Motherboard previously revealed how AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon have sold real-time phone location data to middlemen companies which then provided it to third parties.

The United States is the eighth-most-spammed nation in the world, according to a new report, and saw a 35% increase in robocalls this year.

Kentucky's Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative came out of a local electrification co-op set up during the New Deal, and in 1949 it was expanded into a telephone co-op with more federal infrastructure money. Today, the PRTC has used Obama FCC funding to expand into public broadband delivery, wiring up all of Jackson and Owsley Counties, some of the poorest places in America, using a mule called "Old Bub" to haul fiber through inaccessible mountain passes and other extremely isolated places.

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.