If you’ve ever had a PC crash, you know how painful it is to lose personal data. Most times, you have only yourself to blame for not backing up your data properly.But what if the entity to blame should know better – for instance, the provider of a cloud computing service? Just how much blame, and recrimination, should there be to go around? more

The WiFi Alliance’s certification program for peer-to-peer device connectivity won’t launch until next summer, but the organization is nearing completion of a new specification to enable this hot spot-free WiFi connectivity. Products that achieve certification based on the new standard will be dubbed WiFi Certified WiFi Direct. more

Nearly a year after announcing the deal, AT&T (NYSE:T) has received US Justice Department clearance to purchase Centennial Communications (NASDAQ:CYCL) in exchange for divesting eight markets in Louisiana and Mississippi, five of which Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) has already agreed to buy. The FCC still has to sign off on the $944 million deal, but AT&T said it expects to close the transaction this quarter, adding about 1 million subscribers to its rolls in the Midwest, Southeast, US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. more

Equipment vendors are beginning to unveil new optical and carrier Ethernet products in advance of next week’s Supercomm trade show. more

If you can’t beat them, buy them. Rather than compete with the spry Starent Networks (NASDAQ:STAR) in the mobile packet core space, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) has decided to acquire them, announcing today Starent has accepted a $3 billion offer to purchase its outstanding shares. more

The Femto Forum said today that it will begin the first interoperability testing for femtocells in March, a critical step in ensuring the miniature base stations become practically interchangeable from carrier to carrier. more

The quickly shifting roles of devices and services has some of the best minds of the tech world struggling to figure out which are the razors and which are the blades of the connected consumer economy.

In an interview this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “The iPhone has proven that you can sell a phone with a subscription. The contract cost is greater than the cost of the phone. So what do you think: Do those prices remain higher from AT&T and those guys? Does the hardware become free?” more

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – There are few among us who haven’t dropped, stomped, sat on or cracked a cell phone (or, if you’re like me, called a plumber to find out your flip-phone was the cause of a clogged toilet). In a lot of cases, that accident has been the phone’s demise. To give Nokia (NYSE:NOK) handsets a better chance at survival, the global handset maker has Research and Development labs where technicians presuppose - and account for - any destructive, accidental and inevitable mistakes consumers make with their cell phones. more

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – An SMS message is the same to a messaging vendor regardless of the protocol, but as 4G networks continue to come online, there will be new issues of support and interoperability that carriers will have to address. Two vendors at CTIA, Sybase 365, the mobile messaging and commerce subsidiary of Sybase Inc. (NYSE: SY), and wireless messaging and device management vendor Interop Technologies are demonstrating that they are ready to take this old standard and migrate it to any next-generation network. more

iPhone customers can now use VoIP services over AT&T’s 3G network–not just over WiFi. That’s the ruling today from AT&T (NYSE:T), which has been dealing with regulatory and cosumer fallout from banning iPhone versions of Skype and other VoIP applications from its high-speed packet access (HSPA) network, even though it has allowed such 3G access on other devices. more