NEW YORK — Google and The Chelsea Improvement Company, a nonprofit neighborhood redevelopment corporation, have announced they have partnered to provide free public WiFi internet access in southwest Chelsea, which will provide free Internet access to hundreds of thousands of people each year. It will become the first wired neighborhood in Manhattan and the largest contiguous WiFi network in New York City. Free WiFi is now available outdoors, roughly between Gansevoort St. and 19 St. [...]

Buffalo, New York has been named the worst wireless city in America, according to data collected throughout 2012 by research firm RootMetrics. The firm compiled speed test data taken throughout 2012 from the 75 largest wireless market and found that Buffalo performed the worst in terms of speed. After averaging the average results provided by six carriers, Buffalo clocked it with an average downstream speed of 3.6 Mbps across six different carriers. The firm did [...]

New York, NY – While tablets and smartphones offer the freedom of mobility, close to 40 percent of Americans now use their tablets or smartphones while watching TV at least once a day, and twice as many do it at least once a month, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report. Modernity, in its new form, enables myriad content access points. It’s a fact of which Americans are taking full advantage. These devices are omnipresent, [...]

Verizon recently announced they would be issuing refunds to Sandy victims for FiOS service outages, even if their problems were solely the result of lost power (which was the case for the majority of users). Now Verizon Wireless says they’re also trying to help Sandy victims by waiving text message and voice charges. According to the company’s Hurricane Sandy FAQ, Verizon Wireless is not charging Sandy Victims in New York or New Jersey for domestic [...]

Verizon recently announced they would be issuing refunds to Sandy victims for FiOS service outages, even if their problems were solely the result of lost power (which was the case for the majority of users). Now Verizon Wireless says they’re also trying to help Sandy victims by waiving text message and voice charges. According to the company’s Hurricane Sandy FAQ, Verizon Wireless is not charging Sandy Victims in New York or New Jersey for domestic [...]

Speaking at an investor conference this week Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo insisted the company’s shared data plans are being well received, and despite T-Mobile’s recent return to unlimited wireless data, insisted that the option is going the way of the dinosaur. Verizon launched their shared data plans back in June to mixed reviews, its steep $15 per GB overage and per device fees countering most of the savings provided by offering unlimited voice [...]

Several of the mass copyright lawsuit outfits (like the U.S. Copyright Group) have been claiming for some time now that simply having an open Wi-Fi hotspot is “negligence” and a crime. In short, companies often simply have an IP address to go by when hunting copyright violators, and when they try to sue an individual who points out they had an open Wi-Fi network, the companies rather lazily have tried to argue that simply leaving [...]

Last April Sprint was hit with a $300 million lawsuit by the State of New York for allegedly failing to collect and turn over to the state more than $100 million in taxes for its wireless phone services over seven years. Leaked documents had shown that Sprint has been “unbundling” the company’s monthly plans so that users pay taxes on calls made to people within New York state — but not to those made to [...]

Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM directs our attention to a new study from Telegeography showing that IP transit prices continue to plummet. For example, the median monthly lease price for a full GigE port in London dropped 57% over the last year to $3.13 per Mbps, while in New York, the comparable service saw a 50% price decline to $3.50 per Mbps during the last year. While the firm notes that there remain some disparity [...]

NEW YORK — Wall Street has had its doubts about FiOS, but Verizon‘s bet appears to be paying off as it reported a second consecutive quarter of double-digit percentage growth in year-over-year earnings results and significant increases in operating cash flow. The company’s wireline segment generated continued increases in revenues from FiOS fiber optic services and strategic business services, and Verizon Wireless generated record high margins and strong operational results. Overall, Verizon reported 64 cents [...]