Price matters, Verizon has found. By making it easy for consumers to upgrade FiOS Quantum high speed access services to 50 Mbps for an incremental $10 or $20 a month, Verizon is seeing a “huge take rate,” said Fran Shammo, Verizon Communications CFO. “With the tools that we have with FiOS and delivering messages to our consumers on the TV or on their broadband connection, that they have the ability to just click and upgrade to [...]

PLANO, TX and MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Goodman Networks Incorporated, a privately held leader in the design, engineering, deployment, integration and maintenance of wireless telecommunication networks, and Multiband Corporation, a leading home service provider (HSP) for DIRECTV and the nation’s largest DIRECTV Master System Operator (MSO) for Multiple Dwelling Units (MDU’s), jointly announced that they have signed a definitive merger agreement, in which Goodman Networks will acquire Multiband, which will be operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary [...]

Cablevision has spent the last few years deploying Wi-Fi to NYC metro region commuter areas, and now says they’re getting close to offering service on the trains themselves. Speaking on their recent earnings conference call, Cablevision executive Tad Smith stated the company is “in active, productive, very positive conversations with the trains” but that deploying such technology has been “complicated.” The company filed a proposal with the MTA back in 2010 and originally hoped the [...]

Porn copyright trolls like Prenda law already do plenty of sleazy things in their attempt to frighten BitTorrent porn downloaders into ponying up extortion settlement money. While Judges are just now starting to take aim at these firms, the trolls remain busy trying to frighten porn downloaders into ponying up cash. Torrent Freak points to a new round of letters being sent out by the “Anti-Piracy Law Group,” the latest incarnation of Prenda Law. In [...]

Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference earlier this month, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo stated that the company’s earliest FiOS markets are now reaching penetration targets and that most of their new customers are signing up for faster speeds. According to Shammo, 60% of new FiOS Internet subscribers added in the first quarter chose Quantum speeds of 50/25 Mbps or faster. He also stated that Dallas, Verizon’s first FiOS launch market, [...]

DirecTV is contemplating embedding an antenna into their set top boxes in order to offer live over the air broadcasts, thereby circumventing retransmission fees. Speaking at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference in Boston, DirecTV chief financial officer Patrick Doyle stated they didn’t have a timeline on the project, but that it makes financial sense due to the soaring price of retrans fees and the landscape shift that’s occurring courtesy of Aereo. He [...]

Singapore, Canada, the United States, Kenya, South Korea, Japan and the United Kingdom are among the countries where mobile payments are poised to get traction, according to Business Insider. The index measures the ability to completely replace use of credit and debit cards with mobile devices. But each of the countries ranks high in terms of readiness for different reasons. Access is where Singapore shines. It  has 100 percent mobile coverage, while 70 percent of [...]

To the extent that tablets and smart phones are displacing time formerly spent with PCs, there is potential for a shift in demand for access from mobile and fixed networks. That’s what offloading of mobile traffic to Wi-Fi networks is all about.  On the other hand, users also are shifting application use formerly occurring on PCs to their smart phones and tablets. So some traffic formerly on the fixed network is loaded to the mobile [...]

Microsoft this week introduced the company’s long-awaited successor to the Xbox 360 video game console: the Xbox One. According to Microsoft, their new console will come with 8GB of RAM, USB 3.0 ports, built-in 802.11n, and support for Wi-Fi Direct — but that’s about as technically specific as Microsoft was willing to get. Like Sony, Microsoft held back most of the details ahead of their full reveal at E3, though unlike Sony — Microsoft did [...]

Historically, the big value mobile phones represented was the untethering of “calling” from places. In fact, so great was the value that mobile calling displaced less expensive place-based calling.  More recently, the value of a BlackBerry was the ability to use email anywhere. In the latest iteration of the untethering trend, people now expect to be able to get access to the Internet anywhere they are.  But there is another trend happening as well, namely [...]