iPHONE IS 50% MORE NETWORK EFFICIENT THAN ANDROID SAYS SPRINT

During the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse said the iPhone is more than 50% more efficient on Sprint’s network than Android devices. “iPhone users are expected to use significantly less 3G data than the typical user of a dual-mode 3G/4G device,” Hesse added, noting that his company has found that iPhone applications take better advantage of offloading data onto Wi-Fi networks and that Android apps are “more chatty” with its network. “If Sprint’s claims are true, this could become a new key differentiator in Apple’s relationship with the operators that subsidize its phones versus Apple’s competitors HTC, Samsung [and] Motorola,” BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk explained, noting that Sprint’s report is “short on evidence” and that his firm will continue to test those claims.

VERIZON STARTS "OPTIMIZING" NETWORK FOR DATA HUNGRY USERS

We can't say we weren't warned, since Verizon updated its data policy way back in February, but it's still a punch in the gut to hear its "network optimization" plan went into effect yesterday. A new policy page pointed out by Droid-Life explains how the policy will affect only the "top 5 percent of data users with 3G devices on unlimited data plans" (LTE and tiered data users are in the clear) by managing their speeds when connected to towers it has deemed are congested. Those conditions, termed network intelligence by Verizon Wireless, are what it feels separates this scheme from mere data throttling since it will only affect a few users (those consuming 2GB or more of data per month) at certain times and places, but it's hard to see it any other way. If you're one of those affected, expect a message on your bill or My Verizon account, although you may go into and out of the affected group depending on your usage.

LEAKED: AT&T LETTER DAMAGES AT&T CASE FOR T-MOBILE ACQUISITION

Yesterday a partially-redacted document briefly appeared on the FCC website --accidentally posted by a law firm working for AT&T on the $39 billion T-Mobile deal (somewhere there's a paralegal looking for work today). While AT&T engaged in damage control telling reporters that the document contained no new information a careful review of the doc shows that's simply not true. Data in the letter undermines AT&T's primary justification for the massive deal, while highlighting how AT&T is willing to pay a huge premium simply to reduce competition and keep T-Mobile out of Sprint's hands.

While AT&T is busy telling regulators the deal will increase network investment by $8 billion, out of the other side of their mouth AT&T has been telling investors the deal will reduce investment by $10 billion over 6 years. Based on historical averages T-Mobile would have invested $18 billion during that time frame, which means an overall reduction in investment.

For the first time the letter pegs the cost of bringing AT&T's LTE coverage from 80% to 97% at $3.8 billion -- quite a cost difference from the $39 billion price tag on the T-Mobile deal. The push for 97% coverage apparently came from AT&T marketing, who was well aware that leaving LTE investment at 80% would leave them at a competitive disadvantage to Verizon. Marketing likely didn't want a repeat of the Luke Wilson map fiasco of a few years back, when Verizon made AT&T look foolish for poor 3G coverage.

The letter also notes that AT&T's supposed decision to "not" build out LTE to 97% was cemented during the first week of January, yet public documents (pdf) indicate that at the same time AT&T was already considering buying T-Mobile, having proposed the deal to Deutsche Telekom on January 15. In the letter, AT&T tries to make it seem like the decision to hold off on that 17% LTE expansion was based on costs. Yet the fact the company was willing to shell out $39 billion one week later, combined with AT&T's track record with these kinds of tactics, suggests AT&T executives knew that 80-97% expansion promise would be a useful carrot on a stick for politicians.

The reality appears to be that AT&T is giving Deutsche Telekom $39 billion primarily to reduce market competition. That price tag eliminates T-Mobile entirely -- and makes Sprint (and by proxy new LTE partner LightSquared and current partner Clearwire) more susceptible to failure in the face of 80% AT&T/Verizon market domination.

Regardless of the motivation behind rejecting 97% LTE deployment, the letter proves AT&T's claim they need T-Mobile to improve LTE coverage from 80-97% simply isn't true. That's a huge problem for AT&T, since nearly every politician and non-profit that has voiced support for the merger did so based largely on this buildout promise. It's also a problem when it comes to the DOJ review, since proof that AT&T could complete their LTE build for far less than the cost of this deal means the deal doesn't meet the DOJ's standard for merger-specific benefits. [Broadband Reports]

DOWNSIDE TO 4G...NO ROAMING

Several companies are hopping on the LTE bandwagon, but it's turning out to be more isolating an experience than we hoped. According to PCMag, a Verizon spokesperson confirmed that its fourth-generation broadband network won't be compatible with other carriers in the US. As it turns out, Big Red and AT&T each own a separate block of 700MHz spectrum with only a fraction of overlap, leaving little room for phones on both networks to mingle with one another. There's not much hope for roaming on MetroPCS or LightSquared, either, as their waves of LTE run at 1700MHz and 1500MHz, respectively. This smattering of frequencies means it'll be near impossible to get roam on other companies' 4G networks nationally.

What's worse, the ITU has approved twelve bands for LTE use around the world, so don't count on a wide selection of global devices -- and you thought sorting through international 3G was bad, didn't you? We're still a long way from learning our LTE roaming fate, but it appears the largest carrier in the US won't make the journey any easier on us.

T-MOBILE INCREASES 4G HSPA+ SPEED IN 56 MARKETS

T-Mobile on Wednesday announced that it has doubled the theoretical download speed ceiling on its 4G HSPA+ network in 56 new markets. “America’s Largest 4G Network is now faster than ever and continues to deliver a fast and reliable broadband experience in more places than any other carrier,” said T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray in a statement. “Video streaming on T-Mobile’s network has more than tripled over the last year, and consumer demand for access to rich mobile content from anywhere continues to grow. T-Mobile is now supplying more than 170 million Americans with lightning-fast HSPA+ 42 speeds to feed that explosive demand.” For the time being, T-Mobile offers just one device capable of making full use of its new HSPA+ 42 service: the T-Mobile Rocket 3.0 laptop stick. The carrier has confirmed that it will launch its first HSPA+ 42-capable smartphone later this year, but it has provided no additional details or timeline.

GOVERNMENT REPORT FINDS LIGHTSQUARED LTE INTERFERS WITH GPS

Following up on reports and concerns about LightSquared's possible interference, a government study has found that the outfit's proposed broadband network does indeed impede GPS signals. According to the National PNT Engineering Forum, the federal advisory group that conducted the study, LiqhtSquared's network disrupted GPS signals for all of the devices tested in the area. The report lists OnStar, Garmin, John Deere, emergency services, the FAA, and NASA among those affected by interference. Both LightSquared and the GPS industry are scheduled to present their own tests for the FCC's consideration next week. The news isn't exactly shocking, but it certainly doesn't bode well for the ambitious LTE network.

LIGHTSQUARED SPRINT READY TO SIGN $20 BILLION DEAL

According to Bloomberg, LightSquared, the USD7 billion Long Term Evolution (LTE) open-access mobile network that will utilise satellite spectrum acquired by New York investment firm Harbinger Capital, is close to striking a USD20 billion deal with Sprint Nextel to share network construction costs.

The report, which cites two people familiar with the talks, indicates that the two operators are hoping to finalise terms on a 15 year contract which will allow LightSquared to roll out its network faster than expected. According to Bloomberg’s sources, who declined to be named, if the deal goes through, Sprint would initially receive as much as USD2 billion annually from LightSquared, to help pay for network equipment and construction costs. Subsequent payments would vary annually, based on the number of users on the LightSquared network and usage patterns. However, conflicting reports from Reuters indicate that the agreement with Sprint is more likely to cover an eight-year time-frame, rather than the 15 year period stated elsewhere.

The news comes just days after LightSquared reportedly held talks with AT&T regarding a deal to buy additional network capacity from the mobile carrier. Two people with knowledge of the discussions stressed that the initiative was still at a preliminary stage and may not result in a deal.

VERIZON'S 4G LTE NETWORK BACK UP NATIONWIDE

Verizon Wireless announed late Thursday that their 4G LTE network is back up and running. The network went down earlier in the week, but Verizon says they determined the cause of the issue late yesterday afternoon, and posted an update to their Twitter account to let the public know they’re working with their vendors to resolve it. Now, it looks like everything is back to normal.

Verizon Wireless hasn’t fessed up to exactly what caused the issue in the first place, or what they’re going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Even so, no carrier with as much riding on their network as much as Verizon Wireless has riding on its LTE network would move forward without examining the root cause of the outage and taking whatever corrective action is necessary.

The company did say that while Thunderbolt owners should be relieved, 4G modem owners may still have some issues when moving between 3G and 4G modes. They did note that any issues 4G modem owners had would continue to improve as they continue to work on the network, but stopped short of explaining why. In the meantime, 4G owners can be happy that they have their super-fast network back.

THREE DAY PLAYSTATION NETWORK OUTAGE CAUSED BY "EXTERNAL INTRUSION"

It started on a quiet Wednesday night, with PlayStation gamers finding their Network unresponsive to their login attempts, and now continues well into its third day. Sony has now finally shed some light on the problems it's been having with PSN and, to nobody's surprise, the culprit for its troubles has been identified as "an external intrusion." The current downtime for PSN is the second of its kind this month, with the Anonymous group of online crusaders claiming responsibility for the first. Sony now intends to keep both PSN and its Qriocity music streaming service offline until it can pinpoint the vulnerability that has been exploited and put a stop to it.

FIREFLY RETURNS TO TV ON SCIENCE NETWORK

The word around the ‘verse is that The Science Channel has acquired the rights for the 14 episode series starring Nathan Fillion as Macom Reynolds, who is a captain of a small Firefly class spaceship who struggles to make ends meet. With a crew comprising of an ace pilot, a tough and lovely second-in-command, a mercenary with unique hat tastes, a beautiful companion with an extensive clientele list, a charming engineer, a secretive preacher, and a handy doctor, along with his strange behaving sister, Mal takes Serenity (the name of the ship) out on jobs, mostly illegal to earn some coin. You understand.

Firefly will debut on the The Science Channel beginning on March 6th at 8PM. Original episodes will play every Sunday after that in the intended order set by Joss Whedon.

VERIZON NETWORK WITHSTANDING iPHONE ONSLAUGHT SO FAR

According to the recent findings of Web app performance watcher Compuware Gomez, the addition of the iPhone 4 to Verizon Wireless’ network has had no noticeable affect on network performance. This could mean sales of the highly anticipated Apple smartphone aren’t quite as impressive as many thought they would be. It could also mean that Verizon’s network is so beastly that it’s gobbling up all that new traffic and laughing at the competition — namely AT&T, whose network has been the target of countless iPhone-related complaints over the past few years. Finally, it could mean that Apple’s move to dump Infineon’s chipset and baseband in favor of a Qualcomm offering was a wise, albeit late decision. Granted, Compuware Gomez is only using four days worth of data in its assessment, so it could mean none of these things. For the time being, however, Verizon Wireless subscribers can rest assured that their network is handling the added stress of Apple’s iPhone 4 in stride.

VERIZON WIRELESS LAUNCHES NEW THROTTLING SYSTEM

Verizon Wireless is launching a new network management and throttling system today. The company says that these practices include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing video content "more appropriately" for smartphones. But according to the memo, the new system (which not coincidentally arrives with Verizon's launch of the iPhone) also involves throttling data throughput using a new "proactive management" system that Verizon claims will only impact the top 5% of wireless broadband users:

Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.

Unfortunately, Verizon doesn't specify what kind of consumption you need to be guilty of to find your connection throttled. [BGR]

NETFLIX RELEASES ISP STREAMING DATA

Netflix has released data on how the top networks rank for streaming Netflix content. Coming out on top is Charter and Clearwire bringing up the rear.

To get a handle on which broadband service providers offered the best service to Netflix's streaming-video customers, the company compiled data from October 2010 to January 15, 2011. Netflix tracked the performance of customers streaming high-definition video over their broadband connections. A time-weighted bit rate metric was used to represent the effective data throughput subscribers received over many of the top ISPs.

In its study, Netflix averaged the performance of these network providers throughout their footprints. This means that Verizon's results include data about performance on its DSL network, as well as its faster Fios, fiber-to-the-home network. And AT&T's results include DSL, as well as its fiber-to-the-neighborhood U-verse service.

Rank of networks:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

T-MOBILE YEARS AWAY FROM LTE

T-Mobile is sticking with HSPA+ for the long haul, Bloombergreports — or at least for another few years. While major competitors build out LTE and WiMAX 4G networks, T-Mobile will continue to focus on its HSPA+ 4G network. T-Mobile has already stated that it intends to double the theoretical limit on the download side of its HSPA+ network from 21Mbps to 42Mbps in 2011. That speed increase and possible subsequent improvements to the carrier’s HSPA+ gear will have to suffice for “a few years” according to T-Mobile executives.

T-Mobile’s data network does not yet have to deal with the congestion seen on other networks, so high-speed HSPA+ is more than sufficient for the carrier at the moment. Other more congested networks have a more urgent need to deploy LTE and WiMAX, which can accommodate a greater number of simultaneous data connections with less of an impact on performance.

US CYBER COMMAND ACHIEVES FULL OPERATIONAL STATUS

The US Cyber Command has achieved "full operational capabilities". This means they have all the equipment and personnel to carry out their missions and know how to do it. "I am confident in the great service members and civilians we have here at U.S. Cyber Command. Cyberspace is essential to our way of life and U.S. Cyber Command synchronizes our efforts in the defense of DoD networks. We also work closely with our interagency partners to assist them in accomplishing their critical missions," said Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

The department will continue to grow the capacity and capability essential to operate and defend our networks effectively. U.S. Cyber Command is a sub-unified command under the U.S. Strategic Command. It reached its "initial operational capability" on May 21, 2010. [Engadget]

"GOOGLE ME" SOCIAL NET PLANNED

Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed at Tuesday's Google Zeitgeist their plan for "Google Me".  Google Me is the internal name for an initiative to bring social networking functions to all of Google's services like YouTube and Gmail.

Some of the planned features are alerts on YouTube when friends view their videos, playing social networking games and accessing data from places like Twitter and Flickr. [Ars Technica]

WEBSITE FOR "THE SOCIAL NETWORK" GOES LIVE

The offiicial website for the movie "The Social Network" has launched.  The movie hits theaters October 1st.

"The Social Network" takes a look at the youngest billionaire in history, Jeff Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and the personal and legal complications his success has brought him.  It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Brenda Song, Max Minghella and Justin Timberlake.