Stories about: UMTS

Apple's second generation iPhone -- officially unveiled this week by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and dubbed the iPhone 3G -- is slated to hit the shelves of Apple and AT&T stores across the US (and in 21 other nations) on July 11. The iPhone 3G will sport both cosmetic and serious under-the-hood upgrades from the current model and will feature a new, lower purchase price. It will also ship with the iPhone 2.0 firmware, offering access to a host of new operating system features, most notably the ability to install third-party applications using the App Store.

What a difference a year makes. This month, the hip iPhone celebrates its first anniversary, following its riotous US launch last June 29 . Its birth followed six months of prerelease hype that was ignited by Apple CEO and industry luminary Steve Jobs.

Alltel announced during an earnings report conference call this week that it has selected Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as its 4G wireless broadband technology.

Back in the day, wireless data was a neatly self-contained niche technology used by folks such as field force workers and logistics companies, but virtually ignored by everyone else.

Talk of Apple placing large iPhone orders to its Asian suppliers and predictions that the company will dramatically ramp up sales later this year and into next "make perfect sense," according to one analyst.

Motorola announced six new products and technology demonstrations Wednesday that are designed to improve the consumer mobile media experience. The devices include a new mobile TV with a touch-screen user interface.

Nortel said it will cut 2100 jobs and shift 1000 more to "higher growth and lower cost geographies" after fourth quarter results fell short of Wall Street expectations.

Netgear has unveiled its Femtocell Voice Gateway, which it will publicly demonstrate for the first time at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

Apple will release a 3G version of the iPhone sometime next year that connects to the Internet at much faster speeds than the current model, AT&T's CEO said Wednesday, according to reports by Bloomberg.com.

Ultrawideband (UWB) has long been promoted as the future of wireless personal-area networks (WPAN). But are WPANs still needed?

I recently ran into Paul Callahan at Interop New York. I've known Paul for a long time; he was one of the founders of AutoCell Labs, who developed a technology for automatically configuring and optimizing Wi-Fi that I consider to be sheer genius. It really works, but it so far has not caught on; something about added cost, non-standard elements, and other mostly-valid but completely short-sighted considerations. Anyway, Paul is now VP of Business Development at Airvana, a company best known for EV-DO base stations but which really has a much broader view of the wireless world. Paul is a huge fan of femtocells, and said some fairly negative things about public-access Wi-Fi. I still think the latter is going to be a major success, and Paul didn't change my mind. But he did invite me to visit Airvana to see what they're doing in femtocells, and I was quick to take him up on the offer.