleagues. When I return, be ready for big news regarding the next Cheapskate Mystery Box! It’s happening, and soon. Second, you’ve probably noticed this sentence in recent posts: …
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Samsung’s Galaxy Fold may finally be going on sale in September, but it appears that it won’t have the same carrier support the original release promised, despite a promised redesign. When the nearly $2,000 Fold was first announced earlier this year, Samsung said it would be available from AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. According to The Verge, however, it appears the …
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Dish has made a deal with T-Mobile and Sprint to pay $5 billion for their wireless assets, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing anonymous sources. This would apparently set the stage for the Justice Department to give T-Mobile’s $26.5 billion merger with Sprint the thumbs-up as early as Thursday, something the Wall Street Journal reports it is prepared to do. The TV …
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AT&T’s video struggles may be continuing to worsen, but that doesn’t mean the company has stopped trying to find new ways to get people to watch television. During its second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the company announced that it will begin trialing a new over-the-top streaming service in the third quarter of the year called AT&T TV. It is currently …
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AT&T met analyst expectations in its latest earnings report, even as struggles continued around the company’s U-Verse and DirecTV video unit. The technology giant added 335,000 phone users, the bulk of them coming on the company’s prepaid side. AT&T says it added 72,000 postpaid users, the more lucrative customers that sign up for its traditional monthly wireless service. By comparison, …
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5G subscribers are expected to reach 1.1 billion by 2023 across the Asia-Pacific and North America regions, where the next-generation network has been launched. That would be triple the number of subscribers 4G reached in the same five-year time period after launching, IHS Markit said in a report released Wednesday. 5G, already launched in some parts of the US by Verizon, …
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Selling your phone location data is a lucrative business, but it might not have a place in New York City: The City Council is considering a bill banning the practice within the five boroughs. Council member Justin Brannan on Tuesday proposed a bill that would prevent mobile carriers and apps from sharing people’s location data if that location is within …
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Apple is getting closer to buying Intel’s smartphone modem business, with the iPhone maker now in “advanced talks” with Intel, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The deal could be worth $1 billion and include patents and employees, according to the report. Such a deal could help Apple’s attempts to develop its own 5G chip for the iPhone. It follows …
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing AT&T and two data aggregation services over the sale of customers’ location data. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in US District Court for the Northern District of California, the EFF alleges that AT&T sold customers’ real-time location data to credit agencies, bail bondsmen and other third parties “without the required customer consent and without …
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US 4G wireless networks continued to show overall improvement even as 5G’s expansion continues to loom over the industry. In new industry rankings from wireless industry trackers IHS Markit’s RootMetrics and OpenSignal, Verizon continues to be praised for its robust nationwide 4G network while AT&T was once again found to have greatly improved its speed. The new rankings come a …
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