Items tagged with mobile-broadband
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was recently on CNN's Reliable Sources talking about the surge in mobile and Wi-Fi usage during the coronavirus outbreak. Stephenson says that the AT&T network has seen a significant uptick since companies began asking employees to work from home, and schools moved students to online learning during the coronavirus outbreak. According to Stephenson, mobile volumes are up as much as 40 percent. The executive also said that Wi-Fi calling volume in particular was up 100 percent. Stephenson says that the network infrastructures are "performing quite well," but he does say that the network is seeing some stress as more and more people are pushed to work from home....
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Intel has taken time to congratulate all involved with the new 3GPP Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G New Radio (NR) Standard that was recently completed. The new standard is hailed as a “remarkable step forward for the industry.” With the NSA 5G NR standard complete, for the first item we have an internationally recognized specification for 5G radio systems. This is the foundation on which the mobile industry can move forward on testing and commercializing next-gen wireless services and devices. Intel’s Asha Keddy wrote, “I'd like to congratulate the parties that contributed to the development of this standard, setting the foundation for an interoperable global marketplace ripe...
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Verizon Wireless has announced to 8,500 customers in rural parts of the country that it will no longer service them and all of their phones on their accounts as of October 17. The reason that Verizon Wireless is ditching these 8,500 rural customers, that have a total of 19,000 lines, is excessive data usage on networks owned by Verizon Wireless's roaming partners. In rural parts of the country where Verizon lacks its own wireless network, the carrier has partnered with smaller regional wireless carriers and allows its customers to roam on those networks free of charge. With the return of "unlimited" data plans, Verizon has decided this was a bad move and it is ditching those customers despite...
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When it comes to mobile broadband speeds, Korea is doing quite well. While Sprint is boasting about 50-60Mbps that will be in five U.S. cities by the end of the year, Korea’s SK Telecom says that it already has 300Mbps LTE ready to roll. (Well, sort of.) The technology involved is a three-band aggregation, just like Sprint’s Spark initiative, and with the 20MHz and two 10MHz bands together, SK Telecom says it can offer 300Mbps LTE speeds. There are some hurdles to overcome first, though, including getting global standardization and getting hardware makers to develop the needed chipsets and devices. Even so, SK Telecom expects to have the service commercially available by the end of...
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You know it’s frustrating: We have two tremendous technologies in WiFi and mobile broadband that let us connect to the Internet, yet getting the two to work seamlessly together has been a bit if a headache to this point in time. Further adding to the consternation over the whole thing is that an automatic handoff between a mobile broadband network and a WiFi hotspot would relieve a mountain of traffic for the former, leading to substantial consumer savings on data rates. The GSMA and the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) are collaborating on an effort to make the mobile-broadband-to-WiFi transition simpler with WiFi roaming. The groups are developing “technical and commercial frameworks...
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For as long as WiFi hotspots have been around, you’d think they would have run their course by now. Instead, they’re shaping up to be the next big thing in mobile wireless. Wireless carriers have been using WiFi deployments to offload data usage from their 3G and 4G networks when customers are in range, and there are plenty of developments emerging to make that process work better with stronger security and less interference to the user experience. The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) announced that its latest effort to that end, Next Generation Hotspots (NGH), has enjoyed successful trials with carriers including AT&T, BT, China Mobile, DOCOMO InterTouch, NTT DOCOMO, Orange,...
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