Wall Street Journal

Sprint unveiled plans to offer unlimited voice or texting prepaid wireless plans at Wal-Mart Stores for $20 a month through its payLo by Virgin Mobile brand.

The monthly plans soon to be available to customers who purchase a Kyocera Kona or Samsung Montage device, cost $20 for either unlimited voice minutes with 50 text messages, or unlimited texting with 50 minutes of voice, Sprint said.

"The no-contract market continues to grow, most visibly with smartphones, but many customers find value with unlimited plans without the extra bells and whistles," said Angela Rittgers, vice president of marketing for Sprint's prepaid group.

For roughly two months, about 900,000 households in small towns across the US haven't been able to watch Nickelodeon, MTV or Comedy Central, as a result of a blackout of the Viacom-owned channels by some 60 small cable operators. So far, there is little evidence any more than a handful of the households care.

After bracing to lose as many as a 10th of their customers, the operators have lost less than 2% of their collective subscribers, according to an industry group that represents the operators.

Viacom isn't worried either, saying it expects "no financial impact" from losing what is only about 1% of total pay-TV households. As a result, with the cable operators unhappy about the price Viacom wants for the right to carry the channels, executives say the blackout is likely to be permanent.

Several have replaced the Viacom channels with others.

The situation signals a shift in the often-tense relations between pay-TV operators and entertainment companies. With video choices increasing, operators are starting to push back at program cost increases by dropping channels altogether.

The markets in the current dispute are mostly rural and suburban, in states including Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa and Idaho, where Viacom's portfolio of young-skewing channels with edgy programming popular in urban centers may not carry as much sway.

Google bought wireless-communications startup Alpental Technologies in its bid to extend fast Internet service to more places. Alpental was started by former Clearwire engineers including Michael Hart and Pete Gelbman.

The company was developing a cheap, high-speed communications service using the 60GHz band of spectrum, according to a letter the Alpental engineers wrote to the Federal Communications Commission in 2013.

The 60GHz band has been used for high-capacity networking indoors and to extend fiber-optic Internet service from one commercial building to others nearby. The Federal Communications Commision loosened some rules governing this band of spectrum in 2013, saying that it could be used to provide wireless connections of up to a mile at speeds up to seven gigabits per second. That could extend service without the cost of building new wireline networks in some areas, the FCC said in August. Most broadband Internet services offer much slower speeds, below one gigabit per second.

[Commentary] Like most utopian dreams, the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, or Utopia, hasn't panned out.

Utopia, a consortium of 11 municipalities to build a fiber-optic network, was initially financed in 2004 with a $185 million bond; it was supposed to be completed in three years and have a positive cash flow in five.

The project is a prime example of why governments should not be in the business of building or operating broadband networks -- and why the federal government should not be in the business of cheerleading for them.

Today Utopia has about 11,000 subscribers, less than one quarter of the 49,350 projected to be on board by September 2007. Its failure to attract the anticipated number of customers has caused a spectacular financial failure. Utopia has lost at least $3 million and as much as $13 million annually.

[Schatz is president of Citizens Against Government Waste, Van Tassell is vice president of the Utah Taxpayers Association]

The decline of Nielsen as being the workhorse of ratings it once was is one of the biggest threats facing cable channels. Cable channels had a low-risk but lucrative business model: fill much of the schedule with reruns of shows that were proven hits on broadcast networks -- CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC -- taking a lot of the guesswork out of programming.

But that formula is no longer reliable.

Audiences have fragmented so badly among myriad cable channels and online video outlets that broadcast networks are finding it harder to produce a hit. That means the pool of shows that can guarantee a strong audience in reruns for cable channels has shrunk drastically, driving up prices for what is available -- even when audiences aren't as strong.

Cutting down on reruns by investing more in original programming, meanwhile, can also be costly if those shows don't gain traction. That is why all the big cable networks are hoping for broadcasters to rediscover their mojo.

Further complicating matters for cable networks, viewers now have other ways to watch reruns, including streaming video services and video-on-demand. The serialized dramas that broadcasters are increasingly producing have proved extremely popular on Netflix, viewers often "binge watch," devouring multiple episodes at a time. Shows suited for binge-watching often don't work as well as traditional reruns for cable channels.

Google is facing fresh accusations of anticompetitive behavior in Europe over its Android operating system for mobile phones, even as the Web giant struggles to overcome separate concerns over its dominance of online search.

It said it filed with European Union regulators, Aptoide -- a Portuguese company that runs a marketplace for mobile applications, or app store -- claims that Google is abusing its dominant position in the smartphone market to push users away from app stores that rival its own, Google Play.

"We are struggling to grow, even to survive, in the face of Google systematically setting up obstacles for users to install third-party app stores in the Android platform and blocking competition in their Google Play store," said Paulo Trezentos, Aptoide's co-founder and CEO.

The Lisbon-based company, which says it has six million unique monthly users, said it planned to "join forces with other independent app stores to forge a common front" against Google. The complaint is the latest in a litany of antitrust woes facing the US search giant in Europe.

Online retailer Amazon.com is expected to reveal its first smartphone, featuring a display designed to respond to users' eye movements and capable of displaying three-dimensional images.

The device is Amazon's first foray into the highly competitive market dominated by Samsung Electronics and Apple. The handset business can be very unkind; once-highflying brands like Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry have seen their market share erode.

Amazon invited developers, media and others to its event. Amazon will enter the fray with a powerful partner. AT&T will be the exclusive carrier, according to people familiar with the Seattle company's plans.

The arrangement extends Amazon's relationship with AT&T, which also provides wireless service for Kindle tablets and e-readers. The move could help AT&T attract new subscribers at a time of intense competition among wireless carriers.

AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for Amazon.com 's new smartphone, which is expected to be unveiled soon, according to people familiar with the plans.

The arrangement extends Amazon's relationship with AT&T, which also provides wireless service to Kindle tablets and e-readers. The move could help AT&T attract new subscribers at a time of intense competition among wireless carriers. Apple and Samsung Electronics have a tight grip on the smartphone market in the US with a combined 60% share in the first quarter, according to comScore.

Rival devices from makers like BlackBerry and Nokia have seen their market share shrivel as they failed to keep up with technology. Amazon hopes to distinguish its phone in a crowded market with a screen capable of displaying seemingly three-dimensional images without special glasses, according to a Wall Street Journal article citing people briefed on the plans.

The phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram, according to the story. Amazon is expected to introduce the device at an event in hometown Seattle and has demonstrated versions of the handset to developers in San Francisco and Seattle.

In the race to get the world's fastest mobile Internet service, South Korea and the European Union announced a major new pact to join forces on so-called 5G networks.

The deal sets up a joint group to develop systems, set standards and get radio frequencies ready to accommodate the new technology. The aim is to have a global consensus and vision on 5G by the end of 2015, according to a statement released by the Korean government.

The agreement could be crucial for the EU, which is lagging behind in the global telecommunications race after late and patchy implementation of the current 4G standard. While users can download a one-hour high-definition film in six minutes on 4G mobile Internet, 5G would slash the time to six seconds, according to EU data. Under the plan, the government is aiming for total revenue of 331 trillion won from sales of mobile devices and network equipment that support 5G communications technology, during the 2020-26 period.

From the EU side, in December 2013 the European Commission said that it would allot €700 million ($948 million) and industry partners more than €3 billion to conduct exploratory research into 5G "without delay." The commission, the EU's executive arm, intends to select the first set of projects to fund at the end of 2014, with €125 million to allocate.

The partnership will be led by two groups: Europe's 5G PPP, which is based in Belgium and includes European technology and telecom companies such as Telefónica SA and Nokia Oyj; and its South Korean equivalent, the 5G Forum.

France plans to redouble its push to tighten regulation of big US tech companies at the national and European level, part of Europe's backlash against the growing influence -- and profit -- of a handful of large Internet firms.

The French government will begin public consultations on a new "digital" law for France, and start working on a common strategy with Germany to develop new digital regulations in Europe for companies such as Google and Facebook said Axelle Lemaire, France's junior minister for digital affairs.

"The risk is that the Internet of tomorrow will be paralyzed by monopolies," Lemaire said. "They have the power of life or death over a large number of players in the digital ecosystem."

The country hopes to build on broader pressure facing American Web companies in Europe. A coalition of French and German politicians and companies have been pressuring the European Union to scrap its tentative antitrust agreement with Google to settle concerns that the company abuses its dominant Internet-search engine. At the same time, European officials are digging into tax structures that companies -- often tech firms -- use to reduce the amount of tax they pay on revenue generated in Europe.