AMD Buys Mobile Patents

China’s Lenovo is acquiring patents related to 3G and 4G technologies from U.S.-based Unwired Planet for $100 million, as the company sets about expanding with its proposed Motorola Mobility acquisition.

The 21 patent families that Lenovo is purchasing from Unwired Planet will help the Chinese company grow its smartphone and mobile business in new markets, it said Thursday.

In addition, Unwired Planet is licensing its patent portfolio to Lenovo for an unspecified number of years. The Nevada-based company develops mobile technologies in use by carriers including AT&T and Sprint. After its deal with Lenovo closes, Unwired Planet said it will have about 2,500 issued and pending international patents in its portfolio.

Although Lenovo is best known as a PC maker, the company is aiming to becoming a major vendor of mobile phones. Already, in its home market of China, Lenovo ranks as one of the biggest smartphone vendors, and has dozens of different models on the local market.

Lenovo’s mobile phone business is set to grow even larger. In January, the company announced it planned to buy Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.9 billion.

With the proposed acquisition, Lenovo’s handset business will get a foothold in the North American market. The company plans to keep the Motorola business intact, and even use the business to sell phones in its home market of China.

The Motorola deal will also help Lenovo shield itself from patent-related lawsuits that have been used to try to stymie the businesses of other handset makers. By buying Motorola, Lenovo will take ownership of more than 2,000 patent assets and also gain access to Google’s own patent portfolio.

Lenovo’s deal with Unwired Planet is expected to close in 30 days.

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T Mobile Sees Growth

T-Mobile US has reported a fourth-quarter boost in customer growth and offered to pay customers to ditch rival service providers, escalating already intense competition in the U.S. wireless market.

The company, the No. 4 U.S. mobile operator, promised payments of up to $350 per line to consumers who break their contract with any of its bigger rivals and switch to T-Mobile.

The offer came just days after AT&T Inc promised a $200 credit to T-Mobile customers who switch. While AT&T also offered up to $250 for switching customers who trade in their phone, T-Mobile said it would pay up to $300 for trade-ins.

The companies have been targeting each other because they use the same network technology, making it easy for consumers to bring their phone when they switch, but some on Wall Street are concerned they will cause an industry-wide price war.

T-Mobile said it hoped that whole families as well as individuals would switch to its service in response to the new cash offer, which is aimed at covering early contract termination fees typically charged by wireless operators.

John Legere, the outspoken chief executive of T-Mobile, said he hoped the offer would end the “industry scam” of family plans, which tie entire families into long-term contracts.

Legere joked that AT&T’s recent offer would actually play to T-Mobile’s advantage because it would allow AT&T customers to try a different service with less financial risk than before.

“If it doesn’t work they’ll pay you to come back,” Legere said in announcing the offer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

T-Mobile, which is 67 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom, managed to turn the corner on four years of customers losses in 2013 by criticizing its rivals and promoting its service plans as being more flexible and consumer friendly.

It said it added 1.645 million net customers in the fourth quarter, up from 1.023 million in the quarter before, marking its third quarter of customer growth for 2013.

The fourth-quarter additions included 869,000 valuable post-paid customers, which was up 13 percent from the third quarter, according to the company.

It said customer defections, known in the industry as churn, stayed at third-quarter levels of 1.7 percent and compared with 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

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Is Verizon Interested In Clearwire?

Verizon Wireless reportedly has offered $1 billion to $1.5 billion to acquire some of Clearwire’s spectrum leases, possibly complicating Sprint Nextel’s attempt to buy out the company in conjunction with its acquisition by Softbank.

Clearwire is struggling financially but owns broad swaths of spectrum, the lifeblood of wireless networks. The April 8 bid from “Party J,” which Clearwire disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, is the latest in a series of offers for its spectrum licenses. Unnamed people familiar with the matter identified “Party J” as Verizon Wireless, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Clearwire is a key part of a complicated set of possible transactions that could make a much stronger competitor out of Sprint, the country’s third-largest mobile operator. Sprint already owns roughly half of Clearwire and is bidding about $2.2 billion to buy the rest of its stock. That deal depends on Softbank’s planned $20.1 billion offer for 70% of Sprint, which is still undergoing regulatory review.

Clearwire holds 150MHz of spectrum or more in most major markets of the U.S. Verizon would buy only a portion of that spectrum. “Party J offered to acquire Clearwire spectrum leases generally located in large markets,” Clearwire said in the Friday filing, a proxy statement to shareholders on the Sprint buyout bid. The proposed gross price of $1 billion to $1.5 billion would be reduced by what Clearwire pays for the leases, which could be substantial, according to Clearwire’s filing. The company said it would discuss the offer with “Party J” and Sprint.

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Is Google Going Wireless?

They already sells phones and tablets, provides a wealth of online services and has been laying high-speed fiber to people’s homes. Now Google is apparently  weighing the possibility of a wireless network service as well.

Google has been in talks with satellite TV provider Dish Network over a possible partnership to build out a wireless service that would rival those from carriers such as AT&T and Sprint, the Wall Street Journal reported late last week.

The talks are at an early stage and could amount to nothing, and Google is just one of many companies Dish is talking to, according to the Journal, which cited anonymous sources. But it raises the prospect that Google might expand its business in a new direction.

Dish has been buying spectrum that could support a wireless service, although it still needs regulatory approval to set one up. In an interview with the Journal Thursday, CEO Charlie Ergen said the partners Dish is talking to include companies that don’t currently have a wireless business.

Google declined to comment on the report, the newspaper said.

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Sprint To Offer Ultrabooks

Sprint has become the first U.S. mobile operator to offer an ultrabook, which is being sold with a 3G/4G mobile hotspot device at no added cost.

Sprint and Lenovo announced the 13.3-in. IdeaPad U310 ultrabook with a hotspot device for $799.99, subject to a two-year Sprint mobile broadband service agreement, the companies said. Three months of broadband service will be available for free.

The hotspot is either a MiFi 3G/4G mobile hotspot by Novatel Wireless or the Overdrive Pro 3G/4G mobile hotspot by Sierra Wireless. Data plans for the hotspot start at $35 a month for 3GB, or $50 for 6GB.

Sprint said the offer is focused on small business users and students. It will be available through Sprint telesales at 800-Sprint1, Sprint business sales and business partners and on the Sprint ultrabook Web site.

The IdeaPad U310 features Lenovo RapidBoot, allowing it to resume from hibernate status in less than seven seconds, and BootShield for fast booting even with multiple apps installed.

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Sprint Will Support Mozilla’s Mobile OS

A new operating system for mobile phones, similar to the Mozilla Firefox internet browser has got the backing of several major telecom companies, turning up the heat on Google and Apple in the smartphone market.

Mozilla said on Monday that mobile network operators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Smart, Telecom Italia, Telenor and Etisalat are backing the Firefox platform.

The non-profit organization which evolved from Netscape after the internet browser wars 14 years ago, said phone makers ZTE and TCL Communication Technology will roll out the first Firefox OS phones using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors in early 2013.

Mozilla, which fosters the collective development of open-source Web applications, currently generates most of its income from a contract which makes Google the default search provider for Firefox users.

Broad support from telecom companies and handset makers is crucial for any new smartphone platform to take off in a market increasingly dominated by Google’s Android software, which has a market share of around 60 percent, while Apple’s iPhones run on its proprietary iOS software.

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Sprint Ending Lightsquared Relationship

Sprint Nextel will end its planned 15-year 4G network relationship with would-be hybrid network operator LightSquared, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The end of the Sprint partnership, which was due to expire on Thursday, would be nearly as big a blow to the foundering LightSquared as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s proposal last month to revoke the carrier’s authorization to build a land-based network.

Since the deal was announced last July, Sprint had been planning to host LightSquared’s radio spectrum on its Network Vision infrastructure. LightSquared was to pay Sprint US$9 billion in cash for that hosting and said the plan would save it $13 billion over eight years.

For its part, Sprint had looked to the partnership for extra spectrum on which to run its own planned LTE network. It would get $4.5 billion worth of credits to use some of LightSquared’s spectrum in addition to its own and that of longtime partner Clearwire. Sprint extended the deal twice to give LightSquared more time to win FCC approval for its network.

Sprint will terminate the LightSquared deal on Friday and return $65 million in prepayments by LightSquared, according to the Journal.

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iPhone Adds To Sprint’s Losses

Sprint Nextel posted a bigger loss, reflecting the higher costs of offering Apple Inc’s iPhone. But the loss was smaller than expected because its signed up fewer new customers than expected.

Since Sprint subsidizes the cost of some of its phone sales, its costs rise and profit dwindles the more customers it wins. But since subscriptions fell short of expectations, its loss was smaller than expected.

Sprint’s loss was 35 cents per share excluding unusual items compared with Wall Street expectations for a loss of 37 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Its profit margin based on operating earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) fell to 9.5 percent from 16 percent a year earlier but beat expectations for 8.6 percent, according to eight analyst estimates Reuters compiled.

“It’s still unbelievably depressed and subscribers were below expectations,” said Roe Equity Research analyst Kevin Roe who also noted that Sprint’s targets for the full year were not particularly impressive.

The margin decline was hurt by the hefty cost of selling the iPhone.

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at&t Vows To Continue Quest

AT&T Inc plans to forge ahead with its deal to acquire Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless unit despite regulatory opposition, and it has the financial resources to close the acquisition quickly, a top executive said on Wednesday.

“We continue to move forward with our efforts to complete the T-Mobile transaction…and we will continue to pursue the sale,” AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said at the UBS media conference in New York.

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at&t iPhone 4S Has Fastest Speeds

A study measuring the performance of the iPhone 4S on the three major U.S. wireless carriers found AT&T to be the best in Web browsing and data downloads and uploads when compared to Apple’s latest smartphone on either the Verizon Wireless or Sprint networks.

iPhone newcomer Sprint was found to be superior with its iPhone 4S for network voice quality on the uplink (when the user is speaking), but Sprint was also about five times slower in Web browsing and data downloads than AT&T, according to the study released Friday by Metrico Wireless, a mobile performance measurement company. Verizon finished in the middle on those data tests, but trailed the other two carriers in voice quality.

Metrico measured five performance factors shortly after the iPhone 4S was launched on all three carriers in October: whether calls could be connected and held; voice quality; data performance; Web browsing by page load speeds and video performance.

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