Justice Department officials want T-Mobile and Sprint to form a new, competing wireless carrier as part of a deal to approve their $26.5 billion merger, according to Bloomberg. The two wireless carriers are working on possible concessions to get the deal approved, unnamed sources told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Merging T-Mobile and Sprint would reduce the …
Read More »
Pop the champagne and polish the medals, for the competition to be first to 5G has declared its victors. UK carrier EE turned on the first 5G network in its home country on Thursday, beating its rivals to the punch. EE joins Verizon and Swisscom as “winners” of the race to being the first in a given country to offer …
Read More »
Amazon is interested in snapping up the Boost Mobile prepaid wireless service if Sprint and T-Mobile decide to divest it to push through their $26.5 billion merger, a report says. The online retail giant wants Boost so it can use T-Mobile’s wireless network for the next six years as part of an attached wholesale deal, Reuters reported Thursday. “Amazon would …
Read More »
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have all either launched or are about to launch their respective 5G networks. One carrier that has been quiet, however, is T-Mobile. While the self-proclaimed “Un-carrier” has been quiet about its exact 5G launch plans, the first signs of the new network seem to have popped up in New York. Milan Milanović, who works for Speedtest.net owner …
Read More »
Qualcomm’s about to see more competition in the 5G chip market. Taiwan-based MediaTek said late Tuesday it’s built its first processor that integrates the brains of a device on the same chip as 5G, 4G and other wireless connectivity, which should improve the battery life of devices. The company’s biggest customers will get samples in the third quarter of this …
Read More »
The Federal Communications Commission’s second 5G spectrum auction has ended, raising $2 billion in gross bids. 5G, already launched in the US by Verizon and AT&T, is the next-generation network being used by smartphones to provide faster speeds and more capacity. Through its second auction, the FCC sold off a batch of millimeter-wave (mmWave) high-bandwidth spectrum in the 24GHz band, with …
Read More »
T-Mobile’s prospects for its merger with Sprint are changing by the day, but that hasn’t stopped the nation’s third-largest carrier from continuing to go after rivals. Its latest move: matching the discounts — though not the plans — offered by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. If you have a 15% corporate discount for your AT&T plan, for example, T-Mobile will match the discount …
Read More »
One of the key takeaways from the 9/11 Report was that emergency communications were a mess. You would think that was addressed long ago, but only now is a new mobile network called FirstNet arriving, along with a move toward using cellular networks as mission-critical infrastructure. Now playing: Watch this: With the black SIM, first responders’ calls go ahead… 7:18 …
Read More »
Motorola is… back? As the rest of the smartphone industry grapples with declining sales, in its fourth-quarter earnings Lenovo revealed that its mobile business group — which houses Motorola — had a profitable year and its second straight profitable quarter. While still nowhere near as strong as the company’s PC business, Lenovo says the mobile unit was “profitable starting from …
Read More »
Huawei’s ambitions to unseat Samsung as the world’s largest phone brand by 2020 came crashing to the ground this week following a report that Google will pull support for Huawei’s Android phones. Sidelining its most enthusiastic rival could prove to be a windfall for Samsung — assuming the blacklist status lasts. The measures are already softening. On Monday, the US …
Read More »
