carriers - page 2

Owning an iPhone is a great thing, but the plans sure aren’t. Favoring the carriers more than the consumer, up until now, if you wanted to use an iPhone in the United States, you had to sign yourself up to have your bank account drained for nearly $100 a month for the next twenty-four months.

Last week’s announcement that Cricket Wireless was entering the iPhone game radically changes the carrier landscape in the United States, at least as far as we customers are concerned. The prepaid carrier isn’t some regional oddjob: they service $7 million customers in all fifty states. For $55 a month, you get unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited texts… and no contract. The only rub? You have to lay out $500 for the iPhone up front.

It’s worth it. I decided to sit down with my calculator and figure out how much users can save if they get their next iPhone through Cricket instead of one of AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The answer? A LOT. Here’s the data.

Apple has faced some challenges already when it comes to LTE on the new iPad and it looks like there will be more challenges to come as nearly 60% of mobile carriers worldwide expect to launch LTE service over the next 18 months.

To date, the new iPad only works with LTE systems in North America, a fact that has forced Apple to change the name of LTE iPads. While a new study confirms that LTE will become a global standard for high-speed mobile broadband, it also notes that various regions and countries are focusing on deploying LTE with varying bands of radio spectrum. That could mean devices will need to be designed for specific markets and that international data roaming using LTE will be problematic and potentially impossible.

Bad news for grandfathered unlimited data subscriber on Verizon: the nation’s largest carrier will kill unlimited data once and for all when subscribers switch over to 4G LTE data plans.

Starting in mid-summer, when you buy a LTE handset and switch over to 4G data, Verizon will make you buy one of its new data share plans. Switching plans will end your grandfathered unlimited plan.

While Apple announced another record-breaking quarter yesterday, U.S. mobile carrier Sprint reported a significant net loss of $863 million – nearly twice the loss that it reported for the same quarter last year. iPhone sales, however, helped increase Sprint’s overall subscriber base – making this the eighth consecutive quarter where the company reported overall growth.

AT&T finally began unlocking iPhones for customers whose contracts had now expired over the weekend, allowing the device to be used with other SIM-cards from GSM carriers. But for deployed military personnel, the carrier will unlock iPhones still tied to a contract so that they can be used with others carriers abroad.

Conventional wisdom on Wall Street has it that eventually (and possibly as soon as the end of this year) Apple’s stock price will reach over $1000 a share, largely fueled by the iPhone. But one Wall Street analyst isn’t nearly so optimistic. In fact, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyck is downgrading his recommendation on Apple stock from “Buy” to “Neutral…” and his reasons actually make a lot of sense.

Research in Motion may be watching its mobile business crumble away at its feet, but that’s not the Canadian company’s only concern. It has sided with Nokia and spoken out against Apple’s nano-SIM proposal, accusing its employees of vote rigging by registering themselves under a different affiliation.

When Apple introduced FaceTime on the iPhone 4 nearly two years ago, many users were disappointed to find out that they could only place video calls while connected to Wi-Fi. That was a disappointing fact, but not entirely surprising given the bandwidth that it takes to pull off a high quality video call and Apple’s penchant for making the user experience perfect at all costs.

Guaranteeing a solid experience might have made a good deal of sense when it comes to the iPhone 4, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S – all of them are 3G devices and 3G data performance often falls short of terrestrial broadband and Wi-Fi. But the Wi-Fi only restriction remains in place on the new iPad models with LTE even though LTE performance can approach that of many home broadband options – begging the question: Why is Apple limiting FaceTime on its new LTE devices?

Apple has continually talked about the number of companies that have been testing or deploying iPads to its workers – and if you look around many workplaces today, you’re likely to see at least one or two iPads.

If you’re craving more than anecdotal evidence that the iPad is a serious business tool, however, a new ChangeWave study offers plenty of solid proof. The study shows that 84% of businesses looking to deploy tablets are planning to buy iPads within the next three months. That follows an earlier study that showed the iPad commands 96% of the business tablet market.

T-Mobile has announced its earnings for the 2011 holiday quarter, and the GSM carrier lost over 800,000 subscribers. Being the only major U.S. carrier left not carrying the iPhone, T-Mobile saw a 3.3% decrease in revenue to $20.6 billion.

Although the network’s growth has been on the decline for awhile, the fourth quarter of 2011 resulted in an exponentially greater loss following the launch of the iPhone 4S.

GEVEY has announced the Ultra S unlock for the GSM iPhone 4S. Unlike an unlocked iPhone you have to buy at full price from your carrier, GEVEY’s $55 solution turns your iPhone 4S into a plug-and-play device for any GSM network around the world.

Jailbreakers have been able to unlock their iPhones with a software tool called UltraSn0w, but an unlock for the iPhone 4S has yet to be provided until now. The GEVEY Ultra S does not require a jailbreak, and it’s definitely the easiest way to get your iPhone unlocked for cheap.

A really nifty jailbreak widget for iOS 5’s Notification Center is now available in Cydia. WeeTrackData lets you quickly check your iPhone’s data usage from Notification Center, and you can set a monthly limit to make sure you don’t exceed your allowance.

While most Notification Center widgets seem to be rather trivial functionality-wise, WeeTrackData is one of the first jailbreak widgets with some real practicality.

We’ve all been wondering when Apple will release the next update for iOS 5, with many speculating we won’t see 5.1 until the next-generation iPad is unveiled. According to a new discovery in the iPhone’s carrier operator profiles, Apple could be set to drop iOS 5.1 on Friday, March 9th.

This fall, Sprint became the third U.S. carrier to offer the smartphone. Sprint is the third large largest carrier in the country and the only one to coninute to offer unlimited data plans to new customers – a point that Sprint makes in most of its advertising.

Sprint talked about the iPhone’s impact as part of its quarterly earnings Tuesday. Although Sprint reported large overall net loss of income, the company maintains that the launch of the iPhone was a success. It’s important to note that the iPhone, while helping Sprting add customers, was a factor than the larger than typical net loss, whichthe company expects to recoup in future quarters.

A big challenge for businesses and organizations is cost management, particularly in the current economic climate. Many companies are trying to maximise their budgets – one of the big factors pushing the BYOD trend. Where BYOD isn’t feasible, however, businesses may still have the need to support mobile professionals – and need to do so as cost effectively as possible.

Despite the common presumption that Apple solutions are more expensive, the iPhone offers companies unique advantages when it comes to keeping costs down – and those advantages aren’t likely to be found in Android devices.

A recent survey of mobile carrier execs by Deloitte highlights some of the major concerns over the next few years. Chief among them is losing control of the mobile industry and market space to platform developers – namely Apple and Google. As Galen Grumen points out for Infoworld, this scenario actually gives Apple more power than Google because Apple controls the entire iOS ecosystem, from operating system to hardware to app and media sales.

This situation has mobile carriers worried. Carriers in Europe have actually gone so far as to consider developing their own smartphone platform to compete with iOS and Android in the hopes of enough success to maintain bargaining power against the demands of Apple or Android manufacturers. But the big question is whether or not this is good for consumers and business customers.

If you think about it, it’s pretty convoluted having a separate data plan for both your iPhone and iPad when you could just pay your carrier a lump sum and share a data allowance between the two. Verizon and AT&T certainly think so: they said as far back as June last year that they were investigating shared data plans.

Now, just a couple months before the iPad 3 is expected to debut, Engadget has gotten a tip that suggests that Verizon is getting ready to roll out shared data plans sometimes soon, allowing one account holder to share a data pool between multiple devices for just a $9.99 fee.

When FaceTime was first introduced back in June 2010, Steve Jobs noted the video calling feature would be available to users over 3G once the necessary agreements with carriers had been made. Nearly a year on, FaceTime still requires a Wi-Fi connection, but it could be about to make its debut over 3G in Germany.

AT&T has been forcing the same crappy $25 for 2GB plan down everyone’s throat since June 2010, but now they’re upgrading it for the first time. Starting Sunday, AT&T will be upgrading all their new smartphone data plans with larger data allocations… and larger prices. Yes, pay-by-the-month iPad users, that means you too.

Apple’s carrier partners in Singapore are removing the front- and rear-facing cameras from the Cupertino company’s latest iPhone 4S before selling it, according to a new report. The doctored devices are aimed at members of the military who are prohibited from taking cameras into their bases.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – In the aftermath of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, there are going to be hundreds of awards — some official, some decidedly not-so — declaring the best product of CES.

Why wait? We can already tell you what we think the best product of CES is: Verizon Wireless’s network, which is the only one that has not been frickin’ smeared into jelly by the insane data and voice demands of the show’s technical elite.

If you’re a carrier scrambling for ways to make up dwindling voice and texting profits, Apple’s iPhone 4S is not just a product, but a dreamy pin-up, a new report on smartphone data usage finds. What’s more, Siri — the iPhone 4S’s hallmark feature — is a down-right wet dream.

Finland is far from the minds of most iPhone users. However, the frigid, Nordic country is huge on carriers’ radar because it is there that text messaging was born and where it could very well die. The number of Christmas Eve texts in Finland fell off a cliff, plummeting to 8.9 million from 10.9 million in 2010. With text messages accounting for 20 percent of carrier revenue, its enough to give companies nightmares — but this bad dream is far from over.

If you received an iPad for Christmas, there is a 95 percent chance you connected to a local Wi-Fi network to slurp up data, a new study predicts. Where does that leave cellular carriers? Out in the cold with their expensive data plans and 3G tablets, that’s where. The really bad news for folks like Sprint is the trend for 9.5 out of 10 tablets to exclusively use Wi-Fi doesn’t appear to be changing.

For the second year running, AT&T has ranked as the worst carrier in the United States in an annual satisfaction survey.