SAN DIEGO — The heads of the three largest wireless carriers in the country shared the big stage but no news this morning at CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011. The 90-minute opening keynote session was “full of platitudes” and signified nothing new, Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, remarked in a tweet.

Sprint Chairman and CEO Dan Hesse took the role of industry cheerleader as this year’s chairman of the CTIA board, adding: “Those of us in the wireless industry should be thankful that we’re arguably in the most important industry in the world.” Read more

Apple hit a new record last Friday, surpassing 1 million pre-orders for the new iPhone 4S in the first 24 hours. The previous one-day record, held by the iPhone 4, was 600,000 pre-orders.

The iPhone 4S is the first iPhone available at more than one U.S. carrier at launch. Apple has greater reach now with AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. None of the carriers broke down pre-order sales figures, though more details should come after the iPhone 4S is available for purchase (and begins shipping) this Friday.

Following its pre-order run, it appears all but certain that Apple will break all other previously established records with the iPhone 4S at launch and going forward. Volume totals are likely to be shared by Apple and the carriers when each of the companies release their quarterly earnings in the coming weeks. Read more

Sprint just can’t get enough variety when it comes wireless technology, spectrum and network equipment. The carrier’s history of banding together disparate, incompatible technologies is repeating itself barely six years after it merged with Nextel. Then it was iDEN and CDMA, now it’s WiMAX and LTE.

Today the company announced plans for an aggressive LTE network build that will bring a new 4G service to its customers in some initial markets next year and nationwide by 2013.

Sprint is late to the LTE party, but it’s jumping in head first as it tries to play catch up with the likes of AT&T and Verizon. The carrier committed itself to WiMAX more than five years ago and ever since then has been forging a completely different path from its competitors — standing all alone as the determined, if not stubborn, LTE holdout. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

Mobile commerce gained some considerable momentum today when it was announced that the four largest national payments networks would be joining Isis. The national mobile commerce joint venture between Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA Inc. will get a significant boost with the help and support of Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services.

The new partners come on board two and a half months after Isis abandoned plans to build a proprietary payment network with Discover and Barclays Plc and repositioned the venture to become more of an open mobile wallet initiative. Read more

*As published in RCR Wireless News**

A first-to-market advantage for WiMAX over LTE was supposed to help differentiate Sprint Nextel Corp and Clearwire Corp. from its competitors. But if you live in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area, not so much.

Los Angeles and the surrounding area finally got its first official look at WiMAX earlier this week. San Francisco is still waiting.

Although the companies launched their first WiMAX market almost two years ago in Portland, Ore., scale is what matters most. A so-called fourth generation network without service in San Francisco or Los Angeles (until just this past Monday) is no network I want to pay for. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), took the stage late in the day at the carrier’s developer conference here to help frame the company’s position and standing in the developer community.

He also tried his hat at comedy regularly along the way.

Borrowing from The Onion, a satirical paper that Hesse said he reads religiously, he began with what he called “the open continuum” to define where Sprint stands in the world of openness compared to its competitors.

“We’ve been in this mildly irritating category, if you will, but we’re moving to the more open category,” he said. “Openness for us means enablement… We don’t make the content. We don’t make the app. We make it better, we make it pop between our network and our devices.” Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — A robust computing environment and ubiquitous connectivity are the two most critical components to every facet of mobility, Doug Fisher, VP at Intel Corp. (INTC), said during his keynote at Sprint’s developer conference.

Everything is being driven by “a combination of powerful computing and connectivity,” he said. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) is making sure to embrace developers at every turn at its 10th annual developer conference here this week. Paget Alves, president of the carrier’s business markets group, hit on that theme early on today.

“We’re only as good as the partnerships we have,” he said. “We can’t do any of this without the participation of folks in this room.” Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

Vertical markets present wireless carriers with a host of new opportunities and challenges. Just because wireless technology and enterprise infrastructure should work together doesn’t mean they do. As carriers target these new customers and encourage them to move from a wired to a wireless world, they’re adapting their business strategies according to the trends and problems that businesses face in each market.

Carriers Climb the Vertical Ladder (PDF)

Once I saw the BlackBerry Tour for Verizon selling for $99 at Best Buy, there was no turning back. I’ve been using an unlocked BlackBerry 8900 on T-Mobile for almost a year and it was time for a change. I wasn’t even using minutes on T-Mobile. Instead, my BlackBerry had become a data-only device.

Only $50 to cancel the remainder of my 1-year contract with T-Mobile? Done. Did I mention that I’ve been using an unlocked device (purchased elsewhere) and never should have been forced to sign a contract with T-Mobile to begin with? Oh well, that’s how carriers roll here. So long as they know dinosaurs will always die … someday.

Anyway, this was my first time purchasing a phone under carrier contract at a third-party store. After a couple hiccups, everything went pretty smoothly. All in all, the entire process took 45 minutes and most of that time was spent training my customer service rep. Read more