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The company says, according to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission, that Verizon would receive an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum in the deal.

T-Mobile is not too pleased with a plan Verizon Wireless has hatched to acquire nearly $4 billion in wireless spectrum.

According to the Washington Post, which obtained the documents, T-Mobile lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) yesterday, urging the government agency to block the sale of wireless spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks–collectively known as SpectrumCo.–to Verizon.

According to the Post, T-Mobile believes the sale could provide Verizon with an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum.

Verizon announced plans to acquire the so-called Advance Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum in December. If the deal is approved, Verizon will have the option to sell cable service in its stores, and the cable companies involved in the sale will be able to access its wireless network on a wholesale basis. The deal is a boon for Verizon, as the gold rush for precious spectrum heats up.

“Spectrum is the raw material on which wireless networks are built, and buying the AWS spectrum now solidifies our network leadership into the future, and will enable us to bring even better 4G LTE products and services to our customers,” Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead said in a statement at the time.

Despite T-Mobile’s reservations, Sprint isn’t so quick to jump on the bandwagon. The carrier didn’t ask the FCC to block the deal, but it did request that the government agency take a deep dive into the particulars of the agreement to ensure it won’t hurt competition across the wireless space.

Sprint’s tempered response is no surprise, considering the company has somewhat strong ties with cable companies. Years ago, for example, cable companies and Sprint formed an ill-fated joint venture called Pivot designed to get the cable providers into the wireless business. To attempt to block the deal could have a negative impact on Sprint’s relations with those firms.

If Verizon can gain FCC approval for the spectrum purchase, it could achieve something its chief competitor, AT&T, wasn’t able to do last year in its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA. Federal regulators argued that the acquisition would have hurt wireless competition. After a brief court battle, AT&T decided to abandon plans to acquire T-Mobile USA. If the deal had been approved, AT&T would have acquired a boatload of spectrum and significantly improved its 4G LTE rollout across the country.

If all goes well, Verizon and SpectrumCo. hope to complete the acquisition by the middle of this year.

A new lawsuit against Apple says its visual voice mail feature is infringing on someone else’s patents. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.

A shot of Brandywine’s “simultaneous voice/data answering machine” patent.

(Credit:
US Patent and Trademark Office)

The voice mail system on Apple’s
iPhone has once again become the target of a lawsuit from a company claiming infringement on one or more software patents.

A new lawsuit filed yesterday against Apple by Pennsylvania-based Brandywine Communications Technologies in a U.S. District Court in Florida accuses Apple of infringing on two of its patents covering voice technologies.

The filing, picked up by GigaOm today, says Apple’s infringing on U.S. Patent No. 5,719,992 as well as U.S. Patent No. 6,236,717, both of which cover a “simultaneous voice/data answering machine.” Brandywine claims Apple had knowledge of the former patent since “at least December 13, 2011,” which is when the group sent Apple a letter about it.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the suit.

The patent itself says it “coordinates the storage of voice messages and data messages on an audio answering machine and a personal computer, respectively.” In the abstract, the inventors make the case that this lets people retrieve their messages like they would an e-mail.

The suit covers the first through fourth-generation iPhones, and does not mention the
iPhone 4S, despite being filed some four months after its introduction and release. Curiously, the suit also lists those devices as the “iPhone 4, iPhone 3, iPhone 2″ and “iPhone 1,” despite Apple having only used an enumeration scheme in its fourth generation model. Also curious is the inclusion of the
iPad 1 and 2, which do not have phone applications, and thus voice mail software.

This is not the first time Apple’s voice mail software has been targeted in a lawsuit. In December 2007, just a few months after the release of the first iPhone, Apple and AT&T were sued by Klausner Technologies, which said that Apple was infringing on a patent it held for visual voice mail–a feature that was exclusive to the iPhone at the time. By mid-2008 the Apple, AT&T, and Klausner Technologies reached a settlement for an undisclosed sum.

Brandywine is seeking damages as part of the case, but not an injunction (a ban on sales of infringing devices) as some other recent patent cases have requested.

The draft of the federal budget for 2013 takes an ax to the rival Global Hawk program. An Air Force general says the U-2, a design that dates to the 1950s, is “the stronger system.”

A U-2 pilot at an airfield in Southwest Asia gives the thumbs-up, signaling that all systems are go for a mission in October 2009.

(Credit:
U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. J.G. Buzanowski)

Score one for old-school aircraft against the upstart drones.

Perhaps it’s just a brief respite from the seemingly inevitable winds of change propelling unmanned aircraft ever higher in the Pentagon’s airpower depth charts, but the venerable U-2 spy plane has won a key vote of confidence over the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk. That victory came not in a head-to-head aerial dogfight, but in a more bureaucratic conveyance: the draft of the federal budget for the U.S. government’s fiscal 2013.

“The Administration proposes to end production of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle,” says the budget proposal (PDF), released last week. “High altitude reconnaissance operations will continue with the manned U-2 aircraft which can perform the same missions as the Global Hawk, but at a lower cost.”

The Global Hawk line item drops from $342 million in the current fiscal year to zero for the coming year. The Air Force’s fleet of 30-plus U-2 aircraft, meanwhile, are already pretty much bought and paid for. The last delivery of a U-2 to the Air Force from manufacturer Lockheed Martin was in 1989.

Global Hawk at air base in Southwest Asia in November 2010.

(Credit:
U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Andy M. Kin)

The Air Force didn’t mince words about the selection. “The U-2 is a stronger system, so we’re going to go with the stronger system,” Maj. Gen. Edward L. Bolton Jr., deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for budget, said in a Pentagon news briefing last week. The base budget for the Air Force in the 2013 proposal stands at $154.3 billion, down from $162.5 billion this year.

That’s not how it was supposed to play out. The Air Force had been looking to retire the U-2 last year. And its plans had called for continued expansion of Global Hawk ranks. (Remember, too, that a budget draft isn’t the actual budget. Global Hawk maker Northrop Grumman may yet find support enough in Congress to reinstate some funding.)

It says a lot about issues of cost and complexity that a hot new technology is taking a back seat to a design that’s been around since the mid-1950s. The slender U-2 has been upgraded over time with a newer engine, fiber optics, a longer wingspan, and the digital conveniences of the glass cockpit, but it’s still essentially the same recon and surveillance aircraft that the U.S. used to good effect in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a couple of years after the unwelcome publicity of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 being shot down by the Soviet Union.

The U-2, also known as the Dragon Lady, is in good company when it comes to codgers. The B-52 and the C-130 have also been in service for more than a half-century.

This 1966 photo shows U-2 designer Kelly Johnson (left) with famed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Did either have an inkling the aircraft would still be flying more than a decade into the 21st century?

(Credit:
U.S. Air Force photo)

The new devices could appear later this year, with hybrid disk drives helping keep costs low, according to a report.

The Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook uses a hybrid HDD composed of a 20GB SSD and a standard spinning 320GB drive. Its price bounces around between $800 and $900.

(Credit:
Acer)

Lower-end ultrabooks equipped with hybrid disk drives could hit price points as low as $600, according to an Asia-based report.

Because hybrid HDDs–which combine a small-capacity solid-state drive with a standard hard disk drive–cost about 50 percent less than solid-state-only drives, PC makers will opt for hybrid drives in lower-end models, according to a report Wednesday in DigiTimes. This will drive prices below $700.

Ultrabooks–skinny
Windows 7 laptops that mimic the portability of
tablets–currently bottom out at about $800. That includes the Toshiba Portege Z835, now priced as low as $799.99 at retail. The Z835 uses a 128GB SSD, not a hybrid drive.

Future ultrabooks equipped with hybrid HDDs will fall to between $600 and $700 in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to DigiTimes, citing sources.

Those same sources claim that Intel will cut prices on its next-generation Ivy Bridge chip by up to 70 percent.

Intel doesn’t see it that way, however. While the chipmaker does not discuss pricing of its products prior to launch, the DigiTimes report of a $60 to $70 price reduction on Ivy Bridge processors “is simply not true,” a source at Intel told CNET on Tuesday.

Ivy Bridge is due in the spring and is expected to be the ultrabook processor of choice for Windows 8-based systems.

Leaked document shows ad upgrade presentation apparently targeting the friends of advertisers’ fans.

A snapshot of the leaked advertiser materials.

(Credit:
GigaOm)

Facebook is expected to launch an upgrade next week to its premium ads program that will target the friends of advertisers’ fans.

The new ads, which will launch February 29, will be created from content posted organically to pages, according to a purportedly leaked document (see below) obtained by GigaOm.

“Anything you can post to on your page, you can turn into an ad,” the document says. “Upgraded ads can be targeted to anyone you want.”

When the users seeing the ad are friends with fans of the page, Facebook will automatically expand the ad and provide social context about the friends. The ads will also feature an expanded interface allowing fans to comment on the post directly from the ad.

The social network promises advertisers that the new ads will be in a larger format, boosting engagement by 40 percent and increasing retention by 80 percent. Fan rates are also expected to increase 16 percent, as well as purchase intent, according to the documents, which appear to be a presentation prepared for Facebook advertisers.

The new premium ad types can feature a photo, video, question, status, event, or link. They will replace “classic” ad options such as Premium Like (Photo and Video), Pemium Event, Video Comment, and Premium Poll (Photo and Video), which will be phased out on February 29. Marketplace ads on the right column will not be affected.

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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