It would be a non-news news story to say that Verizon is on track to spend $28.1 billion to acquire Alltel by the end of the year if it weren’t for a tanking economy and a less-than-sureshot regulatory environment. That painful combination makes the carrier’s announcement that it’s going ahead with the deal newsworthy. Verizon spokeswoman Robin Nicol says the deal remains on schedule.

All wireless carriers to work on D.C. Metro
The Metro system in Washington, D.C., just got a little more connected.

The subway system had, since 1997, allowed only Verizon Wireless customers to get cell phone service while riding the trains beneath the capital of the United States. That is now about to change, as a $1.5 billion service upgrade for the system is making its way through Congress now stipulates that customers should have access to service provided by any “licensed wireless provider.”

That specific amendment was added by the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Henry Waxman, Democrat of California.

The plan calls for 20 Metro stations to provide such access within a year, and the rest within four years.

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In a strongly-worded letter to the FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Skype official complained that the major U.S. wireless carriers were all talk when it came to “open” networks, and that if the Commission wanted to live up to its stated goal of making open networks more accessible, it would affirm that this policy covers wireless networks.

Christopher Libertelli, Skype’s senior director of government and regulatory affairs for North America, said that last week at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment conference in San Francisco, the major U.S. carriers paid lip service to the idea of open networks, but strongly cautioned that too much choice would lead to chaos, and damage the viability of their business model.

Libertelli stated that, “The attitude of the wireless carriers was perhaps best summed up in Sprint Nextel Corp. CEO Dan Hesse’s recent comment: ‘The big Internet can be daunting… There can be too much choice.’ This stands in stark contrast to the Commission’s wise policies designed to promote as much consumer choice as possible.”

He said Skype was mindful of the challenges wireless carriers faced in moving to an open network. But he also said it was not enough to simply talk about open networks.

“Consumer choice, competition and free markets, not carriers acting to block competition, should win the day in wireless–now, not later,” he said. “If the Commission believed that the transition to more open networks was going to proceed quickly, statements out of CTIA’s convention suggest just the opposite.”

“Openness” was a major theme of the conference in San Francisco, and the first keynote session included Sprint Nextel’s Hesse as well T-Mobile USA’s CEO Robert Dotson and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam speaking about what “open” meant to their companies.

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Sprint inked a deal with Ciena Corp. to use the company’s carrier Ethernet platform as one of the backhaul solutions for its 4G WiMAX network, Xohm. The company said that it’s focused on Ciena’s next-gen Ethernet-based architecture because it believes it will give Xohm the efficiency and cost advantage that it needs.

It’s no secret that backhaul capacity is a big issue for the deployment of 4G networks. Without the right amount of backhaul, the speeds offered by 4G are negated. Earlier this year, Sprint Nextel said provisioning of backhaul was the primary hold-up to the operator’s nationwide deployment of Xohm.

However, Ciena isn’t the only backhaul solution that Sprint is using. In July, the company announced a deal with DragonWave for its Horizon Compact and Horizon Duo products. Those products were to be used (at least initially) in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. and Chicago markets.

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Google co-founder Larry Page yesterday said 16,000 people have signed a Google-sponsored petition in support of using unlicensed white-space spectrum for broadband wireless. Page was speaking at an event sponsored by the Wireless Innovation Alliance in Washington, D.C., that attracted a wide range of attendees, including representatives from Microsoft and Motorola.

In August, the search giant launched a web site called, www.freetheairwaves.com, on which visitors could sign a petition urging the FCC to open up unused TV airwaves for super WiFi-like services Google calls WiFi 2.0. The intention of the site was to get the common person involved in the debate by featuring YouTube videos that explain white space.

White space is the unused slivers of spectrum in the 700 MHz band between spectrum used by broadcast TV stations. Google advocates using those slices of spectrum to bring broadband wireless access to rural areas of the United States.

Some U.S. wireless carriers oppose the use of white space in an unlicensed manner, with Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA arguing it should be licensed and used for backhaul. The National Association of Broadcasters also opposes the idea, and says unlicensed devices will produce too much interference, and that tests on equipment to determine whether or not there would be interference have failed.

The FCC has yet to declare specific regulations for white-space, and it is still unclear whether a decision will be announced before the November elections.

Page also repeatedly brought up the statistic that there currently are 1 billion devices worldwide using WiFi technology on a 2.4 GHz spectrum; and said he was “amazed we’re in the state of the debate we are in,” calling it a “no brainer” to increase the “tiny slice” of spectrum WiFi technology currently operates on. “Having a greater radius of signal that you can provide cheaply is a huge economic advantage to the U.S. and the world,” he said.

Mar

HTC expects to sell between 1.5 million and 2 million phones powered by Google’s Android operating system by the end of 2009, according to a report in the Taiwan Economic News.

T-Mobile USA is releasing the G1 in the United States on Oct. 22, and HTC expects to sell between 400,000 and 500,000 units in the fourth quarter. Though HTC’s sales projections are well below those of Apple’s iPhone 3G, a main competitor, it has been rumored that Motorola may be launching Android phones in the near future, further boosting the OS’s market presence.

The newspaper cited Peter Chou, HTC’s CEO, as saying that the release of the G1 and Android will push development and applications of the networks for handsets in the future.

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Hewlett-Packard is planning on releasing a consumer-oriented smartphone, making a sharp break with their previous plan of providing more enterprise-focused devices, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The unnamed device will be released first in Europe, sometime in the late fourth quarter, and will be marketed by a mobile carrier and sold in retail stores. The phone will run on Windows Mobile 6.1, be a touch-screen device and have a full QWERTY keyboard. A worldwide release is scheduled for sometime in 2009.

The device is the latest in HP’s line of iPaq devices, which have been marketed as business-oriented devices similar to some of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry handsets, though HP does not have nearly the market share that RIM has.

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It would be a non-news news story to say that Verizon is on track to spend $28.1 billion to acquire Alltel by the end of the year if it weren’t for a tanking economy and a less-than-sureshot regulatory environment. That painful combination makes the carrier’s announcement that it’s going ahead with the deal newsworthy. Verizon spokeswoman Robin Nicol says the deal remains on schedule.

Verizon Wireless announced the deal during a somewhat friendlier economic climate in June and has been under an analytical microscope as financial markets worsened and the size of the deal became riskier.

When closed–both financially and via federal regulatory approval–the acquisition would make Verizon the nation’s largest wireless carrier. When the deal was announced, analysts speculated about its impact on Sprint Nextel, which will drop to a distant third and AT&T, which might need to do some acquiring of its own to keep pace. The market conditions, and Verizon Wireless’ apparently bold intent to plow ahead, has quelled that speculation–at least as much as that type of speculation is ever quelled.

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Breaking with its preferred business model, Apple has released an unlocked version of the iPhone 3G in Hong Kong, allowing users to pick their preferred carrier.

The phones will go on sale in Hong Kong at prices of $695 for the 8GB model and $798 for the 16GB version. If those numbers look strikingly high, it’s only because Apple’s business plan has been to pair the iPhone 3G with a carrier in a given market–for instance, AT&T Mobility in the United States–which subsidizes the cost of the phone because customers are required to sign a service contract and pay for data plans.

Previously, the iPhone was only available in Hong Kong paired with a two-year service contract from Hutchinson, and included a $188 monthly fee.  Now customers will be able to put their old SIM card into the iPhone and activate it in iTunes. It’s not clear whether this gamble will pay off, though it could put more pressure on Apple to unlock the phones in other markets.  

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Net phone provider Skype is expected to begin public testing Wednesday of a new version of its software that aims to make casual video chatting more common.
The Luxembourg-based unit of online auction leader eBay said that public testing of Skype version 4.0 would begin making video a more integral part of the service, which lets consumers make free or low-cost phone calls.

The 4.0 test version invites users to post bigger photos of themselves, instead of just thumbnail images, to encourage callers to see and be seen.

It also incorporates features for non-technical users that detect computer settings, available bandwidth, and connected audio or video devices to make getting started easier.

Skype lets users make international computer-to-computer calls to other users in most countries for free, and calls from Skype-equipped computers or phones to landlines or cell phones at low rates. Skype generated $382 million in 2007 revenue and Wall Street analysts expect it to top $500 million in 2008.

The 5-year-old service counted 309 million registered users as of the end of March, and plays host to 12 million simultaneous users at busy times of day. Its users can send computer instant messages and text messages to phones, share big data files, or chat via video phone.

“Skype users are communicating in many different modes–often at the same time,” said Josh Silverman, a veteran eBay executive who took charge of Skype as president this year.

“We thought it was time for software to take that into account,” Silverman said in a phone interview. “Now video is really bringing together all those modes of communication.”

Skype gives computer-based callers a simple way to hold full-screen video chats instead of constricting conversations to a small window in a corner of the screen, as before.

Full-screen resolution of video in Skype 4.0 is high enough quality to let users make real eye contact, Silverman said.

He said Skype was ready to take heat from fans of its classic, small-screen design for the significant revamp in 4.0, which features a more video-friendly, full-screen setup.

Skype has offered video calling since late 2005, but due to unfamiliarity with it then–and a lack of Web-camera-ready computers–it was an afterthought for many users.

The rise of video-sharing site YouTube has since popularized, especially among younger users, the use of Web cameras connected to home computers. This has fueled a surge in video calling on Skype, and it already constitutes 28 percent of all calls made on the service, Silverman said.

That growing popularity of video calling has taken place despite the fact that existing versions of Skype software make the video feature hard to find. Users must first start a call to a friend, then find the button to add video to that call.

Skype’s sometimes controversial software is built on bandwidth-sharing technology that lends computer processing power to users with less bandwidth from users with spare capacity. This has advantages for improving video call quality that conventional landline or mobile networks lack.

Michael Bartlett, director of Skype product management for Windows, said Skype engineers have designed data compression technology that enables rich-quality voice conversations with as little as 2 kilobits per second of bandwidth and video calls on connections as slow as 6Kbps.

Version 4.0 takes advantage of faster average speeds–now typically 256Kbps or better, he said. For high-resolution, full-screen Skype video calls, 90Kbps is ideal, he added.

Skype will post further details on its blog later on Wednesday. Windows PC users wishing to test Skype 4.0 may then download it there.

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It takes a certain boldness to launch a wireless device on the same weekend that the iPhone 3G is making its debut. But that’s exactly what Palm has done with its Treo and LG with its Chocolate 3.

We reported earlier that the LG Chocolate 3 would make its debut on Monday, but Verizon announced today that it will be available Sunday. The device will be available in black or light blue and will feature one-button access to the VCAST Music with Rhapsody music service. It costs $129.99 with a $50 rebate and a two-year contract. See the phone here

Electronista is reporting that Sprint has started selling the Palm Treo 800w, while other reports say it will start selling the device this Sunday. Avian Securities analyst Matt Thornton says the Treo 800w is expected to feature WiFi, GPS, a 1.3 Megapixel camera and Windows Mobile 6.1. The device will run on Sprint’s EV-DO Rev. A network and will cost, with discounts and rebates, close to $250.

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