Sprint's recent troubles have made plenty of investors and subscribers uneasy, which has led to a number of acquisition-related rumors and highly speculative analysis. Here are three:

Sprint to spin-off Nextel

According to a Seeking Alpha report, Sprint Nextel has hired Morgan Stanley to implement board director Ralph Whitworth's plan to spin-off Nextel. Rumor has it the spin-off will be announced within the next two to four weeks. Most of Sprint's trouble can be traced back to the Nextel acquisition in the first place.

T-Mobile may acquire Sprint

Merrill Lynch analysts told the Kansas City Star today that Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile USA, might be considering a takeover of Sprint in an attempt to prevent a price war between the mobile carriers. Sprint's low share price and the weakness of the U.S. dollar both favor the European company, but Merrill Lynch said it is not privy to any inside information--it's just speculating.

Should Verizon buy Sprint?

Last week the Wall Street Journal's deals blog considered whether Verizon should acquire Sprint. The post brings up Verizon's stellar decision not to make a bid for Sprint back in 2004.

What do you think? Do any of these ring true?

Sprint's troubles inspire rumor mill

oday we tell the forgotten story of the first pager.

Although a few cities had pager-like devices for their police and firefighters as early as 1921, ordinary citizens couldn't use them. The creator of the first commercial pager service was Sherman C. Amsden (1889-1958), a native of Michigan who served as a U.S. Army Air Force pilot in both world wars.

One night in the early 1920s, Amsden had a family emergency and needed his doctor immediately, but the physician couldn't be reached; the doctor was not in his office and he couldn't afford a secretary to answer his phone. This experience inspired Amsden, then living in New York City, to start one of the first telephone answering companies, Telanserphone. Originally intended just for doctors, here's how the Telanserphone service worked: A subscriber who expected to be away from his telephone (playing golf, seeing a movie, taking a shower, etc.) would notify Telanserphone. If anyone called during the subscriber's absence, a Telanserphone operator would write down a message. The subscriber could then call the company at any time or from any location to hear the messages he missed.

Click to see more.
Click the image above to see drawings of Amsden's pager.

Amsden's next idea, which seems so ordinary in the present era of wireless technology, was in fact brilliantly creative. Instead of requiring subscribers to call Telanserphone to find out if they received messages, Amsden wanted a way to alert subscribers that they had messages. Working with inventor Richard R. Florac (1901-1991), Amsden developed the first commercially available pager. The pager was offered to his company's subscribers for a fee of $11.50 a month.

Here's how it worked. Every Telanserphone subscriber with a pager was assigned a three-digit code number. When a Telanserphone operator took a message for a subscriber, the company would play a voice-recording of that subscriber's code number on the company's high-frequency radio transmitter. The code number, perhaps recorded on magnetic tape, would be repeatedly played on a loop, along with all the other code numbers of subscribers with messages waiting at Telanserphone. Each pager was basically just a small battery-powered radio receiver locked onto the Telanserphone frequency, so when the subscriber held the pager up to his ear he would listen for his code number to know whether a message was waiting for him.

On October 15, 1950, a doctor became the first person to receive a pager signal from Telanserphone.

Amsden started a new company, Aircall, Inc., for his pager business. Within two years, Aircall had 400 subscribers, including doctors, salesmen, detectives, plumbers and undertakers

really cool... looks like there are some small battery powered tubes....

Richard Florac - First Pager, Early Portable FM Radios

When T-Mobile began selling Apple's iPhone in Germany last fall, a legal skirmish ensued, forcing the wireless carrier to sell it untethered to a contract--at $1,460, no less. T-Mobile eventually persuaded a court that the two-year contract was legal.

Now that same kind of European rule would be imported into the United States--meaning AT&T would be legally required to sell a contract-free iPhone--if a new Democratic proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives becomes law.

Sponsored by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a congressman who serves as chairman of a House telecommunications and Internet panel, it's similar to but somewhat more sweeping than a bill proposed in the Senate last year. His subcommittee has scheduled a hearing on the plan for Wednesday morning.

The draft legislation says every mobile provider "shall offer to consumers the opportunity to purchase subsidy-free wireless customer equipment."

The emergence of the 27-page draft bill (PDF), called the Wireless Consumer Protection and Community Broadband Empowerment Act, underscores what is apparently growing concern among congressional Democrats during this session with what they seem to view as insufficiently flexible, forthcoming dealings among wireless carriers and their customers.

Both bills would direct the Federal Communications Commission to establish a number of new rules for wireless carriers. Among other things, those companies would have to give abundant disclosure to their customers about their rate plans in a "clear, plain, and conspicuous manner," breaking out the cost of everything from early termination fees to state and local taxes for the customer.

Carriers would also be obligated to devise more detailed maps of their network coverage areas. And they'd have to permit customers to cancel a contract for any reason without penalty within the first 30 days and to prorate any fees associated with leaving a contract early.

Unlike the Senate bill, Markey's proposal would also dictate that wireless carriers offer customers the choice of buying a wireless service plan with no early termination fee.

Read on! I think that wireless carriers will go to a "service only" model and let the cell phone makers "make" the phones... Verizon is headed that way and Sprint is almost in trouble due to $$$$*ching*$$$$ issues...

So let it be known that the cell company(s) need to start CYA....

:)

Democratic bill could force Apple, AT&T to unlock iPhone

Locals in a North Yorkshire village are demanding that satnav companies remove from their databases a rural track recommended by in-car systems as a plausible route from Swaledale to Wensleydale, the BBC reports.

The problem is, the road is unsurfaced and runs alongside a 100ft cliff over which, the concerned villagers reckon, someone will eventually plummet. Carol Porter and hubby Steven, who live beside the carriageway of potential death, have been using their tractor to extricate bogged-down vehicles at the rate of one a week. More seriously, some drivers who are unable to progress attempt a reversing manoeuvre "perilously close to the cliff edge".

I worked for years as a driver for a company and I have to say that I would have loved satnav but nothing beats knowing where the hell your going ....

Crackpot satnav route leads to 100ft cliff

I believe that companies which attempt to have non-techies handling their security risk management, will end up in trouble.

Considering the recent hurricane. While the professional politicians and news analyts are playing the blame game, one major factor to the damage was the failure of the levy system....

The levy system was supposed to be able to withstand only a category 3 hurricane. (If even that, due to lack of maintenance.)

One could argue that it was risk management at work. The odds of a cat 5 hitting New Orleans is so small, why not take that risk? (The downside is that one did hit and the total damage in insured property greatly outweigh the cost of building the levy system to take a cat 5 hurricane.)

I agree that you can't call wolf at every perceived risk. But how can a "business type" manage these risks if they really don't understand the potential damage that can occur?

Ian

There might be a few dissenters over the risk of a cat5 storm hitting the gulf coast... If we remember correctly, it was flagged as one of three serious threats to the US at the start of Dubya's terms in office. The other two, you ask? Oh, a terror attack in New York and a big quake in California. Two outta three, and still time to go...

Securing the world for lost, bio-diesel car drivers

In the great British tradition of "rob someone's house then leave your mobile at the scene", two London men have been jailed for burglary after the satnav system in the vehicle used for the blags stored the addresses of every house they hit.

Ian Bansie, 33, used his work's motor to ferry 31-year-old accomplice Steve Warrington to ten homes in Reigate, Surrey, completely unaware that the satellite navigation system was dutifully keeping a record of their crime spree.

Bansie will now spend the next 32 months in a place where satnav is of limited used - at Her Majesty's Pleasure - after Guildford Crown Court jailed both him and Warrington, the latter for an immobilising four years. ®

Satnav fingers bungling burglars

he US aviation regulator has selected ITT Corp to provide a new generation of GPS satnav-based air traffic control equipment, awarding a $207m, three-year initial contract.

Current air traffic control systems worldwide use radar to detect and track aircraft: either "primary," in which radio pulses from the radar reflect back from the plane's skin, or "secondary," where a transponder emits a code or "squawk" in response to the radar transmission.

In either case, the controller's picture updates only as fast as the radar antenna can spin round, which typically means every six seconds or so. During that time a jet can travel a mile, and usually the radar location info isn't very precise either, which means that, in congested airspace, a substantial margin of error must be maintained. This in turn means fewer planes can move through a given amount of airspace, leading to delays.

Now, however, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) intends to move to a system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), which will lay the groundwork for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen.

Under ADS-B, each plane is fitted with GPS satellite navigation, and thus knows its own location precisely. This information will then be broadcast in real time to a ground network, updating every second. Controllers will have a much more accurate idea where all the aircraft are, which could potentially allow them to move planes through bottlenecks more quickly.

“This signals a new era of air traffic control,” according to FAA number-two, Bobby Sturgell. “ADS-B - and, in turn, NextGen - will attack the delay problem head on by dramatically increasing air traffic efficiency.”

ADS-B will also be a two-way street, allowing pilots to see full information on all the planes in the sky around them, just as controllers do. At the moment, most aircraft don't have a proper radar of their own, though they may have proximity warning systems or weather radars. For monitoring other planes, today's pilots are mostly dependent on ground controllers - or the limited capabilities of the naked eye.

US in move towards GPS-based air traffic control

geoHist is a (relatively) simple program I wrote to log GPS data retrieved from GPSD into a
MySQL database. It is designed to meet the following requirements:

* Standalone
* Run from system startup to shutdown
* Small/fast, non-intrusive
* Robust
* Log data to an SQL database

Description

geoHist will poll GPSD every 10 seconds and then send that data to a
preconfigured MySQL database. It will attempt to detect if you are standing
still, and if you are then it will NOT log the data. It decides this using a
simple drift factor. It will always log position to the database at least
once if there is a satellite fix.

I designed geoHist to be used with my linux-based car computer. It is designed
to be configured once, and never touched again (except to export data).
System Requirements

* GPSD (http://gpsd.berlios.de)
* A GPS device that works with GPSD
* MySQL (http://www.mysql.com)

Anyone want to help me write a program to pull the data out of the DB?

geoHist - standalone GPSD MySQL Logging Daemon

Anywhere.FM is a powerful music player that makes it easy to:
· Upload your entire music collection
· Play it anywhere on the best web music player
· Discover new music through Friend Radio

This site rocks... I am currently looking at this to make my music portable from any PC...

Anywhere.FM - Music Where You Want It

lose-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a "potential threat" to security, it said.

The move follows the discovery of images of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas on Google Maps.

A Google spokesman said that where the US military had expressed concerns, images had been removed.

Google has now been barred from filming and conducting detailed studies of bases, following the discovery of detailed, three-dimensional panoramas online - and in particular, views of the Texan base.

While [Google Earth] is a very useful tool, there has to be a balance
Gary Ross
US military spokesman

"Images include 360-degree views of the covered area to include access control points, barriers, headquarters, facilities and community areas," said the defence department in a statement quoted by AFP news agency.

It said such detailed mapping could pose a threat.

Google spokesman Larry Yu said the decision by a Google team to enter the Texas base and undertake a detailed survey, had been "a mistake".

He told the BBC News website that detailed study of such sensitive sites was not Google policy.

"In this case, it was imagery offered on Street View that caused the concern."

grumble grumble

Pentagon bans Google map-makers