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NEW YORK (AP) — A high-drama telecom deal is heading to court. T-Mobile, in its attempt to buy Sprint for $26.5 billion, has already notched approvals from key federal regulators. Now it must convince a federal judge that the 14 state attorneys general suing to stop the deal are wrong. A trial starts Monday in U.S. District Court in New York and is expected to last several weeks. If T-Mobile prevails, the number of major U.S. wireless companies would shrink to three from four. A combined T-Mobile-Sprint would become a fiercer competitor to larger Verizon and AT&T . But the...

Stardate 20021005.2128 (On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe. And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude. The...

Inside Iraqi Corruption Charles R. Smith Tuesday, March 29, 2005 John A. Shaw is a curious example of Washington politics gone mad. Shaw is a veteran government employee who served inside the White House under Presidents Ford, Nixon and Reagan and was an associate deputy secretary in the Department of Commerce. In 2001, Shaw was appointed by Bush Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to head the newly formed Office of International Technology Security. In this post, Shaw began the difficult task of reforming government controls over the export of sensitive technology to foreign countries. In 2003, Shaw began investigating allegations of...

| 1,755 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment Apple (AAPL) has increased its global shipment goals for the iPhone for the calendar first quarter to 20-21 million units from 19 million units, according to DigiTimes, which citing “sources with Taiwan-based component suppliers.” The company plans to ship 14-15 million of the current version of the phone, with a target of 5-6 million units of the yet-to-be-announced CDMA version of the iPhone that is widely expected to be offered on Verizon Wireless and possibly other carriers early in 2011. The story said December quarter shipments were about 15.5 million units,...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 -- A new technique sends secret messages under other people's noses so cleverly that it would impress James Bond--yet the procedure is so firmly rooted in the real world that it can be instantly used with existing equipment and infrastructure. At this week's annual meeting of the Optical Society of America in Rochester, N.Y., Bernard Wu and Evgenii Narimanov of Princeton University will present a method for transmitting secret messages over existing public fiber-optic networks, such as those operated by Internet service providers. This technique could immediately allow inexpensive, widespread, and secure transmission of confidential and sensitive...

Newly released documents from the Bush administration show that a former member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle has resurfaced inside the new Iraqi government, bringing charges of corruption, bribery and bid-rigging. As a result, millions of U.S. aid dollars and billions in Iraqi government funds have disappeared in an ongoing scandal that is poised to engulf Baghdad and Washington. Worse still, a leading candidate for the top elected post in Iraq has also been implicated in the report as having taken "payoffs" in order to rig a major government cell phone contract. According to a May 2004 U.S. Defense Department...

               February 18, 2004 Baghdad's GSM network launched   France's Alcatel and Orascom Telecom (OTH) have launched the first commercial GSM network in the Central region of Iraq including Baghdad, according to an OTH news release. The contract is part of the Global Frame Agreement signed between OTH and Alcatel, further enhancing their ongoing relationship in the Middle East and Africa. In the frame of the contract signed in September, Alcatel is one of the major suppliers of this new network. The first phase of the network installation started in October. OTH is hoping to reach...