Why Mobile Data Plan 'Throttling' Is Actually a Good Thing

It’s official: The era of salad bar style mobile data plans is almost over. AT&T has joined Verizon and T-Mobile in slowing download speeds for its remaining customers with unlimited data plans, once they reach set (albeit generous) limits. Among the national mobile carriers, only Sprint, which is struggling to compete …

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FCC Should Allow Verizon, AT&T a Fair Bid for Wireless Spectrum

The world is an amazing place. You can sit in a Starbucks in Malibu while I’m sipping tomato soup at a Pret a Manger in London, and we chat for free using Skype or Viber or Rebtel. Or how ‘bout this one: You can pull a smartphone out of your …

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Spectrum Wars

Verizon, America’s largest wireless network, pulled a rabbit out of its corporate hat last month, announcing a multi-billion dollar deal to buy spectrum from cable-TV giants Comcast and Time Warner and the smaller, Syracuse, NY-based Bright House Networks. Sound familiar? AT&T, number two in wireless, made a similarly surprising move …

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Can’t Lick ‘Em? Join ‘Em

The trend toward wireless voice calling at prices more akin to data plan pricing continued this week with the unveiling of AT&T’s Call International App. The free app (which works on most of AT&T’s smartphones) dramatically cuts the cost of voice rates when the phone is connected to …

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DOJ v. AT&T: Who's Looking Out for Consumers?

The Department of Justice has come out with guns blazing in an effort to stop the $39 billion AT&T/T-Mobile USA merger. But is it really in the interest of either the antitrust bureaucracy—or the consumers they are supposed to represent—to put the kibosh on this one?

There’s a legitimate dispute here. …

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What Do You Call 100 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Sea?

Who says innovation and entrepreneurship are lagging in America? Not in the legal profession. Case in point: two national law firms are recruiting AT&T wireless customers to demand their rights to arbitration. But not just any arbitration…

Like everybody else who isn’t a member of the trial bar, we think …

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A Free Lunch for Netflix?

All right, we’ll say it: We love Netflix, the company that has made it so easy to watch any of thousands of movies anywhere, with hardly a moment’s forethought. And we’re not alone. The company boasts close to 26 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, and it recently …

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California Streamin’

California’s Public Utilities Commission has decided to investigate the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, making no bones about the PUC’s concern that the merged companies’ combined market share in the state (47 percent) would be anti-competitive. Maybe, but there’s an irony here. AT&T’s goal is to use T-Mobile’s surplus spectrum …

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Tangling the Web

Yesterday, the FCC decided to regulate the rates that big telecoms can charge the smaller ones for using their mobile networks for data services ranging from streaming video to Web mail. The “little” guys, including not-so-little Sprint, are happy. The big guys – AT&T and Verizon – are …

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Broadband Marriages?

AT&T and T-Mobile USA want to get hitched in order to get a jump on the competition in completing a superfast 4G wireless broadband network. Are other mergers, designed to boost the market power of content providers in the coming world of broadband anywhere/everywhere, now in the works? Dennis Berman, …

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