Wal-Mart to Sell HughesNet Services

Need a little satellite broadband with your order? Wal-Mart customers will be able to buy HughesNet satellite broadband services soon. Sure, it is a niche. But there are lots of big niches in the communications business. About 10 percent of all U.S. end users live places where the local telephone company is not one of the big brand names. Also, for some of us, wireless is a good way to back up a primary wired broadband connection. In my case, Covad as a primary for primary in-home business and personal use, plus 3G wireless primarily for mobility, but also as the backup in case the primary service fails for any reason.

T-Mobile Goes Down

It wasn't your imagination: if you use T-Mobile data services, you had no connectivity for as much as four hours on Tuesday. Personally, I thought it was the coverage inside the convention center I am working inside of. Nope. There was an outage. I thought it was the BlackBerry server at one point. But no.

The latest outage just illustrates an important element of digital life: you really can't trust any service or application to remain "always available." Everything is going to crash, or be unusable, for some amount of time. So one either gets used to the idea of periodic outages, or if that isn't satisfactory, you are going to have to back up all your mission critical services, devices, data or applications. Personally, I don't worry too much about application diversity, though most of us have some of that. I do make sure broadband and mobile access, as well as computing devices, are redundant.

First 700 MHz Winner: AT&T

at&t is the first winner of the battle to win 700 MHz wireless spectrum. Not, of course, because it has won anything in the upcoming auctions for C block and other spectrum. Instead, at&t is acquiring $2.5 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses covering 196 million people in the 700 MHz frequency from Aloha Partners.

The 12 MHz of spectrum covers all of the top-10 U.S, wireless market and 72 of the top 100 markets overall.

A Location Based Service Somebody Needs to Develop

As someone who spends lots of time at conferences and trade shows, and who randomly bumps into people, it occurs to me that one location-based service that would really be helpful is a way to have your mobile alert you when somebody you have been communicating with over a recent user-defined period is in your vicinity. The reason is simple enough: quite often one works with people for years without ever physically meeting them. And if the opportunity presents itself, one would like to stroll over and say hello.

The issue is that I don't know how well GPS will work when all of us are inside a large meeting hall. Bluetooth would help for short distances, I suppose. It might also be nice if the app could run in the background when synchronized with one's notebook or desktop and collect photos of your contacts, putting them into your contact database so you know roughly what the person you want to meet looks like.

For that matter, scouring public sources and putting a picture into my contact directory might also be nice if I weren't a Facebook user, which essentially provides that function.

Sprint Loses CEO; 337,000 Subs

Sprint Nextel says it expects to report a net loss of approximately 337,000 post-paid subscribers in the third quarter, and also announced the resignation of CEO Gary Forsee. Perhaps the company has spent too much time on the WiMAX network is hasn't yet built, and too little time stemming serious subscriber losses in the voice and third generation business it does have.

Help Us Figure Out What We Can Do with Wi-Fi: BT

To stimulate development of new applications using Wi-Fi hotspots, BT is running a contest with a £1000 prize for the best new Symbian-based mobile application. To enter the challenge, an application should make use of the device's Wi-Fi connection for some of its operation. Applications will be judged on the innovative use they make of Wi-Fi connectivity, how easy they are to use, and their commercial potential. There are smaller prizes for runners-up. The challenge is open from October 16 and the closing date for entries is January 16, 2008.

Vonage Settles with Sprint

Vonage has settled its Sprint Nextel Corp. patent infringement lawsuit for $80 million. As part of the settlement, all claims are resolved and Sprint has licensed to Vonage the Sprint portfolio of more than 100 patents covering the connection of calls between a regular telephone network and a packet-switched network such as the Internet.

The $80 million Vonage agreed to pay consists of $35 million for past use of the patents, $40 million for a fully paid future license, and $5 million in prepayment for services.

Vonage has maintained it has sufficient reserves to pay both the Verizon and Sprint Nextel patent infringement awards without long-term damage to its business model. There has been some speculation that the patent infringement damage awards would push Vonage over the edge into bankruptcy. The countervailing point of view has been that the patent disputes were a serious financial distraction but not alone capable of damaging Vonage's long-term prospects. More dangerous by far is the threat posed by cable providers bundling VoIP with video and broadband access services.

In that sense, EarthLink faces much the same problem. It has a reasonably-sized Internet access business that has to contend with triple play bundles as well, though EarthLink arguably has made better progress in creating a double play offering of broadband plus voice.

The settlement of the Sprint lawsuit is helpful primarily in removing a huge distraction and source of uncertainty.