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If AT&T succeeds in its bid to buy T-Mobile USA -- and it looks like it will -- the Tier I carrier ranks will shrink to just three operators. In today’s highly saturated mobile market, it’s hard to envision a new nationwide operator emerging, given the scarcity of spectrum and the difficulty of raising a voice and data network from the ground up. But MetroPCS seems to have just such intentions.

As increasing numbers of Americans get their news online, the owner of CNN.com was accused in an Alameda County lawsuit of discriminating against the hard-of-hearing by failing to provide closed captions for videos posted on the Internet.

CNN's refusal to offer computer users the captions it provides to its television audience "excludes Californians who are deaf or hard of hearing from a wealth of critical information regarding current events," said the suit, a proposed class action in Superior Court on behalf of the state's hearing-impaired residents. More than 100,000 Californians are functionally deaf, lawyers said. They said the suit is the first in the nation to seek equal treatment for the deaf from a commercial content provider on the Internet. The refusal of Time Warner, CNN's owner, to offer closed captions is "astounding, given how central the Internet is in today's communication environment," said attorney Anna Levine of Disability Rights Advocates.

The mobile Data Tsunami is still growing at an astounding pace. According to Nielsen’s monthly analysis of cellphone bills for 65,000+ lines, smartphone owners – especially those with iPhones and Android devices — are consuming more data than ever before on a per-user basis.

This has huge implications for carriers since the proportion of smartphone owners is also increasing dramatically. (Currently, 37% of all mobile subscribers in the United States have smartphones.) In just the last 12 months, the amount of data the average smartphone user consumes per month has grown by 89 percent from 230 Megabytes (MB) in Q1 2010 to 435 MB in Q1 2011. A look at the distribution of data consumption is even more shocking: data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone users (90th percentile) is up 109 percent while the top 1 percent (99th percentile) has grown their usage by an astonishing 155 percent from 1.8GB in Q1 2010 to over 4.6GB in Q1 2011. Even as data usage has almost doubled, most users are paying around what they did a year ago for data. That translates to a lower cost per unit of data consumed. The amount the average smartphone user pays per unit of data has dropped by nearly 50 percent in the last year, from 14 cents per megabyte (MB) to a mere 8 cents.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has denied the program carriage complaint of WealthTV, the last of a group of such complaints that went before an FCC Administrative Law Judge and the only one that was not settled before the FCC had to make that call. The vote was unanimous. Anticipating that result, WealthTV had asked for an oral hearing to plead its case one more time. That, too, was denied.

Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Richard Sippel more than a year and a half ago concluded that Wealth TV parent Herring Broadcasting had failed to prove that "any of the defendants -- Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Bright House -- engaged in discrimination in the selection, terms or conditions of carriage on the basis of WealthTV's non-affiliation." The complaint had been designated for hearing back in 2008. While WealthTV had complained that Sippel put the burden of proof on Wealth rather than on the cable operators, the commission agreed with Sippel that Wealth would have lost in either case. "We conclude that the defendants would have prevailed even if they had been required to carry the burdens of production and proof, as WealthTV contends was proper."

The FCC agreed with the ALJ that it was business considerations, not discrimination, that kept WealthTV off the operators' systems, which Comcast outlined in its testimony as "cost of carriage, the uncertain consumer appeal of WealthTV's programming, bandwidth constraints, the fact that WealthTV had attracted relatively few carriage agreements, the lack of experience of its owners in the programming business, and absence of outside investment support."