All Things Digital

It must be tough to be a delegate at the Democratic National Convention –- you have to know when to scream for Hillary, when to scream for Obama and when not to scream at all. And then you have to learn the art of shaking hands and networking while listening for really important announcements such as someone somewhere is offering free pizza. Life may be easier if you have a swanky cellphone. At least, that’s what a bunch of companies are trying to convince you as they push their mobile-related products in Denver.

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Scott Goldman uses his mobile phone to call friends and business contacts all over the world, from Britain to Australia. But the Southern California-based consultant doesn’t pay a dime in international tolls to his mobile-phone carrier, AT&T, the biggest in the U.S. Instead, Goldman places the international portion of the calls–roughly 100 minutes a month–through a service called Gorilla Mobile that relies on Internet-based technology to route wireless calls virtually toll-free. Goldman, a user of Apple’s iPhone, estimates that he saves hundreds of dollars a year with Gorilla’s service. He stands to cut wireless bills even more by signing up for another, iCall, that’s due for the iPhone in the coming weeks

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Towards the close of 1898 a systematic research, carried on for a number of years with the object of perfecting a method of transmission of electrical energy through the natural medium, led me to recognize three important necessities: First, to develop a transmitter of great power; second, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the energy transmitted; and, third, to ascertain the laws of propagation of currents through the earth and the atmosphere. Various reasons, not the least of which was the help proffered by my friend Leonard E. Curtis and the Colorado Springs Electric Company, determined me to select for my experimental investigations the large plateau, two thousand meters above sea-level, in the vicinity of that delightful resort, which I reached late in May, 1899.

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Qwest (Q) CEO Ed Mueller says the company’s migration of its wireless service offering to Verizon (VZ) is going smoothly. Qwest is switching from selling a Qwest- branded wireless service in which it resold service from Sprint (S) to a co-branded offering from Verizon; the company started rolling out its new Verizon by Qwest wireless service two weeks ago. “I could not be happier with the relationship,” he said. Mueller said in an interview with Tech Trader Daily this morning that he modeled the arrangement on its deal to resell satellite television service from DirecTV (DTV), and its co-marketed DSL service with Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSN.

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Not a very encouraging quarter for Sprint-Nextel (S).

The telecom giant posted Q3 revenue of $9.1 billion, with a loss of 12 cents a share; the Street had expected $9.2 million and a profit of 3 cents. The company did say that adjusted EPS, which excludes special items and non-cash amortization, was a positive 6 cents.

The company lost a net 901,000 wireless customers in the quarter; churn was “just under” two percent, which was down 45 basis points from Q1, but flat from a year earlier. Wireless revenue was down 11 perent year-over-year, and down two percent sequentially. ARPU was steady at $56. Total customers served dropped to 51.9 million, from 54 million a year ago.

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AT&T is admitting that if it discovers users of its wireless broadband 3G service are making use of P2P apps, it will cut them off completely, and claims that it makes this clear in the terms of service. It hasn’t happened yet, but this bit of data will supposedly be used by a dissenting FCC commissioner this week to show that Comcast’s traffic shaping is pretty tame compared to other “rules” out there on network usage (ignoring the very different nature of the networks in question, of course).

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When Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off of the iPhone 18 months ago, the wireless establishment offered a smug response. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a Nokia executive sniffed that Apple’s new gadget merely validated his company’s strategy, and voiced his surprise to journalists that the iPhone didn’t use the latest 3G networks for fast data connections. “Overall, it’s very exciting for us,” he said, implying the mighty Nokia had nothing to worry about.

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If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what’s been happening to text messaging. Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

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Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.

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Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) shares are sharply higher following a bullish presentation by the company yesterday at an Oppenheimer investment conference. The company repeated its previous forecast for the fiscal third quarter ending this month of $210 million in revenue and EPS of 17 cents.

CEO David Aldrich said the company, which makes chips for the wireless handset business, can outgrow the overall wireless industry; he also said the company believes it can expand both gross margins and operating margins. At the gross margin level, the target is 42%, up from 40% in the latest quarter.

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Google’s biggest threat may not be Microsoft or Yahoo. No, one of the most formidable challenges facing Google is likely sitting in your pocket or purse. It’s your cellphone, and it will put added pressure on Google and other Internet companies to revamp the way they handle online marketing.

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If I see the balding guy in the Verizon commercial marching in front of the New Orleans Hard Hat Band one more time, I’m going to pull my FiOS TV cable out of the wall. But when it released financial results for the first quarter Monday, Verizon said this ad and the $99 unlimited talk plan it advertises were working well for the company. On a conference call with investors, the company said 13% of its new customers are signing up for the $99 plan, according to an account by the Associated Press. Previously, only 4% of its customers chose plans with bundles of minutes that cost $99 or more.

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What do Cliff Stearns, John Shimkus and Fred Upton have in common? They’re all members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, and they’ve each publicly accused Google of having “duped” the Federal Communications Commission by “gaming” a recent multibillion-dollar auction of wireless frequencies, shortchanging federal coffers. They also have this in common: Each has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions over their careers from telephone and cable interests locked in a battle with Google over the use of those frequencies.

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There is a shortage of iPhones in Apple’s (AAPL) stores in the United States. And there is a surplus of frenzied speculation about what this means. Many wonder whether Apple is closing out of its existing stock in order to clear the way for new models, possibly with the ability to connect to faster 3G networks.

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Before Google gets too excited about open wireless access, it should look a little more closely at what did in AOL. The analogy is hardly perfect, but the new rules, promoted by Google, that will force Verizon to allow competitors to use its wireless network are in some way similar to those that forced phone companies to let rival Internet providers use their high-speed data services.
As their customers moved to broadband, AOL, EarthLink and the other companies that were leaders in the dial-up Internet business tried to soldier on by arranging to buy high-speed DSL service from telephone companies at wholesale rates to resell under their own names. This strategy completely failed. Today, only five percent of the users of phone company broadband buy their service from anyone other than the phone company, according to David Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime.

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