The four major US wireless carriers are facing proposed class-action lawsuits accusing them of violating federal law by selling their customers' real-time location data to third parties. The complaints seeking class action status and financial damages were filed last week against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint in US District Court for the District of Maryland.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has rejected a request to have the FCC investigate Frontier Communications' business practices in Minnesota, despite evidence that the company has failed to properly maintain its telecom network.

SpaceX has received Federal Communications Commission approval to halve the orbital altitude of more than 1,500 planned broadband satellites in order to lower the risk of space debris and improve latency. SpaceX's satellite project, named Starlink, aims to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband around the world. In a statement on the new FCC approval, SpaceX said that "Starlink production is well underway, and the first group of satellites have already arrived at the launch site for processing."

More than 106,000 rural homes and small businesses in 43 US states will get access to 25Mbps broadband at some point in the next decade thanks to a Federal Communications Commission policy change. The FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF), which distributes money to ISPs in exchange for new broadband deployments in underserved areas, had been requiring speeds of just 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream over the past few years. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a vote in December 2018 to raise the standard for new CAF projects to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

Remember in February when the Federal Communications Commission essentially said that broadband deployment in the US is going great despite 20 million homes lacking access to high-speed connections? And then a month later, Microsoft basically called bullshit? Well, the FCC has finally admitted the report "drastically overstated" actual broadband deployment, but still insists everything is just fine.

But some people don’t even pay for this data at all. Instead, bounty hunters and people with histories of domestic violence have managed to trick telecommunications companies into providing real-time location data by simply impersonating US officials over the phone and email, according to court records and multiple sources familiar with the technique.

Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed breaking up tech giants Facebook, Google, and Amazon on Friday—but big telecom is in dire need of the same treatment. On Friday, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed breaking up Google, Amazon, and Facebook in a bid to crack down on anti-competitive tech giants. The proposal, which suggests ramping up antitrust enforcement and unwinding the sector’s most problematic mergers, is poised to be a cornerstone of Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign.

With the ink barely dry on AT&T’s $86 billion merger with Time Warner, the company keeps imposing price hikes on the company’s streaming and satellite TV subscribers. Price hikes AT&T executives repeatedly insisted wouldn’t happen. Cordcutter News was the first to report this week that AT&T will be scrapping its existing $40 per month DirecTV Now streaming video plan, replacing it with two new, more expensive options: a $50 per month and a $70 per month plan. The price increase comes on the heels of another $5 hike imposed on the streaming platform less than a year ago.

Can we fix this now?

The fight against robocalls can even bring telecom rivals together.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would be conducting an investigation into the privacy practices of several internet service providers. The inquiry comes only a month after the FTC formed its Technology Task Force to look into tech-related…

America’s telecommunications regulators have levied hefty financial penalties against illegal robocallers and demanded that bad actors repay millions to their victims. But years later, little money has been collected.

Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy," and every bogus sweepstakes offer imaginable. That's despite promises from the telecom industry and the US government that solutions would be coming. Much like the firehose of spam that made email almost unusable in the late 1990s, robocalls have made people in the US wary of picking up their cell phones and landlines.

For years, the key rationale given by broadband providers for implementing data caps was that it was the only way they could deal with "congestion." Of course, for years, independent researchers showed that this was bogus, and there was no data crunch coming. If you actually caught a technologist from a broadband provider, rather than a business person or lobbyist, they'd quietly admit that there was no congestion problem.

The nature of the telecommunications industry is obviously changing, and it's perhaps best illustrated with a look at these statistics that show the steep decline of the home landline. With a smartphone in your pocket that replaces a landline's capabilities and then some, it's no surprise to see that fewer and fewer people feel the need to hang on to an old-fashioned wire to ferry their communications back and forth.

Never before had an American telephone company employed this signal, says Roger Conklin, a telephone collector and historian. Until then, the leading telephone provider, the Bell System, relied on its corps of “hello girls” to connect lines at central switchboards so no dial tone was necessary.

Somali rebel group (and US-designated terrorist organization) Al Shabaab has reportedly banned the use of the Internet through mobile handsets and fiber optic cables throughout Somalia, giving telecommunications companies 15 days to comply with the order.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza started off with a big announcement from AT&T: Customers of their wireless service can get around onerous caps on data usage if the company supplying, say, video, pays extra to AT&T for the privilege.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is nothing new, of course, but so far it's been regarded merely as an add-on to America's regular, analog-based copper and cellular voice networks - networks that are currently maintained as a matter of legal requirement. The FCC isn't necessarily such a stickler for tradition, however, as it is now encouraging phone networks to explore what would happen if VoIP replaced everything else.

Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband services to residents and would perhaps even outlaw public-private partnerships like the one that brought Google Fiber to Kansas City.

A scam that repeats itself in modified forms every few years is once again spreading throughout the United Sates. Don’t be a victim! Criminals target people simply by calling them. Intended victims receive a call on their phones from area code 473 which rings once and then disconnects, thereby arousing the call-recipient’s natural curiosity – “who just called me and from where?”

Robbo sez, "Dave Raphael of Dave's Blog has an interesting post about a conversation he recently had with Verizon support and discovered some uncomfortable - yet wholly unsurprising - truths about how Verizon is selectively limiting bandwidth to AWS services and adversely affecting the quality of Netflix. The open admission of this by Verizon support was unexpected - but the fact it is happening should be of no surprise to anyone but the ignorant and naive."

Move over, Republic Wireless: there's a new super-cheap cell phone carrier in town, although it has a huge catch. UppWireless, launching today in the U.S., offers 1GB of data plus unlimited calls and texts for only $15/month - but all of those calls and texts have to go through voice-over-IP apps.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced Wednesday that there would be new rules written to guarantee net neutrality. It’s a good thing any website can reach any person unimpeded by tolls, and it’s good that Wheeler still wants to make this possible. The Internet service providers will first work to dilute the new rules, of course, and then sue to overturn them.

A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.

A rash of consumer-friendliness has broken out across the mobile data industry. Over the last year, the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — have cut prices and offered greater flexibility in how they sell their voice, text and broadband services. The industry could be on the verge of an all-out price war. Who is responsible for this blessed state of affairs?

Deep in the jungles of West Papua’s central highlands, there is a village with its own mobile telecommunications network. That network runs in a box latched to the top of a tree, providing the only reliable cell coverage anywhere within a four-hour drive.

Ukrtelecom announced today that the company's offices in Crimea have been seized in several locations, cutting phone and Internet service between the Crimean peninsula and the rest of Ukraine. However, service was restored after a few hours, according to people in Crimea.

According to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.

Verizon has been the one carrier that’s most resisted the T-Mobile-led wireless pricing wars of the past few months and now we can see why. RootMetrics has posted the results of its massive study of wireless voice, SMS and data quality and has found that Verizon is besting its rivals for overall quality in 35 of 50 states and its tied for first place with AT&T in 10 more.

In today's world, there's one area of technology that can almost never be fast enough: the wireless networks that power our mobile devices. Despite decades of advancements, we still lose signal when walking around in a big city like New York or San Francisco.

Roaming charges for using a mobile phone abroad will be abolished from December 2015 in proposals expected to be voted through the European parliament on Tuesday, but operators have warned that bills could rise domestically to pay for the change.

The setting was ornate, the subject esoteric, but the implications huge. The crowd that filed last month into the wood-paneled room 226 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building included lawmakers, lobbyists, company executives, and a few mystery guests — a roster that reflected the enormity of the issue at hand: nothing less than control of the growing wireless market and the hundreds of billions of dollars that go with it.

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.

Cellphones don't work like landlines; when you call them, the ringing happens on the network server, not on the other phone.