1. Sprint said that roughly 750 of its Educational Broadband Services licensees have moved their customers to LTE ahead of the scheduled shutdown of Sprint’s WiMAX network. EBS licensees hold valuable 2.5 gigahertz spectrum that has been set aside for accredited educational institutions and nonprofit entities. This week, two of these entities filed a lawsuit against Sprint subsidiary Clearwire in an effort to stop the WiMAX shutdown.
Sprint said EBS providers have had more than a year to transition customers to LTE, and that about 75% of its 1,000 EBS licensees have done so. The carrier said that Mobile Citizen and Mobile Beacon have “spent a lot of time focused on ways to break the system instead of simply ordering new equipment.”
2. AT&T is teaming up with Uber to show off its connected car capabilities. Uber drivers with AT&T Mobility in their vehicles will test livestreaming service by showing passengers college football games this month and next. AT&T’s U-Verse app will enable the LTE livestreaming service on tablets inside select Chevrolet Tahoes used by Uber drivers in Atlanta, Detroit, Nashville and Houston.
3. Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said some Alcatel-Lucent businesses will remain as they are after the two companies merge. In an interview with the Economic Times, Suri said that the merger is on track to close early next year, and that Alcatel-Lucent businesses that do not overlap with Nokia will “remain in their current organization construct.” Suri also said that the combined companies will offer IP capabilities that competitor Ericsson lacks. Suri appears to see Huawei as the direct competitor to his company.
4. The smartphone modem market is slowing down, according to Strategy Analytics. Analyst Sravan Kundojjala said the market grew 2.1% to $5.4 billion in the second quarter of this year. Qualcomm remains the market leader, followed by China’s Spreadtrum and Taiwan’s MediaTek, which has the stronger position in LTE modems. Most LTE modems also support 3G, but a growing number of smaller chipmakers are now producing LTE-only modems.
5. China’s economic slowdown does not seem to have dulled consumers’ appetite for mobile apps. The rate of iOS app downloads increased more in China during the most recent quarter than in any other country, according to the analysts at App Annie. The iPhone has traditionally been very popular in China, and App Annie said that app downloads in China got a big boost when Apple increased the iPhone screen sizes.
