New market research from IDC shows that Microsoft’s Windows Phone has taken third place in global smartphone shipments for the first quarter. Windows Phones shipped 7 million units and gained a market share of 3.2%, which is a significant increase from the 3 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter of last year when it held a market share of 2%. Windows Phones edged out previous third place holder BlackBerry, which saw its shipments fall [...]

Apple’s App Store has passed the 50 billion downloads milestone. Though it was launched in 2008, the majority of those downloads have occurred in just the last year. Back in January, Apple reported that the store had reached 40 billion downloads, with almost half of them occurring in 2012 alone. As part of a promotion, Apple rewarded the downloader of the 50 billionth app with a $10,000 App Store gift card.  Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, [...]

It is very quickly becoming clear that if you want the FCC to avoid enforcing their network neutrality rules, all you have to do is throw some half-assed, vague-sounding technical jargon at the agency to bog them down in inactivity indefinitely. With yesterday’s news that AT&T is blocking yet another video chat application in order to drive users to more expensive data plans, it’s rather clear that the FCC lacks the stomach to actually enforce [...]

In late 2011 after several delays, ViaSat finally launched their new KA-band satellite ViaSat 1, which allowed the company to finally start offering consumers some faster residential bandwidth speeds via the Exede brand. Now the company has announced that they’re hard at work on ViaSat 2, with plans to launch it sometime in the middle of 2016 (in satellite launch parlance, that means probably around 2018). According to ViaSat, the launch of ViaSat 2 will [...]

Canadian wireless operator Telus today announced that the company would be buying smaller wireless competitor Mobilicity for $380 Million, the first of what’s expected to be several similar deals. According to the Globe and Mail, while Telus is looking for quick regulatory approval, the government has suggested they’re not entirely thrilled with the erosion of competition and the accumulation of floundering upstart spectrum by incumbents. As for Mobilicity, they insist they looked high and low [...]

These days, in many markets, people using smart phones are on the fixed networks for Internet access, more than on the mobile network.  In North America, as much as 82 percent of Internet traffic from smart phones occurs indoors, where users can take advantage of Wi-Fi, instead of the mobile network, Analysys Mason suggests. In Western Europe, as much as 92 percent of Internet usage from smart phones occurs indoors. So to a large extent, [...]

MARIETTA, GA and OTTAWA, ON – Troy Cablevison has deployed its new 100 Gbps network using ’s MPX-9110 Flexible 100 Gbps platform from Optelian. The low-latency architecture is deployed across Optelian’s LightGAIN optical transport and Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) infrastructure. Covering a six-county area that spans the entire southeastern region of Alabama, the Troy Cable network delivers high-capacity fiber-optic transport from the cities of Montgomery to Troy to Dothan, and all markets in between. [...]

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Clearfield, Inc., the specialist in fiber management and connectivity platforms for communications providers, announced the FieldSmart Fiber Delivery Point (FDP) KIS Outdoor Enclosure. Continuing the building block approach of Clearfield’s fiber management principles, FDP-KIS is the first enclosure to be optimized for pushable fiber deployment. Unique to FDP-KIS, the enclosure is a simple to use architecture from 1 to 48 ports of fiber, housing single as well as multi-count fiber strands. It [...]

Whether TV white spaces spectrum is going to be a big deal or not might hinge on how much real spectrum is available in given markets, plus manufacturing volume to get retail prices of network elements down to a level where the spectrum has a reasonable business case. At a high level, it isn’t going to help as much in urban areas, where interference issues are more constraining. It might prove quite important in some [...]

It sometimes is easy to forget that it isn’t as easy to become an ISP in some nations, as in others. Consider the matter of “unlicensed spectrum,” for example. “Unlicensed” spectrum exists. But use of that spectrum is, in about 66 percent of nations, is not really non-licensed. Based on responses from 75 countries, 33 percent of national regulators require a license to use 2.4, or 5 GHz “unlicensed” spectrum, a study found. Another 33 [...]