Motorola (NYSE:MOT) announced it won a contract that is the first phase of a private 700 MHz LTE network buildout for first responders in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The network will cover 10 sites in multiple counties in the Bay Area, and is part of the Bay Area Regional Interoperable Communications System (BayRICS) plan. The network will cover San Francisco, Alameda County/Oakland, Contra Costa County, as well as the cities of Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. The FCC in May granted a conditional waiver to San Francisco to begin building a public-safety LTE system.

Motorola said the system will be installed this year, and is expected to be running in early 2011. The spectrum for the San Francisco project is held by the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, a nonprofit corporation made up of public-safety groups.

"By combining a public-safety hardened LTE network with the existing voice and data networks, the San Francisco Bay Area has the opportunity to equip their first responders with the advanced communication tools they need to better protect themselves and their communities," Motorola co-CEO Greg Brown said during the company's earnings conference call. "This system is the first of its kind, and further demonstrates Motorola's leadership and commitment to delivering innovative, next-generation public-safety solutions.

Brown said Motorola's recently announced $1.2 billion sale of its wireless networking business to Nokia Siemens Networks will not affect this project or the company's public-safety LTE position in general. Brown said that "over time you'll see these hardened LTE systems be private and public." Interestingly, he also said Motorola is going to deliver a "private broadband LTE experience that will have roaming capabilities in rural areas and interoperability with the wireless operator in those respective regions."

Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) plans to launch 25-30 commercial 700 MHz LTE markets in the fourth quarter and expand that in 2011. Verizon is also trying to partner with rural carriers to expand LTE's reach through licensing arrangements; no deals have been announced. Regional carrier MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS) also plans to launch LTE later this year. AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) plans to trial its LTE network next year. Finally, Harbinger Capital Partners' LightSquared venture plans to launch its satellite and terrestrial LTE network by the third quarter of 2011.

For more:
- see this release

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Once thought to be unhackable, the Android phone is anything but, according to researchers presenting at Black Hat 2010.

However, it continued to lose the most lucrative customers, those who sign two-year contracts, and posted a wider loss for its second quarter due to tax effects.

Sprint shares rose 6 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $4.90 in morning trading. In pre-market trading, shares were up as much as 10 percent before investors fully digested the numbers.

Sprint gained a net 111,000 subscribers in the April to June period, compared to a loss of 257,000 in the same quarter last year. It said it expects to keep adding wireless subscribers for the rest of the year, and reduce the number of contract customers who leave.

Sprint still lost 55,000 subscribers under its own brands -- which include Virgin Mobile and Boost -- in the latest quarter, but made up for that by adding 166,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers, who buy access to the network through resellers.

It lost 228,000 contract subscribers, a figure much improved from the 991,000 it lost in the same quarter last year.

Sprint has been hemorrhaging subscribers nearly constantly since its 2005 acquisition of Nextel. That network, incompatible with Sprint's, is valued for its walkie-talkie-like push-to-talk function, but is poorly suited to smart phones, and more than a million subscribers have been leaving every year.

The rate of contract subscribers canceling service every month was 1.85 percent in the quarter. That was Sprint's lowest figure ever, though it's still higher than the corresponding figure at AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company had some help from the launch of its first "4G" phone, the HTC EVO, which can tap into Clearwire Corp.'s wireless broadband network for faster downloads in some areas....
http://www.mobile-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=74513

After three years of losing subscribers, Sprint (NYSE:S) recorded positive net additions in the second quarter. And the company released some interesting statistics about its WiMAX offering. In particular, the HTC Evo 4G, now sold out, exceeded the company's expectations in many areas, including sales and a record low return rate of the device, said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse.

Hesse indicated that Evo users consumed "three and a half times more data than our other smartphone customers." In addition, he indicated Sprint would be selling a lot more of the devices if there wasn't a shortage of them.

For the quarter, Sprint posted a net loss of $760 million, wider than a $384 million net loss in the year-ago period. The company was hit with a $302 million tax-related charge. Sprint now expects to have positive total net wireless subscriber additions during the remainder of 2010, and fewer postpaid subscriber losses in the second half of the year than in the first half. "We still have a lot of hard work," Hesse said.

For more:
- take a look at this Sidecut Reports post
- read this FierceWireless article
- see this FierceWireless Q2 earnings page

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Altair Semiconductor announced commercial availability of a new TD-LTE reference design for use in dongles, data cards, consumer premise equipment and mobile handheld devices.

The reference design features Altair's FourGee 3100/6200 chipset and supports spectrum bands that encompass India's recently auction TD-LTE band 40, China's band 38 and a number of other bands where TD-LTE might make its appearance in Japan, North America and Europe, the company said. The reference design features a unified TDD/FDD architecture using a single chipset and a single software stack, enabling a small form factor and cost efficient integration for multimode devices, Altair said.

"The demand for TD-LTE products, mainly in emerging markets such as India and China, is rapidly increasing, forcing carriers to develop cost-effective solutions for this growing segment," Eran Eshed, Altair's co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development said in a statement. "Thanks to the maturity of Altair's FD-LTE solution which had sampled in September 2009, and the extensive testing it had undergone with most tier one infrastructure vendors, releasing a TD-LTE version was a logical next step for us."

Altair recently announced a partnership with IPWireless to develop a suite of multi-band LTE modem products that will support key frequency bands ideally suited to global LTE deployments. The companies will integrate Altair's cutting-edge software-defined radio baseband processor into IPWireless' LTE devices. The first consumer-friendly LTE USB modem device will support multiple frequency bands including the 800MHz digital dividend band, 1800 MHz and TD-LTE's 2.5 GHz. Subsequent devices will also support the entire US 700MHz and AWS frequency.

For more:
- see this release

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TeliaSonera, which operates the world's first LTE networks in Sweden and Norway, is mulling a new mobile data pricing model that involves bundling the network usage charges with the cost of mobile content used into a single pricing plan. As such, subscribers would be paying for the content and network resources they are using up instead of simply paying for a certain amount of data.

"We would like to go into some sort of value-based pricing," said Håkan Dahlström, president of mobility services at TeliaSonera, during the operator's second-quarter conference call with analysts. "If you buy a movie, you would have the price of the traffic for that movie included in the price of the movie."

It's unclear when TeliaSonera might introduce this value-based pricing nor whether it would replace monthly contracts. The operator current charges for bandwidth speed and volume meaning 3 gigabytes of data on the LTE network costs about $47 per month. The same amount of data on the 3G network costs $41 per month.

For more:
- see this Light Reading Mobile article

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The stylish, back-to basics handset will appeal to plenty of people who aren’t interested in high-end features.

 Innovative and exciting, but it doesn’t work as well as we had hoped.