Mobile & Wireless

EarthLink has been losing ISP customers to the traditional telcos. It's responding with a potentially risky gambit: allying with SK Telecom to go after those companies' 3G mobile customers.

The European Commission has ordered two German mobile network operators to explain why they apparently overcharged mobile phone users visiting Germany, it announced on Thursday. If the operators fail to convince the Commission that their charges were justified they could face fines of up to hundreds of millions of euros.

A new feature is making its way into a number of recently launched cell phones in Japan and South Korea: motion sensing. The basic idea is that moving the phone through the air translates into actions and inputs on the screen. Not surprisingly, gaming appears to be the main beneficiary of the motion technology.

A recent survey of U.K. mobile phone users offers some discouraging data for mobile phone manufacturers: over 70 percent of respondents say that mobile services are becoming more complicated to use and configure, 59 percent are not confident that they will find 3G phones and services easy to use - and, largely as a result, only 4 percent actually plan to upgrade to 3G.

A new report claims that municipal Wi-Fi network plans, while well intentioned, could end up wasting taxpayer dollars and running outdated and inadequate equipment. The report was put out by New Millennium Research Council, whose parent company is consultancy with clients including Verizon and SBC - potential competitors of those public Wi-Fi networks.

A study by Infonetics Research showed steady growth for WLAN-based VoIP in 2004, an projects bigger things for the technology this year.

Hewlett-Packard Co. introduces an over-the-air software distribution system for mobile operators, a move that could help solve enterprises' looming challenge of managing wireless mobile devices like they do PCs.

PCTEL has released new software that will make the dream of many wireless users come true: it will enable a phone conversation to be transferred seamlessly from a WLAN to a WWAN.

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network is now making available its BSD-based open source WLAN management software. The software lives on a CD-ROM, and can instantly turn a commodity PC into a node on a wireless network.

NTT DoCoMo will begin selling a new range of 3G handsets in Japan this month that will mark its first attempt to push 3G telephony into the mainstream of the cellular market.

Mobile operator mmO2 PLC is going to roll out HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), the enhanced 3G (third generation) standard known as 3.5G. It will appear this year in O2's traditional testing ground, the Isle of Man, and reach the mainland maybe next year.