Cellular

It's mobile or bust for cable operators that seem to be trying anything and everything to get into the wireless market.

One of the biggest shifts over the next decade in the cable market is likely to be a move toward wireless services. As cable operators face stiff competition from phone companies, cable operators large and small are looking for ways to take their services mobile.

Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., talked up his company's investment in a new joint venture to blanket the country with 4G, or fourth-generation, wireless … Read more

A recent Gartner study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008.

If correct, those figures would still account for only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile-messaging market worldwide. China is in the lead, with approximately 560 billion SMS messages sent in 2007, followed by the Philippines' 430 billion and Japan's … Read more

AT&T and Vodafone could be eyeing Huawei's handset division, according to a story published Monday in the South China Morning Post.

The newspaper cited unnamed sources who said that phone companies AT&T and Vodafone had expressed interest in acquiring 50 percent of Huawei's handset division. Private equity firms Blackstone, TPG, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts are also supposedly interested.

Huawei, based in China, is looking to spin off its mobile phone, laptop, wireless data-card, and home router businesses. Meanwhile, it will keep a 100 percent ownership in its network infrastructure business. The company doesn't … Read more

The latest executive to leave Motorola: Rich Nottenburg, chief strategy and technology officer.

The doors of the cell phone maker's executive offices seem to have been revolving nonstop since activist investor Carl Icahn, who took a leading role in the Microsoft-Yahoo merger fracas late this week, began his successful pursuit of Motorola board seats.

Nottenburg's departure, announced on Thursday to employees in an internal memo, according to Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson, follows the replacements of CEO Ed Zander in January, acting CFO Tom Meredith in February, and mobile-devices head Stu Reed and marketing head Casey Keller in March, … Read more

Qualcomm may be preparing to launch its MediaFlo mobile TV service in the U.K.

The company this week said it has won 40MHz of wireless spectrum in the U.K. that would be ideal for mobile TV and broadband services. The spectrum is in what's known as the L-band, which is between the frequencies 1452MHz and 1492MHz.

Ofcom, the telecom regulator in the U.K., auctioned off the spectrum earlier this month. And Qualcomm, a wireless chipmaker and mobile patent holder, came away the big winner spending 8.3 million British pounds, or $16.1 million.

So far … Read more

Just one day after instituting a policy of one iPhone sale per customer, AT&T said Thursday that it has ended the policy both on its Web site and in its retail stores. Customers will now be able to buy three iPhones per person, a limit that the carrier enacted when the device first went on sale almost a year ago.

The nation's largest carrier and exclusive provider of the iPhone imposed the new policy only Wednesday, limiting iPhones to not only one per customer, but also one per household. At the time, AT&T gave no … Read more

Alltel, the largest rural cell phone provider in the U.S., plans to use the same technology to build its 4G network that AT&T and Verizon Wireless have chosen, a move that should provide better coverage for next generation wireless users.

But don't expect a major 4G upgrade from Alltel overnight. The company said during its quarterly conference call on Thursday that it would likely take three to five years to deploy the new network.

Still, the fact that yet another wireless operator has committed to using Long Term Evolution or LTE, is a big deal. Since … Read more

Orange, France Telecom's mobile provider, will whisk the iPhone into at least 10 more European, Middle Eastern, and African countries.

The deal with Apple, announced Friday, will bring the popular device later this year into Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Portugal, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as into unspecified countries in Africa and--back on the home side of the Atlantic--the Dominican Republic.

Until recently the iPhone has been available in just a handful of countries outside the U.S., including the U.K., France, Germany, and Ireland.

But announcement after announcement of foreign outreach keep popping up. Since … Read more

Update 9:52 AM ET: A typo has been fixed in paragraph 6, changing a reference of megabits per second to kilobits per second.

An AT&T executive said Wednesday that the cell phone company will offer 20Mbps downloads over its wireless network as soon as next year. But don't get too excited; the real speed will likely be a lot slower.

Still, AT&T's network upgrade plan is expected to boost speeds significantly, which means that users of the hotly anticipated 3G iPhone, which is expected this summer, will be surfing the Web at lightning … Read more