Wireless camps prep fresh 4G battle: The International Telecommunication Union, Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) ‘s recent call for candidates for the next-generation IMT-Advanced mobile broadband technologies has spurred competing standards groups into action. Even though the technical requirements are not yet finalized for IMT-Advanced — that’s ITU-speak for 4G — the WiMax folks at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) and the LTE folks at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are already hard at work on their proposals.

» Can the Clearwire coalition save 4G WiMax?: It has faced criticism as an unreliable and untested technology, and not only from promoters of the rival HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technologies. Earlier this year, Garth Freeman, the CEO of Australian WiMax operator Buzz Broadband, described his experience with the technology as a “disaster” and cited problems such as latency, jitter, and poor indoor service. While WiMax equipment vendor Airspan claimed that Buzz Broadband’s poor WiMax experience was due more to the company cutting corners in its deployment than to the technology itself, Freeman’s anti-WiMax tirade generated unwelcome negative publicity at a time when the technology experienced delays

Why Intel’s betting its chips on 4G: At first blush, it sounds as if Intel’s throwing good money after bad. After all, why pay $1 billion to join a consortium which has “squabble-fest” written all over it? 4G has been a slow train coming and the latest attempt by Sprint and Clearwire to speed the transition could easily fall hostage to all the big egos with seats on the board. Lest we forget, Sprint and Clearwire went their separate ways last November, only months after announcing plans for a Wi-Fi partnership.

Ericsson first off 4G blocks: Sweden-based telecommunications firm Ericsson has unveiled one of the world’s first high-speed 4G mobile devices, working using LTE (Long Term Evolution) connectivity. The prototype device, dubbed ‘Berta’, was unveiled as part of Ericsson’s LTE demonstration at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It can apparently achieve download speeds of up to 300Mbps, though in real-time tests was shown to achieve 25Mbps upload and download speeds.

4G: The Big Issue: As speculation swirls that Comcast and other cable operators might be thinking about a deal with Clearwire and Sprint Nextel (News - Alert) for wholesale access to fourth-generation WiMAX networks, there are two big financial issues, both centering essentially on the novelty of fourth generation networks.

How 4G will affect the rest of us : Sprint Nextel and Clearwire have announced their 4G ambitions. The goal: to build a nationwide 4G broadband wireless network using WiMax. CNET News.com’s Maggie Reardon explains why this is a very big deal, indeed, and what it will mean to customers.

TELENOR ACQUIRES LICENSE FOR 4G SPECTRUM IN SWEDEN: The Swedish Post and Telecommunications Authority today concluded the auction of spectrum in the 2.6 GHz band, regarded as key to the next generation of mobile technology. Telenor Sweden was awarded a license for 2x 20 MHz in the auction, granting Telenor substantial opportunities to provide 4G services and high-quality mobile broadband.

Wireless camps prep fresh 4G battle: The International Telecommunication Union, Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) ‘s recent call for candidates for the next-generation IMT-Advanced mobile broadband technologies has spurred competing standards groups into action. Even though the technical requirements are not yet finalized for IMT-Advanced — that’s ITU-speak for 4G — the WiMax folks at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) and the LTE folks at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are already hard at work on their proposals.

Betting on the 4G patent pool : Patents are a fact of life in the technology sector, but they’re also a major source of fear and loathing. Witness the current dithering over patents for 3G and so-called 4G technology. Much of the dithering has been directed at Qualcomm, which has had numerous high-profile legal clashes with rivals like Broadcom and Nokia over W-CDMA patents, while manufacturers and operators in Korea, Japan, India, China and even the US have expressed annoyance with Qualcomm for years over its exorbitant royalty rates. In the current Qualcomm/Nokia case in the US, Nokia stated in court documents that it has paid Qualcomm $1 billion for access to its full patent portfolio over a 15-year period.

Sprint: 4G & M&A Still Unclear : At last we finally have a clear picture of where Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S - message board) stands with WiMax. (See Sprint, Clearwire Create $14.5B WiMax Giant.) But what the service provider plans to do with its own cellular network and its own M&A strategy going forward remains unclear. The issue at hand is that Sprint now has 50 million subscribers set to potentially migrate to WiMax services. But the company will only have 51 percent ownership over any customer that makes that migration, as opposed to a 100 percent ownership that it would have over a customer on any 4G network it potentially built on its own.

Nortel Publishes LTE Rates: To help accelerate the global adoption of the 4G technology for high-speed, high-bandwidth mobile communications, Nortel* [NYSE/TSX: NT] has published a competitive handset royalty rate of about one percent subject to terms(1) for its portfolio of LTE standards-essential patents. Nortel’s competitive handset royalty rate for patent value is one of the first to be voluntarily published. Nortel is providing this information in order to help service providers and their handset vendors develop business plans for launching LTE, a wireless technology that can support hotly demanded mobile applications like social networking, multi-player gaming, and streaming video.

Wireless camps prep fresh 4G battle: The International Telecommunication Union, Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) ‘s recent call for candidates for the next-generation IMT-Advanced mobile broadband technologies has spurred competing standards groups into action. Even though the technical requirements are not yet finalized for IMT-Advanced — that’s ITU-speak for 4G — the WiMax folks at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) and the LTE folks at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are already hard at work on their proposals. The LTE standard itself is not even complete, but earlier this month the 3GPP started work on the new and improved LTE-Advanced, which will be the standards organization’s technology proposal for IMT-Advanced. The requirements for LTE Advanced are expected to be firmed up at a meeting in Prague at the end of this month.

Betting on the 4G patent pool: Patents are a fact of life in the technology sector, but they’re also a major source of fear and loathing. Witness the current dithering over patents for 3G and so-called 4G technology. Much of the dithering has been directed at Qualcomm, which has had numerous high-profile legal clashes with rivals like Broadcom and Nokia over W-CDMA patents, while manufacturers and operators in Korea, Japan, India, China and even the US have expressed annoyance with Qualcomm for years over its exorbitant royalty rates. In the current Qualcomm/Nokia case in the US, Nokia stated in court documents that it has paid Qualcomm $1 billion for access to its full patent portfolio over a 15-year period.

4G: The Big Issue: As speculation swirls that Comcast and other cable operators might be thinking about a deal with Clearwire and Sprint Nextel for wholesale access to fourth-generation WiMAX networks, there are two big financial issues, both centering essentially on the novelty of fourth generation networks.

4G Backhaul: A Problem for All? : We already know that the challenge of providing back-end capacity for faster base-stations helped delay the launch of Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S - message board)’s Xohm WiMax, so could 4G backhaul be a problem for all carriers moving to faster broadband networks? The issue with 4G backhaul is a simple one: T1-line backhaul, which many carriers — particularly in the U.S. — use extensively, cannot cope with base stations that pump out data at hundreds of megabits a second to provide a few megabits-a-second data downloads to each individual user. Yet faster data downloads are supposed to be what sells so-called 4G services — be they WiMax or Long-Term Evolution — to consumers. Carriers, meanwhile, want 4G to further bump up data revenues, which are supposed to supplant declining voice revenue over time.