AT&T needs T-Mobile most for its WiFi

In the 36 hours or so since AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced that the American carrier would be buying the U. S. subsidiary of the German phone company, there has been plenty of speculation (some of it right here) about what this will mean for customers and the wireless industry, but not very much, frankly, about why T-Mobile is worth $39 billion to AT&T. It’s about more subscribers, we’re told as though that is obvious, and back-office savings, plus extra spectrum with some special plans for 4G, but that’s not the biggest reason at all. The biggest reason why AT&T wants T-Mobile is because of WiFi.

Subscribers are nice, as are back-office and marketing savings, but […]

Will AT&T buying T-Mobile make jailbroken and unlocked iPhones finally legal?

So AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in a deal that makes perfect sense if you are an RF engineer or a fat-cat telco tycoon, but my question is what happens to all the jailbroken and unlocked iPhones?

T-Mobile and AT&T are the USA’s only GSM wireless network operators, so if you had an iPhone and wanted to dump AT&T to allow things like free tethering, the obvious (and frankly only) way for Americans to do so was by jumping from cranky old AT&T to the much friendlier T-Mobile. And so tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of AT&T customer did just that, and were gratefully accepted by T-Mobile.

But now with […]

Fool me once, shame on you…

Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?

Where’s the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network? Where’s surfing while talking? Where’s the […]

So Steve Jobs walks into a bar…..

Dave Miller, a very smart electrical engineer from New Zealand who is lucky enough to spend his days doing private research on gravity, has a theory about how Apple is handling the antenna problems on its iPhone 4 that have been getting so much attention in the blogosphere and even in the general press. You can read Dave’s thoughts here. For those who don’t want to go all the way to New Zealand, the gist of Dave’s argument is that Apple has a serious problem that it will try to allay by adopting AT&T’s recommended algorithm for assigning numbers of signal bars on the phone display, which Apple admits not having used to […]

The Day AT&T Learned Moore's Law (it's not when you think it was)

att_logo copyLast weekend a story in the New York Times blamed the bad reputation of AT&T’s wireless network on iPhone technical problems, not the AT&T network at all. Going further, Global Wireless Solutions, a network testing company, said the AT&T network is actually faster than Verizon’s, backing to a certain extent AT&T’s now-aborted legal effort to silence Verizon Wireless commercials that said otherwise. I doubt this is actually the case. Last summer as my family and I wandered across the United States in our old Winnebago motor home equipped with two iPhones from AT&T but also cellular data from Verizon, I can say with some certainty that Verizon coverage was consistently better, […]