Telephony Online

In a sad turn of events at the beginning of the conference, CTIA vice president of wireless Internet development Mark Desautels died of an apparent heart attack on Monday afternoon, CTIA officials confirmed today. Desautels was 56. more

Stepping in where Nokia left off, Samsung today announced its first WiMAX gadget for the Clearwire network, an Internet tablet with a touch-screen and slide-out keyboard remarkably similar in appearance to the N810 WiMAX tablet Nokia discontinued last year. The device will be the first standalone WiMAX handheld Clearwire offers on its still small 4G network, giving its customers another option for raw home and mobile broadband access. more

Skype made its official debut on the iPhone today and announced plans to make its way to Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones in May, bringing the total number of operating systems it has a presence on to six. In addition to Windows Mobile, Java, Symbian and Android, AT&T’s handset and BlackBerry’s carrier partners will be the latest in Skype’s mobile attack. more

Ericsson has added a new trick to its growing 3G goodie bag, announcing today it will has added multiple antenna technologies to its futuristic high-speed packet access (HSPA) demo at CTIA Wireless. Coupled with Ericsson’s multi-carrier technology—which stacks 3G channels on top of one another—Ericsson claimed the base station achieves peak speeds of 56 Mb/s, bandwidth it claims is a record for a 3G network. Probably also worth noting is that capacity is on par with the 50 Mb/s to 60 Mb/s Verizon Wireless and other operators are seeing in their 4G long-term evolution (LTE) trials. more

When it comes to mobile, MTV Networks is focusing its energy on application stores and the mobile Web – depending on the handset, according to Greg Clayman, executive vice president of digital distribution at MTV Networks, in his Keynote presentation at Billboard’s Mobile Entertainment Live CTIA pre-conference. Until the iPhone came along, he said the network has found working in app stores to be a difficult, expensive process compared to building sites for the mobile Web. more

The mobile channel presents the best opportunity for advertising – more targeted and effective than the PC or TV, but it is still largely uncharted territory, according to a panel today at the Mobile Entertainment Live pre-CTIA conference. The panel, moderated by Louis Gump, chairman emeritus of the Mobile Marketing Association and vice president of mobile at the Weather Channel, sought to answer three questions around mobile advertising: more

Replicating the multi-radio 3G-4G platforms being proffered to UMTS operators, Alcatel-Lucent today announced the world’s first CDMA-long-term evolution (LTE) software-upgradable base station, which the vendor said can run both radio technologies simultaneously. Alcatel-Lucent is the world’s largest CDMA networks vendor and is clearly positioning its Converged RAN platform at its installed base of CDMA operators, hoping to keep them Alcatel-Lucent customers. more

Genband today unveiled the mother of all session border gateways, the 14-slot S9, which supports signaling bandwidth up to 12 Gb/s, media bandwidth up to 24 Gb/s and can maintain 150,000 concurrent sessions and 900 calls per second. Genband will sell its new creation to both wireline and wireless carriers, though at CTIA Wireless its primary focus will be at operators looking a future femtocell and future 4G deployments, where the extra capacity should come in handy. more

AT&T today extended its relationship with Microsoft to use its PlayReady content access and protection technology to bring shared content and converged entertainment experiences across AT&T’s three screens of TV, broadband and wireless services.

Microsoft will add support for PlayReady into its Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV software platform, so that any PlayReady-based content is viewable through AT&T U-Verse IPTV set-top boxes. Microsoft said the goal is to provide integrated entertainment across multiple screens and introduce a range of new services and content, which has been a long-shared goal of AT&T. more

Mobile application testing and development company DeviceAnywhere today introduced its new self-certification technology called Proof Center designed to reduce the time and expense of certifying mobile apps and content. According to the company, certification and testing remain the greatest barriers to realizing revenues quickly from mobile app development, especially as more app stores are launched and open mobile development gains steam. more