via Study: 3G/4G tablets suck up 3X more data than smartphones — Mobile Technology News.

Cisco Systems’ latest Visual Networking Index report found that the average U.S. smartphone users consumed about 201 MB per month in 2011, while the average tablet consumed 382 MB per month when connected to a 3G or 4G network. Bytemobile’s numbers appear to be high, but then again, Byte is measuring usage nearly six months into 2012, and data usage patterns are changing quickly. According to Cisco, average consumption over all connected devices almost tripled in 2011 alone. Read More

via AT&T’s Chicago problem: Why LTE slows down in the Windy City — Mobile Technology News.

AT&T’s new LTE network is blazing fast, with recent nationwide studies showing Ma Bell Mobile is beating out archrival Verizon when it comes to bandwidth punch. But independent network tester RootMetrics just released a new Chicago report finding that AT&T’s typical 17 Mbps-plus speeds are more than halved in the Windy City. The report highlights a problem AT&T has with several of its markets: it doesn’t have the spectrum in place to offer the big fat pipe it offers in the rest of the country. Read More

Link to Complete Study by RootMetrics

via Sprint runs through shutdown of Nextel iDEN network | CTIA 2012 – CNET Reviews.

Sprint Nextel is preparing to bid adieu to the Nextel side of the business.

Sprint executives today ran through its Network Vision upgrade plan, which includes the decommissioning of its Nextel iDEN network. The company has already shut down 1,900 cellular sites and plans to turn off 9,600 sites by the end of the third quarter, Bob Azzi, senior vice president for networks at the company, said here today. The entire network will go dark by the middle of the second half of next year, he added. Read More

via AT&T, Sprint Promote LTE Phones With Unfinished Networks – Businessweek.

The carriers are playing catch-up with Verizon Wireless, which offers the service widely. LTE, short for long-term evolution, is a new wireless standard that provides faster access to the Web. AT&T offers it in 35 markets, reaching about a quarter of the total U.S. population. Sprint doesn’t have any LTE service yet. It plans to roll it out in six cities sometime around the middle of the year. Read More

via Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History? – Technology Review.

Today’s technology scene seems overheated to some. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Software apps are reaching tens of millions of users within weeks. Major technology names like Research in Motion and Nokia are being undone by rapid changes to their markets. Underlying these developments: the unprecedented speed at which mobile computers are spreading.

Presented below is the U.S. market penetration achieved by nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Penetration rates have been organized to show three phases of a technology’s spread: traction, maturity, and saturation. Read More

via Who’s Devouring AT&T’s Data Capacity? – Businessweek.

AT&T’s first-quarter earnings show that new smartphone customers aren’t the ones straining its data networks. Rather, AT&T’s chickens have come home to roost. Customers are finally starting to consume the big buckets of data AT&T is selling them, taking their fair share of network capacity while not paying more for the privilege. Consequently AT&T is seeing a massive increase in data traffic without a corresponding jump in data revenue.

During AT&T’s Tuesday earnings call, Mobility Chief Executive Ralph de la Vega revealed that AT&T had added a net total of 10 million new smartphones over the past year. The devices now account for nearly 60 percent of its postpaid subscriber base. De la Vega also revealed that AT&T’s wireless data revenue is tracking about $24 billion per year, growing at a steady rate of more than 20 percent per year. Read More

via 3G and 4G Wireless Service in 13 U.S. Cities | PCWorld.

How did the four major carriers perform in our testing of 3G and 4G wireless service in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.? Check out our city-by-city performance charts. Read More

via Enterprise DAS For 4G Mobile Service | Business Computing World.

4G mobile signals often don’t penetrate buildings as well as 2G and 3G signals, so there must be a signal source inside the building to deliver adequate coverage. The network must also have the capacity to deliver multi-megabits of service to each user.

In addition, a high-rise office building may be receiving signals from several cell sites in the outside macro cellular network, and users’ phones hunt from one site to another, degrading service and reducing device battery life. Again, a strong signal emanating from inside the building overcomes this problem because user devices lock on to the internal signal. Read More

via DAS In Action: Small cell options, coexistence, public safety drive conversation

While carriers have for some time been using DAS and other small cell technologies to bolster network coverage and capacity, the dollars spent on such deployments paled in comparison to the tens of billions spent each year on macro-cellular networks. Many at this year’s DAS event, including carrier representatives, expect this gap to shrink. Read More

via Why Spectrum Matters | Epicenter | Wired.com

Like land or pockets of natural gas, spectrum is a valuable limited resource. Yet before we knew it was valuable, the government used to give it away for free without any thought to the future. The decision to auction spectrum in the 1980s was revolutionary. As someone who was fortunate to have a seat at the table in the early days of the wireless industry, I should know. But even I could not have imagined the many uses we now have for spectrum. Read More