remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

It’s Friday, so empty your head into the comment section below. Just remember to clean up after yourselves.read comment(s)

This week AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson let it slip that consumers could expect a new iPhone next year that offered HSDPA wireless broadband support. That’s not a particularly bright move for the CEO of a massive telecom empire, whose Christmas sales could be impacted by the flood of users that will wait for the new [...]

Google has officially announced that they’ll be participating in next year’s 700Mhz auction ahead of the December 3 FCC deadline for declaring intent. The spectrum, considered the last great batch of “waterfront property,” could be used to offer a national wireless broadband network that could challenge incumbent interests.
The FCC refused to meet Google’s demand [...]

AT&T lobbyists rented an Austin theater last night so that local lawmakers could see the Cowboys/Packers game, which wasn’t on many cable networks because of the NFL’s dispute with the cable industry. 181 legislators and their families were invited to the theater, which has been used by AT&T to demonstrate their VDSL-based IPTV platform, U-Verse. [...]

The Wall Street Journal (registration required) confirms that FCC chief Kevin Martin did get two fellow commissioners to vote with him to cap the growth of Comcast Communications. After the decision the cable giant will be no longer allowed to own more than 30% of the pay TV market. As you might expect, Comcast isn’t [...]

CNET insists that Comcast’s use of forged RST packets to throttle upstream p2p use could be perfectly legal under the new network neutrality laws being proposed. Just like the FCC’s policy statement (pdf), which insists consumers are “entitled to run applications and services of their choice” except in cases of “reasonable network management” — [...]

Verizon’s selection of LTE as their next-generation broadband standard has some outlets (like like Fortune) insisting that WiMax is officially in trouble. It wasn’t supposed to be this way; if you flash back to earlier this decade, WiMax was supposed to do everything from cure cancer to potty train your toddlers. In 2004, Intel called [...]

Oregon refuses to spy on students for the RIAA The Inquirer Sprint Rebuffs $5 Billion Investment from SK Telecom SeekingAlpha.com Airvana makes innovations to EVDO CBRonline.com The three reasons why 3G iPhone won t matter that much ZDNet Blogs Wainhouse Research [...]

While TiVO is still only available to a limited number of Comcast subscribers in the New England area (mostly employees), the company has clarified the pricing for the service and insisted marketing for it will be ramping up shortly. TiVO says Comcast will charge users an extra $2.95 per month for the popular service. Multichannel [...]

As we mentioned the other day, the nation’s fourth largest phone provider (soon to be fifth, supplanted by Comcast VoIP) is now offering “naked” DSL, or DSL without mandatory phone service. The catch is that they’re using it as a retention tool — offering it only to customers who threaten to cancel service. Embarq tells [...]

The San Diego-based Utility Consumers Action network (UCAN), a California consumer group, has filed a lawsuit against Sprint, according to RCR Wireless News. The group accuses the nation’s third largest wireless carrier of improperly billing — claiming that Sprint has been charging data card customers fees and taxes that should only be applied [...]

Comcast gave a bit more detail on the state of their DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades at the CableNEXT Conference this week in Santa Clara, California. Comcast CTO Tony Werner told attendees that the company hopes to have Docsis 3.0 technology in place in around 20 percent of the company’s footprint by the end of next year. [...]