www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Saudi Telecom Company (STC) owned Viva which is a newcomer in Bahrain launched a free-of-charge promotion. The mobile operator has claimed in the promotion that it will offer the fastest broadband internet service of its type in Bahrain.
An announcement has been made by the company that mobile internet services will be provided at no subscription cost and without registration fees until June 4, 2010.
USB dongle will be used to access the service which will allow theoretical maximum mobile download speeds of 21.1Mbps over Viva Bahrain’s HSPA+ 3.5G network.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: 180 jobs have been cut and 27 company stores nationwide have been shuttered by Leap Wireless which has described its restructuring as its changing priorities for the year. 90 of the jobs cut were field positions while 90 were corporate positions.
After the move, the number of employees in the company is 4200 and the number of company-owned stores is 42. The review of the stores was taken up by the company in February and the decision to close the stores was taken in early March. The closing is described as a part of normal repositioning that goes on in any retail business.
Recently, a joint venture has been announced by the company with regional, flat-rate wireless provider Pocket Communications to boost Leap’s position in south Texas, where Pocket has a significant presence.
Major Banks have been hired and special committee of its board has been formed to consider various strategic options, including selling the company or merging with another carrier. During its fourth-quarter earnings announcement, the plan of the company to launch a BlackBerry device from Research In Motion as well as a smartphone running Google’s Android platform was also disclosed.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: With the spread of the news that lagging telecommunications company, Sprint Nextel Corp is getting stronger, the shares of the company jumped with the return of the confidence in investors.
21 cents or 6.2 percent was gained by Sprint’s stocks to $3.61 in afternoon trading on Tuesday this week while on Monday its shares rose 3.7 percent. According to the company’s chief financial officer, Bob Brust, the company would pay off $5.2 billion in debt that will come due in the next 30 months, rather than refinance and he also expected “more stable or flattish” revenue this year after two years of declines.
After Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc, Sprint is the third largest carrier in the USA and unlike its larger competitors, it lost customers last year. Brust also announced that losses of customers under contract are narrowing and the prepaid business is strengthening.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Successful completion of a live network environment field trial of 100-Gigabit backbone network technology has been announced by telco AT&T. new Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System was field tested by AT&T during the trial.
Ixia’s K2†100 Gigabit traffic generator and analyzer along with the Opnext 100 Gigabit CFP client side modules has also been used AT&T. A single-carrier 100G transmission with real-time coherent processing on a 900-km long-haul transport link between Louisiana and Florida has been demonstrated in the trial.
The deployment of 4G network technology was completed by AT&T in 2008 in its US IP backbone network. A team was led by the company in 2008 and 2009 that completed two lab trials of 100G technology, expected to be ready for commercial deployment over the next few years.
Wavelength, real-time, coherent 127G PM-QPSK modem was demonstrated by Opnext during the trials. Opnext’s fully IEEE 802.3ba standards-compliant CFP MSA client optical modules which are fully interoperable with 100 GbE interfaces on IP routers were also included in te demonstration.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The main elements of Swisscom appeal over a ruling by the competition commission Weko regarding allegedly illegal mobile termination fees has been upheld by the Swiss federal administrative court. The court has overruled the fine of CHF 333 million.
It was ruled by Weko in February 2009 that mobile termination market is dominated by Swisscom besides violating its position as defined under the Swiss Cartel Act. The ruling followed an investigation launched in 2002 into possible abuse of dominant market position by Switzerland’s three mobile operators.
It was found by Weko that Swisscom was market dominant and had violated its position by charging unreasonably high fees between April 1, 2004 and May 31, 2005. An appeal was filed by Swisscom against the ruling in the Federal Administrative Court.
Weko’s conclusion that the operator abused that position to charge higher mobile termination fees was rejected by the court but it also found that Swisscom has a dominant market position. The verdict is open for appeal at the Swiss Federal Court.
The reasons behind the ruling point by point would be reviewed by Swisscom and Weko over the coming weeks and they will decide on next steps. Swisscom has not set aside any provision to cover this fine, which proved to be the right decision based on this ruling.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A campaign would be launched by AT&T to create awareness regarding the risks of texting and driving, informing cell phone users that text messages can – and should – wait until after driving. True stories will be featured in the national campaign showing text message that was sent or received before someone’s life was altered, or even ended, because of texting and driving.
It would also be demonstrated in the campaign that text messages are not as significant as potentially dire consequences of reading or responding while driving. The campaign will be rolled out in the coming months spanning print, electronic, TV and online advertising. People can also visit AT&T’s online resource center www.att.com/txtngcanwait and download information about texting while driving such as a parent-teen pledge; a teen-teen pledge; a poster; a brochure; safety tips; and more.
A facebook application has also been launched AT&T found at www.facebook.com/att and which can be shared to encourage each other to take the pledge to not text and drive. A pledge has also been introduced by AT&T via a “twitition” on Twitter to ask followers to rally around the cause.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: An application store for the Indian market has been launched by Vodafone’s Indian operation, Vodafone Essar. The operator waited for 10,000 downloads before officially announcing it even though the app store has been running since the middle of last month. This is the third major app store launch in India recently and there’s a fourth one on the way.
These apps provide smartphone features for feature phones and the lineup is also not that fancy when compared to the one on the iPhone or Android app stores. Currently, almost 800 apps available are focused on being useable and cheap.
Between 15% and 25% of the apps on the store are currently free of charge while the rest cost between Rs 5 and Rs 30 to download or roughly $10 to $65 or 8 to 50 euro.
Airtel, which is the biggest rival of Vodafone Essar in India, also launched its apps store a few weeks back. Next month, Reliance will be launching a store as well and prices are again expected to be very low.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Vodafone announcement to cut 375 jobs in the UK has met with severe anger and disappointment from the trade unions. The union has expressed its concern that despite assurances from Vodafone that the losses would only affect back-office jobs, customer-facing jobs would be affected.
Vodafone has been contacted by the Prospect union for professionals to express serious concerns about the lack of consultation about the job losses and it has been brought out in the report that without any notice and without any redundancy consultation, the workers were being asked to leave the business.
According to Prospect National Officer Steve Thomas, this was a disgraceful way to treat workers, especially some very long serving and loyal members of staff.
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Verizon Communication, the telecommunications giant has announced that its capital investment this year will be very similar to last year. A full-year CAPEX of $16.8 billion to $17.2 billion is also expected by the company which is roughly flat from 2009, besides expecting continued strong free cash flow this year.
Company’s strong wireless business will provide it with much of its cash flow while the joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc, Verizon Wireless is also expected to contribute much of the cash flow growth.
Customer growth is also expected by Verizon in the fiscal first quarter. Verizon Wireless still has the opportunity to grow its more lucrative contract customers which is very much unlike other carriers focusing their attention on the prepaid business.
The price of the unlimited calling plans was reduced by Verizon Wireless by $30 to $70, earlier this year. According to Chief Financial Officer John Killian, the company will have a strong first quarter for wireless subscriber growth in the first quarter, and that prepaid wireless service will start to pick up.
