April 2014

As Samsung Electronics's best-selling smartphones face increasing competition from a horde of Chinese lookalikes, one of the South Korean giant’s key goals has been to translate demand for its devices into interest for Samsung’s homegrown software and services. But a new study shows how far the company still has to go.

Strategy Analytics, a Newton (MA)-based research firm, said in a report that US users of Samsung’s devices spend little time on its own messaging, music and voice-activated applications including apps like ChatON, the South Korean company’s answer to services like WhatsApp, Line and Viber.

The report said that US users of Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and S4 smartphones logged an average of six seconds per month using ChatON, compared to more than 11 hours per month on Facebook and about two hours per month on Instagram. On average, users spent just seven minutes during the month on an array of Samsung apps -- including ChatON, voice-activated search app S Voice and app store Samsung Hub. By contrast, they spent an average of 149 minutes on just three apps by software partner Google -- its app store Play Store, video-watching site YouTube and its flagship search engine.

The last time the world got together to talk about how the Internet should work, China and Russia proposed making it easier for individual governments to control what their citizens can see on the Web.

Now they're at it again, this time at a major international conference in Brazil. The conference, known as NETMundial, is expected to produce a set of nonbinding, international principles that countries can use in their management of the Internet.

The issue has grown more prominent lately as the United States signaled its intent to relinquish its largely symbolic role in overseeing the Web's global name and numbering system. Unlike many of the other 180-odd proposals submitted by other countries and organizations, China and Russia are plainly preoccupied by how Internet governance could affect state authority.

The handheld vision Steve Jobs sold to AT&T in 2007 has come to pass. The problem for Apple investors is that the booming market the company created with the iPhone in 2007 -- and then boosted with the iPad three years later -- is now producing more growth for AT&T than it is for Apple itself.

AT&T reported its strongest growth in long-term wireless subscribers in five years, "with smartphones and tablets leading the way," as AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said. Just as important, a surging number of AT&T customers are switching to so-called usage-based pricing -- paying based on how much wireless data they download from the Web -- rather than paying for the devices up front with the help of subsidies.

While the transition is putting a short-term hit on AT&T's balance sheet (as it has to write down the full price of such device sales immediately), the popularity of those plans also helped generate the company's strongest cash flow from operations in seven years.

"The move away from device subsidies accelerated in Q1," Stephens said, as the number of new and existing customers choosing so-called mobile share data plans tripled from a year earlier

The Federal Communications Commission took steps to provide more spectrum for general consumer use, carrier-grade small cell deployments, fixed wireless broadband services, and other innovative uses, through the creation of a new Citizens Broadband Radio Service.

The FCC proposed rules for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service in a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that advances the Commission’s efforts to meet the growing demand for spectrum by proposing to make 150 megahertz available in the 3.5 GHz Band. The FNPRM proposes innovative spectrum sharing techniques to unlock the value of the spectrum between 3550 MHz and 3650 MHz, and seeks comment on extending the proposed service to 3700 MHz.

Specifically, the FNPRM proposes a three-tiered access and sharing model comprised of federal and non-federal incumbents, priority access licensees, and general authorized access users. Together, the proposals seek to promote flexibility and innovation by leveraging advancements in technology to facilitate sharing between different users and uses, including incumbent government uses.

Federal and non-federal incumbents would be protected from harmful interference from Citizens Broadband Radio Service users. Targeted priority access licenses would be made available for a variety of uses, including mobile broadband.

General authorized access use would be permitted in a reserved amount of spectrum and on an opportunistic basis for a variety of consumer or business-oriented purposes, including advanced home wireless networking. Access and operation within the 3.5 GHz band would be managed by a spectrum access system, a dynamic database or databases that incorporates technical and functional requirements necessary to manage access and operations across the three tiers. In addition, the FNPRM seeks comment on technical, auction, and allocation rules.