In typical Washington fashion, yesterday two distinguished senators – John McCain and Charles Schumer publically urged federal regulators to consider the national security implications in weighing Japanese carrier SoftBank's bid to purchase a stake in tier-1 telco Sprint Nextel. In letters to federal agencies, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., pointed to SoftBank's ties with the Chinese, while Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., referred to Sprint's "strategic assets." What Senator Schumer failed to... [More]

  Bamboo Mobile, a Compass Intelligence practice, has just launched some exciting new research regarding the top trade-in and buy back programs for wireless devices.  Kate Pearce heads up this research and she has some great things to say about this market. “New programs have really brought much-needed attention to this issue.  In 2012, all of the major network operators had in-store trade-in programs; online options continued to grow and so did the availability of automated... [More]

This morning, Dish confirmed it had made an unsolicited offer for Sprint. The offer is a 13 percent premium to the current Softbank offer that Sprint management has accepted. The real question here seems to be “is 13 percent enough to derail the current momentum of the Softbank offer, and which company would be stronger?” Sprint’s biggest challenge right now is the speed with which it moves. It has been historically slow and plodding when making big decisions that impact the fu... [More]

Just about everyone east of Lake Tahoe has felt at one time or another that California legislators and judiciary are stupid but this tops it off. And in what appears to be the most idiotic decision in history, drivers in California can now be pulled over using their GPS while . . . driving. In perhaps the most far reaching distracted driving law anywhere, an appellate court in California has found that GPS applications on handsets will cause a distraction and not actually assist drivers in dete... [More]

On Wednesday, February 20th, AT&T announced the launch of its AT&T Partner Exchange. This new reseller program is unique in two ways. First, this is the first time AT&T is opening up its APIs (focused on core services and their network) to solution providers or resellers. This reseller program is also unique in that it all came about and was developed in the Plano, TX AT&T Foundry and I believe they started this around November, so 3 or 4 months and out the door. [More]