MuniWireless

Last Friday in Paris, the French regulator ARCEP held a press conference to announce that Iliad-Free will be the new mobile operator in France. It has taken five years for the French government to bring a fourth operator market because of strong opposition from the other incumbents, France Télécom-Orange,  SFR and Bouygues.  ARCEP had no other choice because Iliad-Free was the company to respond to the second RFP which was issued on 3 August 2009 (two years after the first…

Mobile operators in Europe love borders, in fact, the more, the better because it’s awfully profitable. Check out this post from Benoit Felten (Your phone bill this month is 46,000 Euros), a story originally published in Le Monde about a French guy who bought a 3G dongle and 95 EUR per month data plan from mobile operator, Orange (France), only to end up with a mobile phone bill that resembles a receipt for a brand new automobile: “The guy lives in…

2010 is the year of mobile app stores, unlimited data plans, 4G network technologies (WiMAX, LTE) and smartphones with full browsing technologies, providing a perfect storm of adoption, carrier revenue realization.

Market research and consulting company JBB Research which specializes in the mobile and telecommunications industry, today published its latest report, “The U.S. Mobile Web Market: Taking Advantage of the iPhone Phenomenon,” which provides the first industry-wide look at mobile web strategies from the handset, carrier, mobile OS, and mobile browser standpoints.

JBB…

Steve Kimatian, a Republican candidate for mayor in Syracuse, NY, wants the city to have Wi-Fi everywhere for free or a very low price. According to Kimatian, the city can fund the costs of deployment partially through federal funds. While the article discussing Kimatian’s plan does point out that there have been some successes and some failures among municipal wireless deployments, it cites Thomas Hazlett’s argument against muni Wi-Fi:

Municipal Wi-Fi projects often run into problems because the unlicensed radio frequencies…

AT&T is finally launching multimedia messaging service (MMS) on the iPhone tomorrow. That’s a welcome announcement for some iPhone users, but many fear that the added data traffic will cause even more breakdowns in the network. Customers of AT&T have been critical about the operator’s poor cellular service which has been suffering from the success of the iPhone.

Recently, the FCC has proposed rules that would make it more difficult for service providers, including wireless operators, to discriminate against certain types…

UK mobile broadband customers are getting barely 1 Mbps, according to a recent survey:

But the operators continue to use theoretical, not actual, speeds in marketing their service. Last July, Ofcom released its own study which confirms the discrepancy between actual and advertised speeds. Ofcom introduced a voluntary Code of Practice which, if adopted by a service provider, requires the latter to disclose the average speeds that a customer can expect.

Related story:

UK broadband speeds much slower than advertised (28 July 2009)

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