As the wireless industry presses ahead with plans for a next-generation wireless technology, one key player keeps dragging its heels. Indeed, on April 14, several dominant wireless companies agreed to a licensing framework for patents addressing the emerging technology, known as Long Term Evolution [LTE]. The companies, including handset maker Nokia and network equipment maker Ericsson, join major wireless operators including Verizon Wireless and China Mobile as supporters for LTE, a technology widely seen as an on-ramp to truly speedy mobile Internet connections.

If it lives up to its billing, LTE would make today’s cable and DSL modems — as well as the “3G,” or third-generation, mobile networks wireless carriers have spent billions to deploy — seem downright snail-like.

But conspicuously absent from this LTE confab has been Vodafone — the world’s largest wireless service provider, and thus the company that buys the most mobile phones from the likes of Nokia and strings the most territory with network gear from Ericsson and others. “We announced a month ago with Verizon Wireless and China Mobile that we are going to press for development of the LTE standard,” Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin told BusinessWeek in a recent interview. “But we have not said we are definitely going to LTE.”

And yet, Sarin wants to make two points crystal clear: Despite his noncommitment to LTE, Vodafone is not a technological-age laggard, and it is not blindly locked into serving Europe. Rather, the gargantuan wireless company is branching aggressively into emerging markets such as Latin America, India, and Africa. Of Vodafone’s globe-leading 250 million subscribers, 40 million customers are located in these distant markets, and that segment of the customer base is growing by 20 million a year, he notes.

And though Vodafone has been criticized for not being a 3G leader in its native European lands,…

A congressional panel wants to know why a plan aimed at using public airwaves and private money to create a nationwide emergency communications network failed to attract any interest in an otherwise successful spectrum auction.

The House Energy and Commerce telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee on Tuesday was to hear from all five members of the Federal Communications Commission as well as key figures in the behind-the-scenes negotiations that failed to lead to an agreement to construct the wireless broadband network.

The recently completed auction of a portion of the public airwaves, while raising a record $19.1 billion, failed to attract a bidder to build the network.

Disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revealed limitations of the nation’s emergency communications networks, like the inability of police and firefighters to communicate with one another.

Ideally, a new network would help solve the interoperability problem and avail emergency personnel of many of the advances in wireless technology that are available to commercial users.

Among the witnesses scheduled to testify is wireless industry pioneer Morgan O’Brien, a co-founder of Nextel Communications Inc., now chairman of a new company called Cyren Call. O’Brien was the first to aggressively advocate the idea of using publicly owned spectrum to lure private investors to build a national emergency network.

O’Brien’s plan was shot down last year on Capitol Hill over fears it would endanger the success of the spectrum auction. O’Brien is still involved because of an agreement his company signed to act as adviser for the Public Safety Spectrum Trust Corp., a nonprofit run by safety officials that oversees the public portion of the public-private partnership.

The FCC approved the emergency communications plan last summer.

It largely incorporates a proposal developed by Frontline Wireless LLC — a company fronted by a former FCC chairman and high-tech…

Winning the FCC’s spectrum auction for the nationwide C block of 700-MHz spectrum — the 22-MHz band being abandoned by television broadcasters — means Verizon Wireless will deploy its fourth-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology in 2010, CEO Lowell McAdam said Friday in an investor conference call.

The new spectrum, combined with Verizon’s existing network, “provides new flexibility as we execute our high-growth business model,” McAdam added.

“We now have sufficient spectrum to continue growing our business and data revenues well into — and possibly through — the next decade, and this is the very best spectrum with excellent propagation and in-building characteristics,” he said.

‘New Wave’ of Apps and Devices

The combination of “national, contiguous, same-frequency C-block footprint and our transition to LTE” will spur development of a “new wave of consumer electronics and applications using this next-generation technology” — and Verizon will be the “preferred provider” for these developers, he said.

“In all, this spectrum positions us well to preserve our current advantage and reputation as the nation’s most reliable wireless network and the leader in data services. This is a wise investment in future data-growth opportunities,” he said.

Earlier in the week, AT&T — which is also adopting LTE as its fourth-generation technology — said it had spent $6.6 billion on B-block licenses. AT&T says its 4G network will also be running in 2010.

Even though Verizon’s spectrum is almost twice as deep as AT&T’s, 12 MHz is more than adequate to handle LTE. AT&T’s 12-MHz spectrum — plus the 700-MHz spectrum it picked up from Aloha Partners — mean Verizon and AT&T will be duking it out well into the next decade.

Cell Chips Everywhere

With both companies backing LTE and gaining access to the 700-MHz spectrum, “the focus will be on new types of data services,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with…

AT&T and Verizon Wireless will be using their new spectrum licenses to move into next-generation wireless technology, according to recent announcements by both companies. AT&T and Verizon bid about $16 billion for the new licenses in a recent auction by the Federal Communications Commission that many observers described as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity.

4G Services

AT&T said Thursday that its successful bids for the B block will give it the capacity “to meet customer needs as the company moves to higher-speed” fourth generation, or 4G, services.

It added that the new 700-MHz spectrum from the auction, along with other licenses it recently acquired, will cover 100 percent of the top 200 markets in the U.S. and 87 percent of the entire U.S. population. The new licenses, the company said, will allow customers to do more with their wireless devices and will lead to wireless connectivity being embedded in more devices.

The newer technologies will include LTE, or Long Term Evolution, and HSPA+, providing peak speeds of 100 Mbps or more. By the end of this year, AT&T said, it is planning on delivering 3G to about 350 leading U.S. markets.

Verizon Wireless said Friday that its new spectrum licenses will also allow it to roll out a new generation of wireless services. According to news reports, the company said its next-generation network will launch as early as 2010, also using LTE. Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg reportedly described the spectrum acquisition as “nothing short of a transformative experience” for the company.

Verizon said its objectives in the auction had included filling in gaps in its current wireless coverage, such as in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Its newly acquired C-block spectrum has open-access conditions, imposed by the FCC after a lobbying effort by an alliance led by Google. These conditions mean that third-party devices and…

Syrian officials boast a state-of-the art press center with fast Internet access and wireless technology for press covering the upcoming Arab summit. But the country is tightening its own citizens’ use of the Internet — jailing writers and bloggers and blocking sites deemed harmful to state security.

The controls tightened considerably in recent days when authorities began requiring Internet caf owners to keep a detailed log of their customers, apparently to make it easier to track down offenders.

The new directive, conveyed orally by security agents, requires Internet caf owners to take down their clients’ full name, ID or passport number, the number of the computer and the amount of time spent on the computer. The logs are to be submitted to security agents upon request.

“It’s a new form of psychological pressure and part of the state’s systematic intimidation of Internet users,” said Mazen Darwish, a journalist who heads the independent Syrian Media Center.

“It works to a certain extent in the sense that it creates a kind of self-censorship among users,” he told The Associated Press.

Darwish himself has been a target of repression of the media. He was arrested in January as he was reporting on unrest in the town of Adra, near Damascus, after a murder in the area, and he is currently standing trial before a military court for alleged defamation of state institutions. He faces up to one year in jail if convicted, he says.

The new measures imposed on Internet users are just the latest technique employed by authorities to tighten their control of the media. President Bashar Assad, who took over from his late father Hafez Assad in 2000, has somewhat relaxed his father’s iron grip on the country, but he has also cracked down on dissent, jailing writers and pro-democracy activists.

Assad, a British-educated eye doctor, is credited…