Microsoft last week bought just over 600,000 IP addresses (a /10 block and a /11 block if you are counting) for $7.5 million from bankrupt Nortel. For a moment there it was everywhere on the web, a mild reminder of what happens during famine when gluttons hoard food. But what is really going-on here, and what does it mean in the near and longer terms? Well first let’s settle something: it is immaterial to Microsoft. Had the price been $7.5 billion or better yet $75 billion, I’d say that Redmond viewed as central to its survival having that block of addresses. But $7.5 million is pocket change and probably represents to Microsoft just a cheaper […]
IPV6 is coming (yeah, right)
Ivan the Terrible?
If you were Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, faced with suddenly becoming the number two mobile phone company in America following an AT&T/T-Mobile merger, what would you do? You could try to buy Sprint, and for all I know Seidenberg will do just that. You could make a counter-offer for T-Mobile, but that would just be too darned expensive. If I was Seidenberg, though, I would try to poach customers — millions of customers — from T-Mobile.
AT&T is paying $1300 per T-Mobile subscriber and by the time the deal is finished extra costs will probably raise that to $1400 or more. Were I Seidenberg, then, I’d spend right up to that level to snag customers from […]
AT&T needs T-Mobile most for its WiFi
In the 36 hours or so since AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced that the American carrier would be buying the U. S. subsidiary of the German phone company, there has been plenty of speculation (some of it right here) about what this will mean for customers and the wireless industry, but not very much, frankly, about why T-Mobile is worth $39 billion to AT&T. It’s about more subscribers, we’re told as though that is obvious, and back-office savings, plus extra spectrum with some special plans for 4G, but that’s not the biggest reason at all. The biggest reason why AT&T wants T-Mobile is because of WiFi.
Subscribers are nice, as are back-office and marketing savings, but […]
Will AT&T buying T-Mobile make jailbroken and unlocked iPhones finally legal?
So AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in a deal that makes perfect sense if you are an RF engineer or a fat-cat telco tycoon, but my question is what happens to all the jailbroken and unlocked iPhones?
T-Mobile and AT&T are the USA’s only GSM wireless network operators, so if you had an iPhone and wanted to dump AT&T to allow things like free tethering, the obvious (and frankly only) way for Americans to do so was by jumping from cranky old AT&T to the much friendlier T-Mobile. And so tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of AT&T customer did just that, and were gratefully accepted by T-Mobile.
But now with […]
Who ya gonna call? Supertanker!
At this point in the Japanese nuclear emergency it is coming down to the simple proposition of how do you drop enough water on the stricken reactors, and especially the spent fuel ponds, to keep further damage from happening? The Japanese Self-Defense Force is experimenting with helicopter water drops which are, frankly, stupid. The choppers can’t drop enough water to make a difference and they are so slow that they potentially expose their crews to excessive amounts of radiation. Much better to use the Evergreen 747 Supertanker.
The unique Evergreen Supertanker is the largest piece of firefighting gear on earth, capable of dropping more than 20,000 gallons of water or chemicals at a shot (40,000 gallons per hour!), then streaking back for more at over […]
