As it looks less and less likely that Dish Network will win the Sprint sweepstakes it seems the relationship between the two parties is quickly souring as well, with both at odds not only with Sprint’s own takeover, but the pending acquisition of Clearwire as well.

In a complicated story more suited for a cheesy romance novel, over the past several weeks Sprint and Dish have gone back and forth in their attempts to woo Clearwire shareholders, with Sprint offering its ‘best and final’ offer last month, only to see Dish Network counter with a significantly increased offer of its own on the eve of the shareholder vote. Clearwire’s board of directors has since recommended that shareholders accept Dish Network’s revised bid.

Now Sprint is trying a different tack in this ongoing fight for Clearwire, filing a lawsuit against the satellite TV provider and Clearwire to prevent Dish Network from acquiring the wireless broadband provider.

America’s third largest wireless carrier filed a lawsuit in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on Monday, arguing the Dish’s revised offer for Clearwire “violates the rights of Sprint and Clearwire’s shareholders and the laws of the state of Delaware.” The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Clearwire shareholders, preventing them from accepting Dish’s tendered proposal.

“Dish has repeatedly attempted to fool Clearwire’s shareholders into believing its proposal was actionable in an effort to acquire Clearwire’s spectrum and to obstruct Sprint’s transaction with Clearwire,” Sprint said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

Yesterday Dish Network fired its own salvo in response to Sprint’s legal action, stating that the pending lawsuit is nothing more than a “transparent attempt to divert attention from its failure to deal fairly with Clearwire’s shareholders.”

Here is Dish Network’s full comment: Sprint’s lawsuit is a transparent attempt to divert attention from its failure to deal fairly with Clearwire’s shareholders, as well as to exploit its majority position to block Clearwire’s shareholders from receiving a fair price for their shares. DISH is confident that its superior offer, which has been unanimously recommended by the Clearwire Board, including the majority appointed by Sprint, will be upheld and Clearwire shareholders will be free to realize the 29 percent premium represented by the DISH offer.

Its becoming increasingly clear that Dish Network sees Sprint and Clearwire as its gateway into the mobile industry, evidenced no more so than by the money it’s tendered in both acquisition deals. While the value of Sprint–as the country’s number three wireless carrier– is obvious, Clearwire’s value, as I’ve said before, is found in the one vital resource it has to offer: spectrum.

While it’s unclear what Dish Network would do with only the spectrum Clearwire has to offer, without the mobile infrastructure needed to actually employ it in a useable fashion, it would at least serve to advance the company’s ultimate goal of finding a perch in the mobile market, and its clear Dish Network is willing to pay a handsome price for that perch…and Sprint is willing to do whatever it takes to prevent it.

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Under a constant barrage of commercials touting various mobile carriers as the fastest, the most powerful, having the widest coverage and the like, it can be difficult to determine fact from, well, marketing fiction. In fact, as we’ve written here many times before, mobile marketing tends to focus solely on what a particular company does best (and who could blame them?), selling that one strength as the only facet users need to consider when choosing a network.

Amidst these confusing marketing campaigns the true mobile puzzle can be hard to piece together, and, therefore, in an effort to shed some light on some of these claims, popular tech news outlet PC Magazine hit the road, conducting real time tests on all major American networks in various spots across the country, tabulating the results to find out who truly is America’s best network.

The result: PCMag found that AT&T is America’s fastest LTE network on average, posting average download speeds of 16.7 megabits per second and average upload speeds exceeding 7.4 megabits per second. But as I mentioned, speed is only part of the story, which is why AT&T may not be America’s best network.

Although its Verizon and AT&T that make up the America’s wireless duopoly, it was T-Mobile’s LTE network that scored second on the speed trials, posting 12Mbps download speeds and 7Mbps upload speeds. Verizon, for its part, was right behind in third, with 11.9Mbps download speeds and 6.3Mbps upload speeds. The conclusion from the PCMag survey, “If you’re looking for a fast mobile broadband experience in major and medium-sized cities, AT&T is the best nationwide 4G choice.”

There’s no question that in this category T-Mobile was the biggest surprise, as the nation’s fourth largest provider has shown it’s ready to compete on the national LTE stage. “T-Mobile’s new LTE network looked great in the few cities where we could find it,” PCMag explains, “and it has the best backup in T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network.”

Sprint, for its part, took fourth place in the speed trials, but showed it was on the rise, having effectively transitioned away from its doomed WiMax experiment.

While AT&T will no doubt trumpet these results to the world, boasting the nation’s fastest network to any and all who will listen, network reliability and, of course, network coverage are equal players in this mobile triumvirate. As I mentioned, boasting the fastest download and uploads speeds doesn’t really matter to users if they don’t have reliable access to the network in the first place.

To that end, as part of PCMag’s survey the firm conducted studies in a variety of locations, including rural and suburban areas where, no surprise here, Verizon was king, no doubt the reason Big Red boasts the nation’s largest subscriber base.

In the end, as the PCMag study concludes, if you happen to live in a major and medium-sized metropolitan area, AT&T is the clear choice, as not only does it have reliable coverage, it is clearly the fastest LTE network on the block. If you’re like most of us, however, and live outside the city, AT&T still plays second fiddle to Verizon, who seems to have found the ideal blend of speed, coverage, and reliability.

Therefore, while studies like this do wonders for the ballooning egos of our national mobile carriers, you have to keep reading past the banner headline to really get an accurate picture of the mobile landscape, one where AT&T is fast for the few, while Verizon remains reliable for the many.

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As smartphone theft is on the rise, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and San Francisco district attorney George Gascón announced an initiative to push the tech industry to develop technologies to discourage theft and restrict the market for stolen handsets and tablets.

They have created a new group, the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative (S.O.S), which includes prosecutors, political officials, law enforcement officials and consumer advocates over a dozen states. The group will be co-chaired by Schneiderman and Gascón.

S.O.S aims to take action against the rising number of smartphone thefts, which has triggered both Gascón and Schneiderman to get it touch with leading tech companies and pressure them to implement a “kill switch” that would help to dry up the market for stolen devices.

To put that trend into numbers, Gascón brought up several sets of data during the Thursday meeting between the newly formed group and tech company representatives: about 1.6 million Americans had their smartphones stolen last year, and abut 40% of robberies in major cities now involve handsets, the Federal Communications Commission’s data shows. In addition to the above data, police across the country say Apple’s iDevices are the most popular target for thieves, because they hold the highest value on the secondary market.

As we previously pointed out, there was another initiative, a database of stolen devices, which required the rightful owner to contact the carrier in case of theft (after reporting to the police) and report its serial and IMEI or MEID number. But that didn’t work out, as the majority of handsets end up overseas, which makes the database useless.

With iOS 7, however, Apple has taken a step forward in the fight against iPhone/iPad theft. The mobile OS, which comes out this fall, presumably with a new-generation iPhone, includes a very useful feature called Activation lock. During the WWDC 2013 keynote, Craig Frederighi suggested that the new feature would prevent thieves from turning off Find My iPhone (Apple’s previous feature for theft victims) and then reactivating the device, as it prompts anyone who tries that to supply their iCloud username and password.

Both Scheiderman and Gascón have saluted the feature, but given the lack of further details, we can only assume there is a tremendous amount of work still to be done before the feature will become what both victims and federal regulators imagine.

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Written by: Istvan Fekete. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging service, has reached another important milestone: they have processed 27 billion messages in just 24 hours, up from the already significant 18 billion messages recorded on the final day of last year.

To be precise, the 27 billion messages consisted of 10 billion inbound messages and 17 billion messages received by WhatsApp users. The company spread the info through its Twitter account, which also explained why these two figures don’t match: “sending one message into a group chat of 10 people is a ratio of 1:10, inbound to outbound.”

WhatsApp became popular very shortly after it hit the App Store, as it allows users to send unlimited free text and multimedia messages to individuals or groups simply by using your Internet connection. There is a one-time $1 cost when you purchase the app, but otherwise users can enjoy completely unrestricted usage. The app is available for all platforms — iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Asha, Symbian, and more — and it involves only the cost of your data usage when sending a simple text or multimedia message.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently made public that the company has more than 200 million active monthly users, but the total number of registered users wasn’t disclosed. This makes the app far bigger than Twitter, and it is fair to say that it has taken the lead in the mobile messaging industry.

In fact, WhatsApp has grown so big that it has successfully struck a deal with carriers worldwide, as well as handset makers. An eccentric example of a successful deal: Nokia has even included a physical WhatsApp button on the Asha 210, which pushes the install base of the company even higher.

The popular messaging app surpassed even BlackBerry, which once dominated the space through its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. According to the latest numbers, BBM has 60 million active users, who send some 10 billion messages each day.

BlackBerry, however, is poised to reclaim the No. 1 position, as its BBM service will shortly be available on all smartphone platforms.

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For years Apple’s iPhone has served as the benchmark for elitist technology, a high cost phone available almost exclusively to those basking in their first world glory, leaving much of the 2/3s world dreaming of the day they’d be able to get their hands on an Apple device of their own.

The problem for Apple and its high yield model is that its target markets quickly became saturated with high end handsets, leaving Apple little room for continued expansion. So with emerging markets in Asia and Africa now serving as the next frontier of mobile development, it seemed just a matter of time before Apple succumbed to the persistent rumours and produced its own low cost iPhone aimed squarely at this budget market.

But the Apple development rumours don’t stop there, as reports also indicate that alongside Apple’s plans to get smaller, it also plans to get bigger, taking its cue from rival Samsung and delving into the niche ‘phablet’ market with a larger 5.7” iPhone as well.

While rumours have been swirling for several years now about Apple’s potential plans for producing a cheaper iPhone that would compete for the bottom end of the market, the story really gained traction over the past few months, even more so now that the China Times has reported Apple suppliers have starting shipping components for this pared down iPhone.

According to sources along Apple’s Asian-based supply line, processors, cameras, and several other components have been shipped to manufacturing facilities in China as the Cupertino Company prepares to begin production. The budget device is reportedly going to be offered in a variety of colours, and in a revolutionary turn, Apple might attempt to sell the device contract free.

But with a rumoured sticker price of $100 Apple may have missed the boat here, as most analysts consider the affordability window of the low end market to be considerably lower, somewhere between $50-$60, meaning that in emerging markets in the 2/3s world, the iPhone will still be a pipedream. That said, I would guess that’s exactly how Apple wants even its budget phone to be perceived, as selling the phone at a higher price point in the low end market will likely achieve the same result the original iPhone did here, creating a ‘must have’ buzz around a piece of elitist technology.

Along with its plans to get smaller, a report from Reuters indicates Apple may also be mulling over plans to get bigger, following popular devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note series into the realm of phablets—larger smartphones geared towards web browsing. Apple is looking at introducing at least two bigger iPhones next year – one with a 4.7-inch screen and one with a 5.7-inch screen,” Reuters reports, citing sources who claim suppliers have already been approached with plans for larger screen devices.

Both the moves to get smaller and to get bigger are clearly signs that Apple is feeling the pressure from Samsung, as the latter has outgunned Apple in the mobile market recently by flooding every price point and smartphone niche with multiple Android options, creating a clamour among Apple investors to change the company’s current one device launch per year model.

But what remains to be seen is whether Apple can succeed in these markets, particularly given that for the first time since Steve Jobs released the original iPhone, Apple is delving into markets it didn’t create.

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Late last week many Samsung investors abandoned ship when a research note from J.P. Morgan predicted that the company’s third-quarter shipments of its new Galaxy S4 would be disappointing, sending the Korean tech giant’s stock plummeting. In fact, the company lost about US $12 billion in market value on Friday alone, with further losses on Monday.

While many wonder how investors could loose confidence in a company that sits atop the mobile mountain and that was only a few months ago the darling of the mobile world, it may not be Samsung’s fault per se, but simply that the mobile market is changing, becoming, as analysts note, a ‘commodity business’ much like the PC industry, and like the PC industry smartphone growth has started to flat-line as consumers become wary of flashy incremental upgrades.

In fact, while it took the PC industry years to really feel the effects of stagnation, the mobile market is likely to get hit much harder, much faster, by changing consumer opinions, and its always those at the top who feel it first.

The problems all began for Samsung when J.P. Morgan released its report, finding that Samsung’s supply chain shows a progressive decrease in monthly orders starting in July, meaning that Samsung has already foreseen a downturn in consumer interest for its new Galaxy S4 and has responded accordingly. This lack of confidence in its smartphone sales over the next few quarters, however, is of great concern for investors, many of whom were caught off guard by this report and were subsequently sent scurrying for the door en masse.

But the decrease in orders for the Galaxy S4 may have more benign explanations than an overall market shift, some analysts say, pointing to the fact that the initial sales for the GS4 have been much stronger than its predecessor, meaning the sales of Samsung’s new smartphone may be simply reaching their natural equilibrium after such a strong start.

As Barry Randall, a Covestor model manager, recently told the eCommerce Times, “I believe that because the immense S4 sales momentum was stronger than it was for the SIII upon the latter handset’s release, it’s logical that the inevitable sales growth deceleration would happen sooner and be more pronounced for the S4.”

But others aren’t as convinced, seeing Samsung’s forthcoming downturn as a sign of an overall stagnation of the mobile market. “Just as the PC industry became a commodity business and flat-lined, the same is starting to happen with smartphones, albeit with a much faster cycle,” Bill Douglass, principal of Gotham Communications, explains. “Consumers are seeing fewer and fewer compelling reasons to trade up to the ‘Next Big Thing’ in mobile phones, because the innovations are now just incremental, rather than truly disruptive.”

There’s no getting around the fact that most big players in the mobile market have maintained their lofty perches through incremental upgrades instead of radical innovation, with Samsung finding its own recipe for success in offering multiple upgrades to its Galaxy line within a given calendar year. While luring consumers in with promises of the latest cutting edge technology, it seems the masses are starting to realize that the phone they have is just as good as the newer flashier one being advertised, meaning they’re less likely to incur early cancellation fees or the like to get their hands on the latest and greatest.

In fact, perhaps the most telling thing about this entire situation is not Samsung’s sales projections, but the fact that the Korean tech giant spends more now on marketing then it does on R&D, evidence that the entire mobile market is content to rest on its laurels while consumers like us continue to get bored with what’s on offer.

For years now Near Field Communication evangelists have been trying to get people to share things by waving or bumping their phones together, touting the short distance data transfer solution as the revolutionary future of mobile sharing technology. But the reality is NFC has struggled with mass adoption, stagnating into, as TechCrunch writer Natasha Lomas insightfully puts it, “an ugly wasteland of non-use.”

So while some decry Apple’s latest iOS 7 upgrade for once again failing to include NFC, perhaps Apple is right to avoid this struggling quagmire altogether, with Apple users better served by the company’s own in-house sharing service AirDrop, which combines the best of NFC without the need to “wander around the room bumping your phone.”

That said, Apple’s jabs at Android NFC-enabled phones may be nothing more than a smokescreen, a slight-of-hand designed to get people on board with Apple’s new technology while giving the Cupertino company time to develop its own NFC solution. Then, when it does finally embrace NFC, this mockery will be all but forgotten, buried under heaps of…praise.

Granted NFC has seen adoption in some countries as a mobile payment technology, something both vendors and consumers are still struggling with here, but as a data sharing platform it’s been an embarrassing failure. In fact, for many the acronym NFC has taken on a new meaning, “Nobody F****** Cares.”

Simply up, while Samsung continues to tout the many uses of NFC by showing star crossed lovers separated by some airport security Plexiglas still able to share that moment with each other, the problem has always been the inherent proximity restraints, something Apple thinks it has solved.

With AirDrop Apple has created its own peer-to-peer sharing system, but it utilizing Wi-Fi to allow users to share content, meaning that while some proximity is necessary—up to 100 meters—it involves none of the social awkwardness of waving or bumping your phone into your neighbours.

Of course AirDrop is not without its own drawbacks, the most significant of which is that both parties need to have iOS 7 to initiate the sharing platform, but then again to use NFC both parties need to have NFC-enabled smartphones.

But despite the fact that Apple seems to be trying to create a new market standard–much as it did with its support of HTML5 over Flash—and the fact that Apple execs went out of their way to mock Android NFC-enabled devices, there are some who consider its AirDrop sharing medium as nothing but a stopgap measure, designed to satiate the masses until Apple can make NFC work the way it wants.

“AirDrop gives current iOS users a way to share, especially if they will not update to the new hardware when it gets NFC,” Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner, explains. “So in a way, AirDrop helps keep older hardware relevant once NFC is integrated in the devices.”

In fact, over the years I’ve noticed that Apple, like many companies, tends to have a very selective memory, meaning when the company does eventually adopt NFC it will have completely forgotten all the mockery, as it’ll be buried under mounds of overly effusive praise.

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According to a report signed by 4G Americas, Canada and the US added 58 million HSPA and LTE mobile broadband connections annually during the period between January and March. This means mobile broadband accounts for 49% of all mobile connections in the two countries.

On a global scale, LTE has recorded an impressive 400% growth as of the end of the first quarter, ending the three-month period with more than 90 million connections. The most recent numbers show that this number surpassed 100 million connections as of May.

As 4G Americas points out, there are 178 commercial LTE networks stretching across 72 countries, compared to about 74 commercial LTE networks in 40 countries just 12 months ago. The success of the 4G LTE network has triggered more than 100 newly launched networks in just over a year, with the US and Canada heavily contributing to the growth of the Long Term Evolution network.

According to the latest stats, the two countries combined account for 54% of all global LTE connections.

Canada’s LTE network is set to grow at an accelerated pace. Since the beginning of the year, wireless players have been giving some LTE love to multiple regions. The “LTE year” kicked off with Telus turning the switch on to its LTE network in Thunder Bay in January, and SaskTel closely followed the incumbent with its own 4G network launch.

Next it was Telus again, who flipped the LTE switch on in Prince Edward Island, focusing on Charlottetown, followed by the Saint John, North Bay and Summerside launch, reaching more than 24 million Canadians in April.

Bell, Koodo, Virgin, and Telus again went live in Saskatchewan later that month, with the latter expanding its 4G network in Fredericton and New Brunswick in May. Meanwhile, both Rogers and MTS announced expansion of their LTE coverage.

As you can see, Canadian wireless operators are set to expand their LTE network, driven by the consumer demand for high-speed cellular network coverage.

Chris Pearson, President of 4G Americas commented, “Innovations in technology and service providers’ commitment to upgrading their networks to LTE has moved the U.S. and Canada to the current mobile broadband leadership position. However, the leadership of LTE in North America is fragile, as more spectrum allocations by governments are needed soon to alleviate the impending spectrum crunch.”

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Written by: Istvan Fekete. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

In a flurry of activity over the past 48 hours or so, the ongoing Sprint acquisition saga has seen Dish Network consider tabling a strong counter offer, Softbank sweeten its own deal, and the impending shareholder vote originally scheduled for today that could have ended it all now delayed for yet another two weeks.

The week began with the doomsday clock ticking on Dish Network’s chances to acquire America’s third largest mobile carrier, the satellite television provider pouring over Sprint’s books in an effort to determine whether to table a counter offer before the scheduled vote on Wednesday, a vote that many assumed would see the Softbank offer approved.

Then yesterday, in an effort to ward off Dish Network’s advances, Softbank went on the offensive, increasing its own bid by 7.5%–to $21.6 billion–and sweetening the pot for shareholders by offering more money up front. In response, the impending shareholder vote has been delayed for two weeks as shareholders ponder the new deal, now giving Dish Network the time it needs to table its ‘best and final’ offer.

On Monday it was clear that Dish Network wasn’t ready to give up on Sprint yet, despite the fact that Softbank’s proposed acquisition of the country’s third largest carrier had been approved by all necessary regulatory channels and that Sprint’s largest investors backed the Softbank deal. Dish Network representatives were pouring over Sprint’s books ahead of the today’s scheduled shareholder vote, trying to determine the company’s value and if a strong counter proposal for feasible…or even advisable.

But as mentioned, Softbank was not willing to sit on its laurels waiting to see what Dish Network would offer and how Sprint’s shareholders would respond, sweetening its own deal to ward off its rival’s potentially strong advances. Under the terms of the new deal, Softbank has agreed to give Sprint shareholders an extra $4.5 billion in cash, and to pay $7.65 per share, up from the previous offer of $7.30. The increased offer would give Softbank a 78% stake in the company, compared to its previously offered 70%.

As a result, the Japanese company will have less money to invest in Sprint, a huge selling point to some investors when Softbank made its initial bid, as the cash infusion is desperately needed for Sprint to catch rivals AT&T and Verizon in the American wireless market.

“The amended agreement allows Sprint shareholders to receive substantial cash and to begin to participate in Softbank upside on an expedited and low-risk basis,” said Larry Glasscock, chairman of Sprint’s special committee evaluating the bids. “We believe this preserves the timing and closing certainty of the original Softbank transaction.”

So what does this mean for Dish Network? While Dish Network has been informed by Sprint that its current bid is, “not reasonably likely to lead to a superior offer,” by pushing the shareholder vote back two weeks Dish Network has been granted some reprieve from the doomsday clock, with Sprint stating the satellite TV provider now has one week to deliver its, “best and final” for consideration, lest it be left out in the cold.

In the end, despite the reprieve it seems unlikely Dish Network will be able to offer something substantially better than Softbank, as what Sprint needs is both value for shareholders and a cash infusion for continued growth, and unless Dish is able to provider both, Softbank remains the best option going forward.

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The next opportunity for wireless operators — in this case I am referring to AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Windstream — is FTTT (fiber to the tower) services for wireless operators that need higher-speed backhaul services to accommodate the growth of their existing 3G/4G LTE networks.

In the USA the FTTT opportunity means a $650 million funding gap that operators need to fill, while in Asia Pacific this could go up to $5.3 billion by 2017, according to a study written by Strategy Analytics for Tellabs. A recent Cisco report on mobile data traffic found that subscribers in the Asia–Pacific region will account for 47.1 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2017, up from 35 percent in 2012, making the Asia–Pacific region the largest in terms of data consumption.

As users may have experienced, the actual speeds delivered vary by market, but the trend is to extend their fiber into existing cell towers. The explanation is pretty straightforward: for each $1 spent on backhaul above 17.5% of the total cost of operations, carriers are able to protect $4 in revenues, and operating margins could improve by up to 5%.

Looking at the four biggest wireless backhaul providers, here is what a Fierce Telecom study found out about how they are tackling the wireless backhaul opportunity: AT&T is known as the most aggressive provider of 4G LTE. It runs the largest 4G network, and its wholesale network connects into more than 600 wireless and wireline carriers in over 220 countries and territories. AT&T’s FTTT plan has a central piece: Ethernet, so it offers four Ethernet-based services through AT&T Wholesale.

“In the domestic wireless market, AT&T Wholesale competes for backhaul business, but AT&T Mobility also sells MVNO services,” wrote Paris Burstyn, senior analyst for wholesale at Ovum. “The two units must collaborate with each other to meet the needs of intermediaries that want to offer combined wireline and wireless packages.”

Verizon Global Wholesale: Because of its aggressive FTTH and network transport buildouts, fiber is within reach of about 85 percent of wireless operators’ cell sites. Burstyn belives that the next wave of growth will come from two sources: other large and Tier 2 wireless operators expanding their 4G networks, and the advent of microcells

CenturyLink plans to add fiber to 4,000 to 5,000 additional towers and expects to have a total of 19,000 towers in its footprint equipped with fiber.

Windstream has equipped about 3,000 tower sites with fiber and 1,600 others are in the process of being connected. About 60% are in-network and the remaining 40 percent are off-network, which the telco said is incremental revenue. Also the telco that its FTTT buildout will drop down over 2014 as its wireless operator customers complete their LTE roll outs, but there is an opportunity to sell services to multiple tenants and higher bandwidth speeds as wireless operators look to support the ongoing demand for higher wireless data speeds.  

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Written by: Istvan Fekete. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Apple has done it again. During the two-hour-long WWDC 2013 keynote, the company gave us tech addicts a presentation of what the company has been working on during the past few months. And it was impressive: with iOS 7, Apple has overhauled its mobile operating system, eliminating every inch of skeuomorphism.

The world’s largest tech company presented the operating system that runs on (almost) all iPhones and iPads, sending a very clear message: they have undertaken what can be called the most audacious redesign since the iPhone was presented by Steve Jobs back in 2007.

Before the big event, the rumour mill had spilled information about a major software overhaul, with some sources speaking about a flat new interface dominated by black and white. And here it is: there is no trace of skeuomorphism (whereby digital interfaces are designed to look like real-world counterparts), that has been characteristic of iOS since its original launch.

“The new version is almost unrecognizable, which will make it polarizing,” said Jan Dawson, chief telecom analyst at Ovum. “Some people will love that their phone feels new and different, while others will be disoriented by the newness. On the other hand, this is a clear statement from Apple that it acknowledges the need to refresh the user interface and is willing to do something pretty dramatic.”

Fortunately, Apple has learned a lot from the jailbreaking community, which has been one step ahead of the company in releasing features of iOS for power users. Among the many new features iOS 7 has, Control Center reminds us a lot of what jailbreakers have known as SBSettings. This (iconic) jailbreak tweak allowed instant access to key system settings such as Wi-Fi, brightness control, Bluetooth, etc.

Also, the new Airdrop feature is the new Apple way to make image sharing easy, without the need to bump the phones like you do with the Galaxy S4. Airdrop was first available on Macs, but now has finally arrived in iOS 7.

Jony Ive, Craig Frederighi, and their team have dug deep into the mobile operating system to redesign all the native apps it comes with, and that even includes the Music app. The revamped app now features iTunes Radio as well, Apple’s long-rumoured music streaming service.

iOS 7 will launch this fall. Meanwhile, iOS 7 beta 1 is already available for download for developers.

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There’s long been a rule in business that true customer service makes one’s subscriber base feel like part of the family. Once a person feels that they’re truly valued, the business principle states, they’re more likely to stick with you for life. In an attempt to bolster its Wi-Fi network coverage, performance, and power Comcast has given this principle its own unique spin, welcoming customers in as part of the family by doing what any loving family would do… putting them to work.

On Monday Comcast announced several new initiatives aimed at expanding its Wi-Fi network coverage, the foremost being its new home-based neighbourhood Wi-Fi  hotspot project. This new home-based strategy ostensibly transforms one’s Comcast Wi-Fi gateway into a public hotspot, broadcasting both the customer’s own private signal and one that can be accessed by any Comcast subscriber.

Simply put, it you’re a Comcast customer with one of the company’s new Wi-Fi gateways, your router has been put into service, not just serving you, but serving everyone in your neighbourhood, whether you want it to or not.

As CNET’s Marguerite Reardon explains, the way it works is quite simple. “Comcast subscribers who are using the company’s newest wireless gateways for home Wi-Fi will broadcast an additional Xfinity Wi-Fi signal. And that additional signal will be the one that other Comcast customers, who already have access to Comcast’s public Wi-Fi network, will use.” [Italics mine]

Comcast has made it abundantly clear that this new public signal emanating from its customers’ routers will have no impact on their own personal home Wi-Fi signal, so if you have subscribed to the company’s 50Mbps broadband service, you’ll still have full access to the network without any “interference or degradation in service” from the public Wi-Fi signal.

“Our broadband customers will continue to get the service that they are paying for,” Tom Nagel, senior vice president of business development, said in a recent interview. “That was extremely important to us in designing this product.”

On a positive note, it does seem that having two signals emanating from the same gateway could improve the overall security of one’s Wi-Fi network, as one’s password no longer needs to be given out to guests or the like, but beyond that, unless one is overly altruistic I suppose, its difficult to see the real benefit of participating in this program.

As Reardon explains, “Xfinity customers already get access to all of Comcast’s Wi-Fi hot spots at no extra charge. It’s bundled into their home broadband service. So in many ways, there is really no incentive to participate in the Comcast community Wi-Fi initiative.” But given that Comcast customers will participate in this program by default, and can only stop their participation by actively opting out, most customers will likely not even realize they are providing public Wi-Fi services on their personal router from their home broadband connection.

In the end, there seems to be a great deal to be skeptical about, particularly Comcast’s claims that this additional public signal will have no effect on one’s private bandwidth, for while it may ostensibly be two separate routers serving these groups, the signal comes from the same cable, and if that you happen to be in a particularly public place, its hard to imagine that traffic not impacting your own service in any way.

While Comcast clearly would like this to be a way for customers to feel ‘part of the family,’ the reality is it has turned them into nothing more than faceless cogs in its giant Wi-Fi machine.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Having already cornered the ecommerce market, become a driving force in digital music and streaming video delivery, having found its own little comfortable niche in the ultra-competitive tablet market, on top of rumours it is looking to enter the mobile space, Amazon is really a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to technology, but to really become the centre of our connected everything lifestyle companies like Amazon will need to expand their focus, which is why it should come as no surprise to hear that Amazon is planning a major roll-out of its online grocery business.

For the past five years Amazon has quietly been running its AmazonFresh division in its hometown of Seattle, an online grocery service that delivers “produce, dairy, meat, boxed groceries and other items in insulated containers direct to customers’ doors during appointed one- or three-hour windows,” using this testing phase to find the right balance between convenience and profitability.

Then last week the company quietly announced it is expanding on its Seattle trial run, adding Los Angeles as the company’s second beta testing market, with rumours that San Francisco will be added later this year. But in an online business that has left its fair share of carnage in its wake, does Amazon have what it takes to find that balance between value and revenue?

Over the course of the last five years Amazon has been fiddling with the online grocery game, as CNET writer Jay Greene explains, tinkering with pricing and the sort of goods it offers, “Trying to come up with the right mix that engenders loyalty and still earns a profit.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos admitted during an annual shareholder meeting last month that the company has been working hard on the economics of online grocery shopping, but was noncommittal at the time about Amazon’s progress in that regard. Now it looks like Amazon has found the formula it likes, expanding its trial service to L.A.

While many companies have taken a run at offering an online grocery service, most notable examples have failed, leaving many to wonder if Amazon has bitten off more than it can chew. But to be fair, if there’s any company that can manage the narrow profit margins online groceries offers, it’s likely to be the ecommerce giant who has built its entire empire on markets of exactly this sort; markets where no other competitors dare show their faces.

Beyond the slim profits available from such a market, the real advantage to creating a convenient, affordable, and most of all, reliable online grocery service is the potential it has for driving customers to other facets of Amazon’s business.

In fact, as Greene writes, “AmazonFresh has the potential, perhaps more than any other Amazon business, to habituate customers into buying from the company regularly. Unlike buying books, movies, and so much else that Amazon offers, shopping for groceries is a weekly, or even daily, activity. If Amazon can persuade consumers to buy their milk, bread, shampoo and laundry detergent from AmazonFresh, it may well move itself one step closer to convincing them to purchase other items from the company as well.”

Dollars and cents aside, the other boon of an online grocery service is the consumer information it will generate for Amazon, allowing the ecommerce giant to paint a fairly accurate picture of our wants, needs, and interests; information that will serve as fuel for its growing targeted advertising machine.

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While airlines and hotels are famous for sneaking in those extra taxes and fees, over the past few years wireless carriers have quietly gone about finding their own ways of increasing their income off customers, often by adding “below-the-line” fees, so-named because they often appear at the bottom of the phone bill after the regular contracted service charges.

To that end, AT&T made headlines early last month when it imposed a new monthly “mobility administration fee” of $0.61 on every monthly bill, a number that certainly won’t break the bank for any customer but one that will generate massive revenues for Ma Bell, the change estimated to increase the telecom giant’s annual revenue by more than a half-billion dollars.

Again, while the paltry monthly increase will likely have little effect on consumers, it’s the fact that wireless providers are masking their price hikes in this manner that should really have people up in arms, as consumers have entered into term contracts with their providers on good faith that the agreed monthly service fees won’t change for the life of the contract, and while customers can’t change anything about their contract without hefty penalties, providers are routinely making changes with no consequences at all.

There was a great moment in The Simpsons episode ‘Bart to the Future,’ where in a vision of the future where Lisa has become President she institutes a punitive tax increase, but avoiding calling it a tax increase she labels it a “temporary refund adjustment,” assuaging the fears of the masses as she bilks them for all they’re worth.

As of May 1, 2013 AT&T customers will now find their own ‘temporary refund adjustment’ tacked on to their monthly bill, one instituted by the company itself but nestled right down there next to the mandatory taxes and fees the government requires you to pay on top of your cell phone bill. Now this new “administrative fee,” as its called, is clearly not considered part of the contracted service fee customers pay each month, but neither is this below-the-line charge a new government tax, and its something that often flies under the consumer radar.

Wireless providers—and lets be clear here, all of them do this—justify these additional fees as simply covering additional operational costs, such as expenses incurred while running their business, but are adamant that such fees are not rate increases. Of course one’s service contract is supposed to include all such operational costs, device costs, and service fees, but that simply isn’t the case.

While companies in other industries may simply absorb these types of operational costs or charge higher rates to generate the difference, wireless providers have “stealithy disguised” these rate increases by calling them something else, leaving many people frustrated when they discover that the price they were quoted when signing their contract is not the price they pay on a monthly basis.

Further, while AT&T’s latest increase was only a paltry $0.61, who’s to say that that fee won’t increase, as there’s clearly nothing governing any of these below-the-line costs. While AT&T’s tag line has long been Rethink Possible, the company justified this increase with the antithetical response; well everyone else is doing it.

Stating that the new monthly fee has been instituted to “help cover certain expenses, such as interconnection and cell site rents and maintenance,” Ma Bell went on to say that, “For some time some of our competitors have been assessing this type of charge… Until now, AT&T has not charged such a fee, but it will help defray a small portion of certain expenses and we are using a name for the fee that has become common in the industry.”

Call it sneaky rate hikes, call it double-dipping, heck, call it a temporary refund adjustment, it doesn’t really matter, what the top four national carriers are doing is finding ways of circumventing a contractual service fee to bilk you out of more money, and while its only $0.61, its enough to raise my ire and I’m not even a customer.

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Struggling mobile manufacturer HTC, which has seen its presence in the mobile space dwindle as its fellow Android partner Samsung continues to dominate, has lost yet another senior executive, simultaneously begging the questions, how much senior management does one company need, and is there anyone left at HTC who hasn’t defected yet?

According to Bloomberg, HTC Chief Operating Officer Matthew Costello has stepped down after less than three years at the company, a tenure that has seen the company’s shares drop 76 percent. The company’s president of engineering and operations, Fred Liu, will reportedly assume “Costello’s responsibilities in an expanded role covering operations, quality, sales operations and services”.

What’s interesting in this latest chapter of HTC’s executive exodus in how the company views these radical changes, as HTC CEO Peter Chou explains the recent departures of at least seven high level executives not as rats fleeing the sinking ship or the dangerous haemorrhaging of high level talent, but as the purposeful deployment of a strategic plan intended to streamline the company, implying to me at least that these executives aren’t leaving per se, they’re being let go…or at least that’s what HTC would have us think.

HTC recently released the following statement from CEO Peter Chou: “To achieve success, we’ve had to change when it was right for the business. Recently was one of those times. We took control of our business, narrowed our focus, and launched our new HTC One. Actions to streamline our business resulted in some reorganization and executive departures, but initial sales of the One have validated our approach. Response for our flagship device has been strong and demand has exceeded our expectations. We are confident that the business steps we have taken and continue to take are the right ones to lead to a strong resurgence of the HTC brand.” [Italics mine]

While open for interpretation, its clear to me that HTC wants everyone to believe that the departure of seven top company executives was little more than an unavoidable by-product of the streamlining process, a process that Chou implies was not only purposeful, but successful as well.

Now there’s no denying that the company’s recent strategic reorganization has seen some immediate results, as the sales numbers from May show strong gains for the company’s flagship HTC One smartphone, but this does little to convince me that the company has revived its Android brand or that it has any hope of achieving long term success.

As mentioned, this most recent departure by Costello is the latest in a string of executive departures, including its HTC Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher, Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera, Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy — all within the past three months.

Whether some of these departures were initiated by HTC itself doesn’t really matter, the company has suffered a huge blow to its management structure and no matter how the company spins it, this isn’t simply streamlining operations and refocusing on its core brand; something fishy is going on at HTC and whether its Chou or his wunderkind CMO Ben Ho (seemingly some of the only executives left at the company) its likely to drive HTC right into the ground.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.