It's time for New Year's resolutions: stop smoking, lose weight, get to the gym more often, and all sort of other well-meaning pledges that fade by February. As the shutters close on the Christmas selling season and carriers look to the projects, projections and...
WASHINGTON-The wireless industry was as close to getting its hands on 700 MHz spectrum as it ever has been. A hard date had been set for auctioning broadcast spectrum as part of the transition to digital TV services. The House and the Senate had...
Opinions are not hard to come by in the ongoing debate between proponents of GSM and CDMA technologies. It's easy to get caught up in questions about which technology is better, which one is growing faster, which one will take over the world. But...
Sprint Nextel Corp. took a significant step in fulfilling chief executive Gary Forsee's plans to expand the carrier's reach into other media distribution channels, and at the same time may have altered the balance of the wireless industry. Following months of speculation, Sprint Nextel...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission last week approved rules implementing relocation fund legislation approved by Congress last December, a move that paves the way to auction third-generation wireless licenses in June 2006. The guidelines require the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to be...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously approved rules implementing relocation fund legislation approved by Congress last December, a move that paves the way for the auction of third-generation mobile-phone licenses in June 2006.The guidelines require the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to...
RESTON, Va.-NII Holdings Inc., partially owned by Nextel Communications Inc., said several 800 MHz licenses that it won in a Mexican auction have been transferred to the company. The company acquired an additional 15 megahertz of spectrum per basic service area, bringing NII's average...
WASHINGTON-A coalition of nine local and public-safety advocacy groups, led by the Association of Public-safety Communications Officials, released a statement urging Congress to pass a hard date to end TV's transition to digital technology."We are writing to remind Congress that this issue is not...
The rash of consolidation and spectrum deals that have recently swept through the wireless industry could have a substantial impact on the Federal Communications Commission's Auction 58 set for late January, as the carriers with a history of being the most aggressive bidders have...
WASHINGTON-No matter who is the next president, Congress is going to look at reforming the Telecommunications Act of 1996, said panelists Tuesday morning at a breakfast panel."I think a telecom re-write will happen. It doesn't matter whether Ralph Nader is president, telecom reform is...
WASHINGTON-Legg Mason Inc., which owns just over 9 percent of the stock for Nextel Communications Inc., said Monday it expects Nextel to accept the Federal Communications Commission's plan to solve public-safety interference in the 800 MHz band."Once the order is published in the Federal...
WASHINGTON-Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants excess revenue from a future third-generation mobile-phone auction to help fund deployment of enhanced 911 service, according to sources. The plan could potentially complicate passage of relocation fund legislation previously hamstrung by a controversial amendment that...
NextWave Telecom Inc.'s announcement last week that it would give back 60 of its PCS licenses to the Federal Communications Commission could finally give the government a clear path to auction the licenses to a spectrum-starved industry. But unlike the FCC's previous attempt to...
WASHINGTON-Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told the Federal Communications Commission recently that any plan to solve the public-safety interference problem in the 800 MHz band must be self financing, and if an allocation of replacement spectrum is necessary, an...
WASHINGTON-Ten years after Congress authorized auctions to award wireless permits, the market-based licensing scheme continues be a magnet for those needing funding for pet projects, but the Federal Communications Commission's strong embrace of intelligent radio technology and commercial exploitation of unlicensed spectrum could force...
WASHINGTON-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell told Congress he is opposed to an amendment in a spending bill that would exempt from spectrum auction an application of a wireless startup with strong political connections to provide digital broadcast service to rural areas using hybrid...
WASHINGTON-The Senate Commerce Committee may have killed the wireless industry's hopes of gaining much-desired frequencies in the 1700 MHz band when it amended a bill to allow the Pentagon to be reimbursed for vacating that spectrum.The amendment would allow a digital broadcast satellite license...
WASHINGTON-The Senate Commerce Committee passed by voice vote a bill meant to keep the NextWave Telecom Inc. bankruptcy saga from happening again."The bill would ensure that valuable spectrum would not go unused unnecessarily. It precludes a successful bidder in a spectrum auction to avoid...
WASHINGTON-A watchdog group said a quasi-governmental corporation set up to fund small telecom startups spends nearly as much on executive salaries and overhead as on investments in companies.The Center for Public Integrity said its investigation found the Telecommunications Development Fund paid more than $7...
A recently completed Federal Communications Commission paging spectrum auction generated about $2.4 million for a total of 2,832 licenses, numbers that come nowhere near the billions spent on other wireless spectrum auctions in recent years, but results that provide further evidence of the still-active...
WASHINGTON-House telecom subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) introduced legislation to create a trust fund that would use spectrum auction proceeds to underwrite the cost of moving military radio systems to new frequencies in order to free up spectrum for mobile-phone carriers. While the bipartisan...
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina-Movicom BellSouth was the only operator that presented the prequalification documents to participate in the spectrum auction that will take place on 18 November in Uruguay. As it is, the company will only be interested in acquiring 10 megahertz on the 1900...
WASHINGTON-House Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.) today introduced legislation to establish a fund to underwrite the cost of moving government licensees to other bands in order to free up spectrum for third-generation wireless systems.The relocation fund, a key to implementing the Bush administration's...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission is seeking comment on whether bidders in the re-auction of bankrupt NextWave Telecom Inc.'s PCS C- and F-block licenses should be able to withdraw entirely from the re-auction or choose to keep certain licenses and discard the rest."Since the commission...
