New Sprint ad shows iPhone using WiMAX… via Overdrive

Your existing iPhone (yeah, even the original) can surf the information superhighway at 4G speeds. Today. Who knew, right? Sprint’s Overdrive — which creates a WiFi hotspot that enables nearby devices to cruise on Clear’s 4G (or 3G, if you’re not in a 4G locale) network — can theoretically enable any WiFi-capable phone to surf on WiMAX, but Sprint’s taking a pretty bold approach by actually touting the feature in a new spot. Befuddled? Hop on past the break and mash play. Too bad this is about as close the iPhone will ever get to Sprint’s shelves…

Continue reading New Sprint ad shows iPhone using WiMAX… via Overdrive

New Sprint ad shows iPhone using WiMAX… via Overdrive originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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T-Mobile and Clearwire mulling 4G partnership

Looks like the kids at T-Mobile USA are well aware that their company’s future will depend on offering both compelling handsets and a competitive network for them to ride on. Reuters reports that the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary has been exploring all its options with regard to the provision of 4G services, including potential joint ventures with cable companies and even spectrum sharing with AT&T, though the likeliest candidate for the moment remains Clearwire’s WiMAX infrastructure. Asked about a potential merger with Sprint, who controls more than 50 percent of Clearwire, T-Mobile’s CEO Robert Dotson declined the idea, explaining that “what you never want to do is take one company that is going through challenges and take another company going through challenges.” Reports of ongoing discussions between Clearwire and T-Mo have been around since last September, and the latest from Dotson suggests that his company is keen to get a resolution either way as soon as possible.

T-Mobile and Clearwire mulling 4G partnership originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC A9292 ‘Supersonic’ shows up in another inventory listing

It’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll see this mythical Supersonic from HTC show up at CTIA next week (wouldn’t that be awesome?), but a phone identified as the HTC A9292 has recently made an appearance in yet another internal system which can’t be a bad sign. As a refresher, the A9292 is popularly believed to be the Supersonic, a 4.3-inch Android-powered beast for Sprint that could become one of the carrier’s very first WiMAX-enabled phones. This time around, the phone’s turned up in a warehouse portal used by indirect third-party dealers, which would seem like a sign that they’re getting ready to distribute these bad boys; hopefully we’ll know all in just a few days’ time out in Vegas. Stay tuned.

[Thanks, Onyoursix]

HTC A9292 ‘Supersonic’ shows up in another inventory listing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic rumored to debut on Sprint at CTIA

There’s hardly anything here that we didn’t already know, but an unveiling date of “next week” sure catches our eye. A new report over at The Wall Street Journal confirms earlier details that were fed to us over Sprint’s first-ever WiMAX smartphone, and now we’re learning that the HTC Supersonic will be officially revealed to the world at CTIA next week. We’ve heard before that the carrier anticipates selling a 4G phone “this summer,” but you can bet we’ll be digging for a hard ship date and price tag when we hit the scene in Las Vegas in just five short days.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic rumored to debut on Sprint at CTIA originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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T-Mobile HSPA+ Speed Test: 3G Gets Pumped Up to 21Mbps [Tmobile]

Streaming HD video. Uploading gigantic files. Surfing the web comfortably. These aren’t things you’d normally expect on 3G. But T-Mobile’s beefed up HSPA+ network, which I tested recently in the first city to launch, handled these tasks beautifully. Simultaneously.

While the other carriers are looking past 3G to 4G technologies—Sprint with its WiMax already up and running, and AT&T and Verizon banking on LTE—T-Mobile is the one doing the most to upgrade the 3G network it already has in place. Overhauling their existing HSPA 3G network to HSPA+ promises theoretical speeds of 21Mbps—three times faster than the 3G we know and don’t quite love.

In my testing throughout Philadelphia, the first city to get the upgrade, I found that I was routinely getting triple the speeds we expect from 3G nationally—take a look at our nationwide 3G megatest if you need a refresher—with the HSPA+ network averaging in the high 3Mbps range and peaking at 7.81Mbps in one location.

The 3x jump makes a big difference. Consistently averaging download speeds in the high 3Mbps range might not seem like a terrific improvement, but in practice it puts the experience a lot closer to the broadband you take for granted at home than the crippled access you’re often stuck with on 3G. And I really tried to push the HSPA+ network by using the internet the way I would at home, at my most extreme. At one point, I was uploading a several-hundred megabyte file to FTP briskly (around 150KB/sec), downloading a torrent even more briskly (~350KB/sec), and still loading web pages quickly and all at once, instead of piece by frustrating piece. At the end of the day, when I was done with all my testing and just catching up with the stuff I follow on the internet, I didn’t immediately ditch the 3G and jump back on Wi-Fi. I didn’t feel the need to.

Philadelphia is the first city to get pumped up to HSPA+, though T-Mobile is aiming for coverage in major cities across the nation by the end of the year. Since it’s not a new network, just an expansion of their current one, many customers who live in areas with HSPA+ coverage will see improvements in speed with the gear they’re using right now. Anything that’s HSPA 7.2 compatible—that includes HTC HD2, myTouch, Moto CLIQ, Moto CLIQ XT, Samsung Behold II, HTC Touch Pro 2, Dash 3G—will notice snappier speeds. But to really see things crank, you’ll need a dedicated HSPA+ device, and T-Mobile’s first is the webConnect Rocket USB stick. I tried out the Rocket, which works with Mac and PC, all over Philly, and was impressed with the results.

I tried the same tests we used in our nationwide 3G test: several runs of speedtest.net, several timed page loads of the Wikimedia Commons Hubble page, and several timed loads of a big Hubble image itself.

Here’s where I went. Some of the places were suggested by T-Mobile as optimal testing spots—and cheating or not, I followed them in search of the biggest bandwidth readings. But even when I was off on my own, I found that my speeds rarely dipped to levels currently attainable by standard 3G, and were often, as you can see, much much faster, including latency under 100ms at almost every location.


View Philly HSPA+ Testing in a larger map

The webConnect Rocket USB stick is on sale now and can be purchased for $99 with a 2-year contract or $199 without one. With the contract, you get T-Mobile’s EvenMore Data Plan, which will run you $59.99/mo for 5GB data or $29.99/mo for 200MB data, and without it the Rocket gets the EvenMore Data Plus Plan, costing $49.99/mo for 5GB and $19.99 a month for 200MB. If you pay full price up front, the stick pays for itself in 10 months, which might be a good deal, as it’s just about how long HSPA+ will enjoy its mobile broadband crown until AT&T and Verizon start deploying LTE in 2011.

That 5GB data cap, however, could be a problem. With the 3G speeds we’re used to just surfing the web can be a chore. Downloading big files or watching HD video were usually out of the question. But since the HSPA+ feels like your broadband at home, it’s easy to treat it that way, and I can imagine users racking up 5GB dangerously quickly. By my back of the napkin calculations, at the speeds I saw, it’d only take about 4 hours of continuously downloading files to eat up your month’s allowance. I forsee customers clamoring for beefed up plans to match T-Mobile’s beefed up network.

T-Mobile says they are planning “broad national deployment” for HSPA+ by the end of 2010 and will be naming specific cities at the CTIA conference starting next week. How aggressively they roll out the upgrades will determine the fate of HSPA+, if it emerges as a worthwhile pre-4G alternative or if it falls to the footnotes of mobile broadband history. But if you have the need for speed and HSPA+ makes its way to your city, it’s definitely worth your attention. It’s so fast, you might forget it’s 3G.

Say Goodbye to Unlimited Wireless Data Plans [Opinion]

You know how you pay a fixed monthly fee for your phone, and can check email and Twitter, surf the web and the Yelp app anytime you like without counting minutes or megabytes? Yeah, well that’s all gonna end.

Yesterday, Verizon CTO Tony Melone said that the days of all-you-can-eat data plans are ending, echoing something AT&T’s boss said a week ago, that metered (or variable) pricing was ahead.

The bigwigs talk of fairness—why should the weekly email checker pay the same as the out-and-about Pandora and video streaming junkie?

They talk of transparency: “It’s one thing to say all you can eat is gone,” Melone told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s another to have consumers worrying, ‘Can I stream this radio?'”

This isn’t going to be abrupt, and it won’t affect all people equally. But one thing’s for sure, if you use your phone’s data plan a lot, you’re going to start paying more than $35 per month for it. And even if the “unlimited” plan remains, it’s certainly going to cost more, and be one of a multitude of levels or options.

Once upon a time, the home ISP business went through these similar phases: The dial-up age when we kept track of specific hours given away free on shiny, shitty AOL discs gave way to the strange time of the single device with unlimited data. ISPs meant that to be for a fixed machine but Wi-Fi routers and wired routers soon split that up to many many machines in the home and perhaps even in the apartment building. This happened to the chagrin of broadband providers. And now, in this moment, most of us pay a fixed rate for unlimited data, capped by speed rather than maximum downloads. But as all of you pirates know full well, there are maximum-download caps out there too, and more and more people are becoming eligible for that taxation. Who dares to guess how low that threshold will go?

You may say, “Phew, I’m definitely not a target.” You may think you’ll never use wireless like you use your home broadband connection, that your phone is just a phone—one that, sure, streams songs and stuff, but big deal, right?

But think about the MiFis of the world, the little portable hotspot which turns broadband meant for cellphones to Wi-Fi for almost anything. Better still, think of Sprint’s Overdrive WiMax-to-Wi-Fi router, the next generation high speed network equivalent of the MiFi? And what about the next-generation of WiMax and LTE phones, which will hopefully be able to be used as Wi-Fi hotspots? Not following? Here: If your phone can give connectivity to your computer—and whatever else you have within 30 feet—you’re gonna have to pay for that. And God help us all if the Hulu iPhone app ever shows up, because we’ll use a ton of broadband, they’ll charge us a ton for that broadband or they’ll go out of business not doing it.

My fear is that metered pricing will feel like a gotcha, like when you go over talk-time minutes. The problem with those minutes is that you have to provide a “best guess” of how much you’re going to talk, and if you go over, they nuke your wallet. Sprint tried a plan that just charged different reasonable amounts of money depending on how much or how little you used your minutes. Both of these are flawed. The best guess is often based on nothing, and the variable pricing is too confusing: you never know what you’re going to be paying month to month.

As these carriers roll out their metered plans, hopefully they will combine these two types of billing. We need helpful constant monitoring. (At the moment, the best way to keep track of an iPhone’s downloads requires AT&T’s optional app.) We have to be aware of our usage, comfortably not naggingly, and when we go over, we need to be treated like fans of the service, not like criminals stealing cookies from the wireless-broadband cookie jar.

All You Can Eat neon by Jeremy Brooks/Flickr, used under CC license

AT&T’s de la Vega: HSPA+ coming ‘in certain locations’

AT&T hasn’t been quite as forthcoming with the exact details of its next-gen network plans as T-Mobile and Verizon have been recently, but FierceBroadbandWireless appears to have wrested a tidbit from wireless boss Ralph de la Vega in a recent interview. Though the standard HSPA 7.2Mbps deployment is still AT&T’s short-term focus, HSPA+ — which can theoretically take HSPA to 21Mbps and beyond — is clearly still on its radar prior to LTE. “We will also deploy HSPA+ in certain locations,” de la Vega said on no uncertain terms — without revealing even a hint about where those “certain locations” might be, unfortunately.

Speaking of LTE, the 4G tech still seems to be on AT&T’s back burner for the moment with the first commercial markets not scheduled to light up until 2011, a strategy that seems pretty difficult to argue with considering HSPA’s considerable room to grow from its current speeds and the lack of LTE devices in the pipeline. Of course, that could end up really hurting these guys a few years down the line when the first generation of LTE is in its prime and they’ve given Verizon about a year’s head start, but — and this is a huge “but” — if they can save up some cash by rolling cheaper HSPA upgrades now and really dump unheard-of levels of cash into the network when they’re good and ready, it’s conceivable that they’ll be able to build out a big footprint in short order. Ralph, can we recommend you look to Bell and Telus for inspiration on how to pull that off?

AT&T’s de la Vega: HSPA+ coming ‘in certain locations’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WSJ: Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Handsets Expected Mid-2011

verizonwirelesslogo.jpg

4G handsets from Verizon Wireless could hit the market by mid-2011, about six months earlier than expected, an executive told the Wall Street Journal this week.

Verizon plans to roll out its long-term evolution (LTE), high-speed 4G network by year’s end, and could have compatible phones available three to six months after that launch, Anthony Melone, Verizon Wireless chief technology officer, told the Journal.

Verizon has said the first LTE devices it offers will likely be dongles or modules utilized through a laptop. Melone confirmed that, and said that full wireless coverage will likely take some time, so the first LTE phones will have dual chipsets that work on LTE and Verizon’s existing network.

“Very likely, we initially won’t have a single, integrated chip,” he told the paper.

T-Mobile Targets March 14 for HSPA+ Modem

T-Mobile_webConnect_Rocket_HSPA+_Modem.jpg
T-Mobile announced that the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick, the first HSPA+ device for the U.S., will be available beginning on Sunday, March 14. HSPA+ is interesting because it could enable 4G LTE-like speeds using existing 3G infrastructure, as we found in an early hands-on test.
The carrier announced the device at MWC in February, and is also targeting late 2010 for broad national availability of HSPA+. Right now, it’s still just for Philadelphia, although we should see several major cities light up with HSPA+ on both coasts well before the end of 2010, according to the carrier.
The webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick retails for $99.99 with a two-year contract and an Even More webConnect data plan. $60 per month gets you 5GB, while $30 gets you just 200MB; both charge 20 cents per megabyte over that. Another new option, Even More Plus webConnect, drops the annual contract and lowers the monthly prices by $10 in each case, but raises the up-front price of the modem.
This is all looking really interesting; only the 5GB cap will prove worrisome. It’s bad enough on 3G, but as we move to faster networks, that will only become more limiting as time goes on–especially that T-Mobile is already touting the modem’s ability to “download large files” and “watch video from a laptop on the go.”

Verizon promises first 4G handset for next summer, foretells end of unlimited data plans

Alright, you ultrafast mobile broadband zealots, whip out your calendars and draw a big red tick around the middle of 2011. Verizon’s CTO Anthony Melone has identified next summer as the carrier’s release window for its first LTE handset, which should be preceded by the 4G service being rolled out by the end of this year. If you’re wondering what you’ll be using on that “faster than 3G” network while waiting for the vanguard handset, we saw plenty of LTE-equipped gear at CES and let’s not forget about that 1080p-decodin’ NVIDIA tablet that was teased during the show. The one bit of bogus news from Melone was the statement that contracts with “as much data as you can consume is the big issue that has to change.” Verizon seems resolutely set on introducing some type of tiered or metered price plans, which is unfortunately the same path AT&T is headed down. The message from the networks is therefore clear: with great (downloading) power comes great (bill-paying) responsibility.

Verizon promises first 4G handset for next summer, foretells end of unlimited data plans originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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