Mobile World Congress

Telecom operators can hardly curb their enthusiasm about surging mobile data usage while at the same time casting around for ways to make money from it.

Social media and mobile phones are growing increasingly close, a relationship evident at this year's big wireless conference in Barcelona.

Billionaire Philip Falcone’s LightSquared Inc. wireless venture has agreements with five customers to provide wholesale fourth-generation service.

Although Microsoft and Nokia speak of creating a "third ecosystem" and saving the world from an Apple-Google duopoly, their deal should perhaps be seen less ambitiously.

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, said the company would also continue to use its scale and footprint to capitalize on the other end of the spectrum in the smartphone industry — by focusing on developing markets where a large portion of the population is not yet using the mobile Web.

European phone operators said Internet companies such as Google shouldn't be allowed to dominate content services and that platforms must be kept open for all companies.

There is a reason why Verizon Wireless didn't mention anything about hand off between long-term evolution (LTE) and its CDMA network when it announced its first successful voice-over-LTE calls last week. Verizon doesn't plan to support the packet-to-circuit conversion that would allow customers to move between LTE and CDMA 1X coverage without dropping their phone calls. Rather Verizon will keep VoIP-initiated calls on the LTE network and circuit-switched calls on the 2G network -- never the twain shall meet.

Near-field communication (NFC) is a simple idea -- using a wireless signal to exchange information between two devices, like, for example, using your mobile phone instead of a credit card to make payments in a store.

Network operators are stepping up efforts to provide large-scale mobile advertising services, taking advantage of advertising agencies’ desire for greater competition to Google and Apple in the fast-growing market.

Paying for your morning coffee and newspaper by swiping your mobile phone instead of fumbling for cash or debit card could be just around the corner. For telecoms firms like Vodafone and France Telecom, it's the innovation they hope may finally enable them to steal a march on Apple and Google who dominate the mobile market with devices, applications and software.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo pitched the social network as a potent weapon for businesses. Twitter has become a "second screen" alongside television, making major social events out of live TV, programmed broadcasts and even commercials, Costolo said in a keynote address at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Video telephony, for decades a fixture of science fiction, cartoons and comics is poised to take a leap in popularity this year, experts say, as an era of face-to-face communication begins to replace the century-old voice call.

Ruckus Wireless has developed a gateway that offers a first step toward a time when smartphone users will automatically roam onto Wi-Fi networks to use data services.

As cellphones have spread, so have large cell towers — those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade. Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them.

Mobile phone operators are stepping up their campaign to charge Internet content providers such as Google that are unleashing an explosion of data traffic on telecoms groups’ networks.