Kevin Fitchard

[Commentary] As the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint against T-Mobile points out, carriers aren’t the ancillary victims they claim to be. They take a hefty cut of every premium SMS transaction sent their way and therefore have conflicting motives when it comes to cracking down on offenders.

According to the FTC, T-Mobile kept charging customers for these SMS services for years after learning they were fraudulent (T-Mobile said the accusations are unfounded). It seems there’s an easy solution here: just ban these kinds of SMS billing arrangements entirely. The conflict of interest the carriers face goes away, and given the datedness of premium SMS, no one is going to miss it except for scammers.

If there is going to be an exception to that rule, it should be charitable giving. In the last half-decade, SMS donations have had a big impact on donations to non-profits and humanitarian organizations, especially those that respond immediately to global disasters like the Haiti earthquake of 2010. N

The cities of San Francisco and San Jose are merging their two municipal Wi-Fi networks; at least on the virtual level. The two cities are using a new technology -- Hotspot 2.0 -- to let smartphones automatically connect and roam between their two networks as well as provide a layer of security on what wouldn’t normally be available in wide-open public hotspots.

SF wants its public hotspot network -- which now covers Market Street, the city’s main commercial corridor, but will soon expand to public parks -- to become a key component of its municipal infrastructure, useful for businesses, consumers and city workers. That demands encrypted connections, he said.

San Francisco Department of Technology CTO Flavio Aggio said he certainly isn’t blind to Hotspot 2.0’s potential for forming intercity networks. San Francisco and San Jose are connecting their networks, but Aggio said he is already in talks with other cities to include their municipal Wi-Fi grids in broader roaming agreements.

It’s fair to say that since John Legere became CEO of T-Mobile US nearly two years ago, the US mobile industry has changed a lot. Not only has T-Mobile triggered some big shifts in how mobile devices and service plans are sold, Legere has also injected a lot of excitement into a normally staid mobile market.

As to whether T-Mobile questions the notion that mobile data capacity is a rare commodity that has to be metered and meted out sparingly, Legere said: “I do believe there have been artificial barriers and scarcity put up by the duopolists.”

Part of the reason is pure capitalism, he thinks. AT&T and Verizon want to maximize the return on their investments, so they charge as much as they can for data. By preserving the illusion that data is a limited resource, they can justify such high rates. Consequently, when T-Mobile offers lower rates for data, people assume that T-Mobile is vastly underpricing that resource.

Legere and his CTO Neville Ray believe that their competitors are also using the notion of scarcity as a crutch when they should actually be investing more in their networks. While T-Mobile does offer cheaper individual smartphone data plans than its competitors, Legere pointed out that T-Mobile hasn’t embarked on a quest to commoditize data or to start a price war in the US mobile market.

Sprint’s LTE rollout may be behind those of its nationwide competitors, but it appears to be getting close to completion.

Its 4G network now covers 225 million people, and it plans to hit the 250 million mark by mid-year. It kicked off a program that brings its 4G coverage to small markets and rural areas it never planned to target with 4G service.

Sprint announced roaming agreements with 12 regional and rural carriers as part of a LTE network sharing agreement with the Competitive Carrier Association and the NetAmerica Alliance. The idea is to create a common device portfolio and nationwide LTE footprint that Sprint and all its regional partners can share in.

If you want to sell a telecom merger to the American public, the hip to do is promise more broadband access. Sprint chairman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is making such claims to justify his forthcoming bid for T-Mobile, and now AT&T is on its own broadband kick to push its proposed acquisition of DirecTV.

In a regulatory filing with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T promised to deliver broadband to 15 million more homes and businesses, but Ma Bell isn’t just talking about wireline technologies like DSL and U-Verse. It plans to build the bulk of this network using wireless airwaves. AT&T said it would target 13 million primarily rural locations outside of its broadband footprint with a technology called wireless local loop (WLL).

Local loop is the telecommunications term for the circuit a copper line completes going from a telephone company’s switching office to the customer’s home. But in this case of WLL, the circuit is made via wireless, not copper.

AT&T says its WLL network could deliver speeds of 15 Mbps to 20 Mbps. That isn’t as fast as the speed we’ve come to expect from cable, but it’s certainly not bad either, especially considering the limited options in rural areas. The big question is whether it can deliver the monthly capacity to individual subscribers to make it a truly competitive offering.

Now that Time Warner Cable has it made it easier for customers to access its Wi-Fi hotspot networks with its recent upgrade to Hotspot 2.0, and it’s starting to expand its wireless coverage with roaming deals.

It’s now signed a new roaming deal with wireless ISP Boingo, giving it access to its network of hotspots in busy US transit hubs, including airports, train stations and even New York City subway platforms. The deal is reciprocal, meaning Boingo’s wireless customers can access TWC’s 32,000-node hotspot network, built in commercial corridors and other highly trafficked areas throughout its cable territory. TWC broadband customers won’t get access to Boingo’s entire hotspot footprint, just travel hubs in about 100 US locations.

[Commentary] When SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son gave a well-received talk on deplorable state of the Internet in the US, he never mentioned T-Mobile directly.

However, the subtext was there: if regulators let him get his hands on T-Mobile, he wouldn’t just make the US mobile landscape the competitive, but the entire realm of Internet access.

Give me T-Mobile and I’ll give you a competitor to Comcast-Time Warner, was the message Son delivered, and everybody seemed to eat it up.

I think Son is being pretty disingenuous here. He simply can’t deliver the network to meet those promises. Here’s why.

Mobile and wireline broadband networks are fundamentally different animals, and no matter how much wireless technology improves you’re never going to pump the same amount of capacity through a cellular connection that you would through its wireline equivalent. Son argued that today’s average LTE connection -- at 6 Mbps -- is just as fast as the home broadband speeds many Americans have today (though as The Verge’s Chris Ziegler pointed out, he seemed to be making up numbers), but Son is conflating speed with the cost of capacity. The way people use their home broadband connections simply can’t stand up to today’s mobile technology and today’s mobile business models.

When looking at the technology involved, Son also stands on tenuous ground. Mobile and wireless technologies will gradually get faster and more powerful, evolving to a point where we may some day be able to consume data over wireless connections as indifferently as we consume over the wireline connections. But that kind of scenario involves much more than the cellular networks Sprint could provide.

Ever since it acquired Alltel back in 2009, Verizon has been indisputably at the top of the US mobile carrier heap in terms of subscribers. But AT&T is again vying for that top spot, thanks to its recent acquisition of regional operator Leap Wireless, according to a new report by Chetan Sharma Consulting.

At the end of the first quarter, AT&T and Verizon both controlled 34 percent of the mobile subscriptions in the US, according to Sharma’s estimates. It’s hard to pin exact numbers on those carriers, though, since both report subscribers differently.

At the end of March, AT&T had 116 million total connections, but that number includes all of its wholesale subscribers (those that connect with one of AT&T’s mobile virtual network operator partners) and machine-to-machine links attached to cars, gadgets and other devices in the Internet of things. Verizon doesn’t report any of those numbers. It only reveals business and consumer retail subscribers buying their service directly from Verizon. That number totaled 103 million.

By Sharma’s calculations just as many people are connecting their phones and tablets and hotspots to AT&T’s network as Verizon. Any way you look at it, these two carriers are huge. They collectively control 68 percent of the US wireless market.

Google is working with Wi-Fi equipment maker Ruckus Wireless to build a large-scale Wi-Fi network in the cloud off of which any business could hang its wireless routers, according to a source familiar with the project who asked not to be named.

Google has been working closely with Ruckus, trialing a new software-based wireless controller that virtualizes the management functions of the Wi-Fi network in the cloud, according to a source. The end result would be a nationwide -- or even global -- network that any business could join and any Google customer could access. The source also confirmed earlier reports that:

• Google will offer the service to businesses for free as long as they agree to join its public network, though businesses will have to supply their own broadband connections.
• Hotspot 2.0 will have a big role to play in the network, connecting smartphones and tablets automatically and securely to any Google-powered access point, much like they would connect to their mobile carrier’s 3G of 4G network.
• Google will be able to provide analytics to businesses about consumers that use networks, separating out location-specific information from the data collected by the virtual network as a whole.

Since it launched two years ago, FreedomPop has been moving beyond its original freemium mobile broadband concept. It moved away from iPhone sleeves and mobile hotspots to start selling smartphones and voice services.

Now FreedomPop is adopting what has become an old standby among budget mobile carriers: The unlimited data plan that really isn’t unlimited. FreedomPop launched a new $20-a-month smartphone plan called Unlimited Everything for its new line of LTE phones. It comes with all-you-can eat voice and text and 1 GB of LTE data. Once that gigabyte of 4G data is used up, speeds are throttled back to 3G levels for the remainder of the billing period. It’s a format many other smartphone driven mobile virtual network operators like Straight Talk and H20 Wireless and even major carriers like T-Mobile have adopted.