Hasta La Gadget!

Remember those LTE trials that Verizon Wireless started up in Boston and Seattle back in August of last year? Good news, mobile surfers — the operator has today confirmed in a roundtable at CTIA that they’re both nearing their end, giving us hope that they’re gleaned the necessary information from them to start moving onto bigger and better things. Namely, more elaborate trials in more locales around the nation. As you might expect, Verizon Wireless is indeed gearing up to move into its next phase of commercial LTE testing, with Tony Melone (Senior VP / CTO) stating that ‘friendly user trials’ were slated to begin this summer. He declined to elaborate on the whos, whats and (most importantly) wheres, but there’s no doubt that these are likely the last hurdles before we see its 4G network go live in “one third” of the country. We’re told that those tests will be used to kick the tires on “commercial” gear, which is starkly different than the non-commercial kit that has been used in Beantown and the Emerald City. So far, the company’s seeing peak rates of around 40Mbps and 50Mbps (down), with average download rates hovering in the 5Mbps to 12Mbps range and upload speeds falling between 2Mbps and 5Mbps. Be sure to let us know if any undercover VZW engineers start installing weird antennas near your abode in the coming months, cool?

Verizon ‘wrapping up’ Boston and Seattle trials, ‘friendly user’ ones coming this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re here at Verizon Wireless’ LTE forum at CTIA 2010, and a higher-up speaking about application development just let a sweet little nugget of information slip: the long-awaited V Cast Apps market will launch on March 29th (that’s the new target, anyway). If you’ll recall, we’ve been hearing about this portal ever since last summer, but we’re guessing that a bona fide launch was put on pause in order to tweak things for Verizon’s eventual LTE release (a bit we’ll touch on here later). Initially, the BlackBerry Storm (and Storm2, presumably) will be supported, with other RIM devices coming onboard shortly thereafter. The rollout will continue over the coming weeks and months, hopefully to a few other mobile operating systems.

Responding to a few questions, Verizon insists that its own storefront won’t take away from “other markets,” namely the Android Marketplace. Instead, they’re “perpetuating the ecosystem,” with the app store simply being a vessel of distribution. In other words, app devs are stoked that their software could be found in multiple stores.

Verizon launching V Cast Apps on March 29th, RIM devices get first dibs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ooh wee! Verizon and AT&T are getting all hot and bothered over the forthcoming LTE battle — a battle which much like the current map wars, you can expect to grow weary of in about two minutes. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal today, both carriers have put reps in the limelight for a volley of tough talk. For starters, AT&T’s CTO John Donovan claimed that Verizon was jumping the gun with its first-on-the-scene LTE rollout, suggesting initial devices are “going to drain the battery like crazy, and [they’re] going to be a fat brick,” noting that “2012 will be the time when you’ll have decent handsets.” Donovan lumped on the hits by also saying that “Anyone who says their network is ready for the iPhone — or the broader mobile data explosion that AT&T has experienced — is being naive.” Of course, Big Red didn’t just sit there and take it — spokesman Jim Gerace fired back that “No matter how much our competitors talk, it’s not going to slow us down,” though he offered no further comment on the insults’ stride-breaking potential. Both parties were mum on just how fleeced the consumer would be getting once the LTE pricing plans are announced, of course.

AT&T says Verizon’s first LTE phone is ‘going to be a fat brick’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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

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.