tower

T-Mobile USA has hired advisers to help it sell its wireless towers in an effort to raise cash, Bloomberg reported today.

T-Mobile's network of roughly 7,000 wireless towers has been on the block before, and is seen as one of the easiest ways to generate money for the carrier's German parent, Deutsche Telekom AG. A sale is seen generating as much as $3 billion a year for T-Mobile, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Philip Cusick.

T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom are on the hunt for cash after initiating an aggressive plan to move to 4G LTE on … Read more

In an effort to scoop up the smash-hit social-gaming app Draw Something, mobile gaming publisher Zynga acquired OMGPOP for an unprecedented $180 million, plus an extra $30 million in employee retention.

Not only is it the first major acquisition for Zynga, it's also a bit out of character for the company, especially considering some recent controversy the mobile powerhouse ran into with the developer of Tiny Tower, NimbleBit. … Read more

TOKYO--Nearly a year after the magnitude-9.0 quake that pummeled Japan, construction of the world's tallest tower, the Tokyo Sky Tree, is now complete.

Builder Obayashi, which recently announced plans for a space elevator to start services by 2050, declared the Sky Tree complete ahead of a ceremony Friday. While the world's tallest man-made structure remains the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 829 meters (2,720 feet), the Sky Tree tops the list of the tallest free-standing towers at 634 meters (2,080 feet).

It's 34 meters taller than the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China, and nearly twice the height of its predecessor, Tokyo Tower (333 meters). Operated by Tobu Railways and a consortium of media companies, the Sky Tree will serve as a digital terrestrial broadcasting center for Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto region. … Read more

With the passage last week of legislation authorizing the FCC to conduct new spectrum auctions, you might think that the looming spectrum crisis has been averted.

Nothing could be farther from the truth--or more dangerous to the continued health of the mobile ecosystem.

To avoid severe service interruptions or outright collapse of mobile networks, the FCC's 2010 National Broadband Plan estimated that mobile users will need an additional 300MHz of spectrum by 2015 and an additional 500 MHz by 2020. Many industry insiders believe these estimates are actually low.

The FCC now has the authority to conduct auctions to … Read more

How fast can you go up? Mitsubishi Electric recently unveiled technologies for new high-speed elevators that will climb at a vertiginous rate of roughly 40 mph when they enter service in China.

The elevators will be installed in the 632-meter (2,073-foot) Shanghai Tower, which is being erected in Shanghai's Pudong area.

Designed by U.S. architectural firm Gensler, the 128-story skyscraper will be the tallest structure in China when complete and second only in the world to Dubai's Burj Khalifa.

The elevators could travel as fast as 1,080 meters, or 3,543 feet, per minute--roughly 40.2 mph. … Read more

I expect Alienware will sell a lot of these.

There's very little about the new Alienware X51 gaming slim tower a mainstream buyer won't appreciate. You can buy a reasonably fast configuration, like our review unit, for less than $1,000. It's on an aesthetic par with an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. You can even put it on its side and slide it into your media rack.

It's still a PC, of course, with all the content benefits and interface and software hang-ups implied therein. And in spite of Alienware's clever work cramming in a full-size 3D card, the X51 will make a finicky upgrade platform. You get no other expansion card slots, there's room for only one hard drive, and the 330-watt power supply (an upgrade over the 230-watt default) limits you to mainstream graphics cards.

Still, the bumped-up GeForce GTX 555 card in our review config can run Battlefield 3, Skyrim, or pretty much any other game at 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution with smooth frame rates and respectable quality settings. That's all many gamers will ask for, particularly those shopping for a PC like this one.

Read the full review of the Alienware X51.… Read more

Allied Star Police is a fun little game with a touching backstory: developer PopCap Games helped create this simple, side-scrolling castle-defense-style game through the Make-a-Wish Foundation, for a 9-year-old with leukemia whose wish was to make a video game.

Befitting a game co-created by a 9-year-old, Allied Star Police is action-packed, quick to play, and not too complicated--with cool graphics and animation (even cooler on the iPad) and a loud, rock-out soundtrack. The game pits you (the Allied Star Police, of course) against the evil Flamions, as you send competing waves of well-armed vehicles toward each other's bases.

Your … Read more

If you've ever tried to join a conversation on an enthusiasts' forum about modifying your car for better performance, it may have seemed to you that everyone was speaking a foreign, abbreviation-based language.

What's the difference between NA and FI? I/H/E? What's that? Should you just add more NOS? If so, do I pour it straight into my FMIC? Some of you may already know the answers to these questions, but many are probably staring blankly at these seemingly random groupings of letters.

In this week's edition of the ABCs of Car Tech, I'… Read more

The Yokohama Marine Tower was lit up Wednesday night courtesy of electricity from the batteries in a Nissan Leaf.

Nissan is lending some battery power to the local 106-meter-tall Japanese landmark in Yokohama, the capital city of the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan, which is located about 27 miles south of Tokyo.

In fact, the tower's night twinkle will be powered by a Nissan Leaf channeling electricity to the tower from its batteries via a connected power control system until November 6.

The publicity stunt is part of the Yokohama Marine Tower's 50th Anniversary celebration and Yokohama Port's … Read more