Sprint Agrees to Pay About $32 Bln to Buy T-Mobile

As reported by Reuters: Sprint Corp has agreed to pay about $40 per share to buy T-Mobile US Inc , a person familiar with the matter said, marking further progress in the attempt to merge the third and fourth-biggest U.S. mobile network operators.

The $40 price represents a 17 percent premium to T-Mobile US's closing share price on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of more than $32 billion and the shares have more than doubled in price since the group bought smaller rival MetroPCS a year ago.

Deutsche Telekom shares were up 1.4 percent at 12.60 euros by 1115 GMT on Thursday, valuing the German firm at over 56 billion euros ($76 billion).

However, Hannes Wittig, an analyst at JP Morgan, said the $40 price, if confirmed, seemed low.

"T-Mobile US should be worth more than that given that the synergies should exceed $20 billion, Deutsche Telekom would share some of the execution risk and Sprint would be getting control ... Somewhere in the high 40s would be more appropriate," he said.

Japan's Softbank, which owns Sprint, and Deutsche Telekom, which owns 67 percent of T-Mobile, still have to negotiate on the details, including financing and the termination fee to be paid should the merger get blocked by regulators, the source familiar with the matter said.

Analysts see the regulatory challenge as the biggest hurdle facing the companies since both the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have expressed a desire to have at least two more network operators competing against the market leaders AT&T and Verizon.

Three years ago regulators rejected AT&T's agreed $39 billion bid for T-Mobile US, which resulted in AT&T paying Deutsche Telekom as T-Mobile's full owner a reverse break-up fee of $6 billion in cash and U.S. mobile assets.

Under the proposed sale to Sprint Deutsche Telekom is expected to keep a 15 to 20 percent stake in the combined company, the source said.

It also remains to be seen what the break-up fee would be if the deal fails to gain regulatory clearance. Bloomberg said Softbank was pushing for a termination fee of $1 billion, while Deutsche Telekom wanted more like $3 billion.

Officials at Sprint, Softbank and Deutsche Telekom declined to comment. T-Mobile US did not respond to requests for comment.


REGULATORY CONCERNS
The U.S. telecommunications sector is already in the throes of a major, broader consolidation, with AT&T seeking to buy satellite TV operator DirecTV and cable company Comcast trying to merge with rival Time Warner.

The changes could create a clutch of media and telecoms giants and leave Sprint an also-ran with an inferior business, the source said.

Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son has made no secret of his long-held desire to buy T-Mobile and merge it with Sprint, creating a carrier with the resources to upgrade its network and better compete with AT&T and Verizon.

For Deutsche Telekom, an exit from the United States would allow it to concentrate on its European business, including at home in Germany where it faces an upcoming auction of radio spectrum and needs to invest more in optic fiber broadband.

But first Sprint, T-Mobile US and their owners have to win over U.S. regulators to their merger plan.

"The (regulatory) agencies have tipped their hand and the parties know that," said an antitrust expert who asked not to be named to protect business relationships.

"(They) must think that they have stronger arguments and they're willing to battle them out with the agencies. That has to be part of their calculus here."

Analysts have also said that Softbank and Deutsche Telekom could choose to challenge the U.S. government in court if the acquisition was blocked.

"We see the odds of approval from both the FCC and DOJ as very low unless landscape-altering concessions are offered," wrote Nomura analyst Adam Ilkowitz in a note.

New Chip to Bring Holograms to Smartphones

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky contraption to your head.

Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie "Star Wars."

A key to this future may lay in Carlsbad, Calif., where startup Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3-D images for smartphones and giant screens.

Other companies have shown they can project floating images that appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles. For instance, the lifelike image of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, which graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012, was a combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.

An Ostendo chip with an affixed lens
sitting in the palm of a hand. Evelyn M. Rusli for The Wall Street Journal

Ostendo's projectors, in contrast, are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the color, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.

"Display is the last frontier," said Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in 1998 sold CommQuest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.41% for about $250 million in cash and stock. "Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display."

The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to life.

Ostendo's chief executive and founder,
Hussein S. El-Ghoroury in Carlsbad,
California, on Thursday. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal!

Microsoft Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are both working on their own virtual reality rooms, building a complex system of projectors and computers. Hewlett-Packard Co. recently spun out a company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3-D imaging to smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. agreed in March to spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR Inc., maker of the Oculus Rift headset that pulls users into 360-degree virtual environments.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, in part, convinced of the value of virtual reality after he accidentally tried to set down a real world object on a virtual table while testing the Oculus Rift, forgetting for a moment that the table didn't exist in the real world, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Ostendo, tucked away in Southern California, is little-known but has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, and has secured some $38 million in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of that has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the government's futurist agency that worked on the predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.

That capital has given Dr. El-Ghoroury, an immigrant from Egypt, the luxury to work for nearly a decade undisturbed. Ostendo now employs about 115 people, including scientists suited in scrubs and goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech semiconductor lab.

Researchers with Ostendo Technologies, Inc.
work in a nanotechnology lab on Thursday to
manufacture Quantam Photonic Imager chips that
can produce holograms. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal

The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name, which fuses an image processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, alongside software that helps the unit properly render images.

During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air. The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer.

According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT's Media Lab, Ostendo's advantage and the key to its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch, Ostendo's chips are at about 5,000 dots per inch.

Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers, expects the first 2-D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability, in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.

Dr. El-Ghoroury said the company still needs to improve the 3-D product and is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolution.

Ultimately, the larger vision is to have Ostendo's chips everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a glasses-free 3-D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.

So what happens in a world where 3-D and virtual reality is everywhere? Dr. El-Ghoroury predicts people's relationship with technology will change and breed a wave of business opportunities, on scale with the introduction of the iPhone.

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3-D—all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data," he said.

Association Says Indoor E911 Location Technology Not Ready

As reported by GPS World: In a recent FCC filing, the Telecommunications Industry Association said that indoor positioning technology is not sufficiently developed to support ongoing wireless E-911 location accuracy requirements.

While TIA supports the FCC’s goal to improve location accuracy, “Imposing location accuracy mandates at this time would be premature, given the nascent stage of the technology that will be needed to accomplish the Commission’s objectives, and should neither favor nor disfavor specific technologies,” said the association in its filing.

The NPRM proposes a requirement to achieve “rough” indoor location information, TIA said. It proposes to require providers to provide horizontal information for wireless 911 calls that originate indoors, specifically a caller’s location within 50 meters.

TIA also disagrees with an FCC proposal to require mobile operators to provide z-axis, which is vertical location within 3 meters of a caller’s location, for 67 percent and 80 percent of indoor wireless 911 calls — ranging from three to five years after adoption. Again, TIA says that the technology is not fully developed.

TIA quoted AT&T’s filing: “[The] time [is] right to begin discussing Indoor Location Accuracy for E-911” but the “FCC should be careful to ensure that any proposed rules on location accuracy are aligned with proven capabilities of the current state of technology and they should set realistic accuracy benchmarks that the industry and public safety can embrace.”

The location industry has been counting on indoor positioning, with its beacons and Wi-Fi enhancements, to jump-start a location-based services market that always seems to have tremendous potential, but the numbers don’t back it up. Some big-time analysts have said that while the promise of indoor positioning is huge, it just isn't there technically yet.

In fact, one analyst said that the biggest technological breakthrough last year was indoor mapping. Such major retailers as Home Depot and Lowes launched indoor maps with product search locators. These same analysts say that indoor Wi-Fi positioning is not accurate enough for macro location.

The big deal coming up is how FCC positioning accuracy regulations will affect beacons or Bluetooth low energy for micro location and proximity services.

TIA said it supports initial FCC location accuracy requirements back to 2007. However, don’t ask TIA for more location regulation. “To date, the development of 911 and E911 location accuracy technologies and applications has been fostered by a voluntary and consensus-based standards process. This process has proven quite successful to date, and the Commission should refrain from imposing regulations that could slow additional development,” the association said.

LAPD Adds Drones to Their Arsenal

As reported by the LA Times:The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired some eyes in the sky.

On Friday, the department announced that it had acquired two "unmanned aerial vehicles" as gifts from the Seattle Police Department.

The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a camera, video camera and infrared night-vision capabilities.

In making the announcement, however, department officials were at pains to make it clear the LAPD doesn't intend to use the new hardware to keep watch from above over an unsuspecting public. If they're used at all, the remotely controlled aircraft will be called on only for "narrow and prescribed uses" that will be made clear to the public, the statement said.

That, according to LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Andrew Smith, would include situations involving barricaded suspects or hostages in which police need to see inside a building as they decide how to respond.

"We wanted to be really up-front with the public that we're looking at using these down the road," Smith said. "We wanted to make sure it didn't look like we were trying to sneak these things into action."



Wanting to avoid the negative connotations the word has taken on, the department's statement deliberately avoided referring to the aircraft as drones.

The LAPD's skittishness underscores concerns over privacy and other sensitivities that have come up in recent years as police departments around the country have begun to experiment with surveillance technology.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department recently came under fire for flying a small airplane equipped with high-powered cameras over Compton for several days without alerting the city's residents of the video dragnet.

Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, praised the LAPD for being up-front about the acquisition, but raised concerns about the department using them, even in a limited fashion. The potential for abuse, he said, was high.

Villagra highlighted news reports showing Seattle officials abandoned the idea of using the aircraft after a public outcry over them.

The ACLU, he said in a statement, "questions whether the marginal benefits...justify the serious threat to privacy an LAPD drone program could pose."

Google to Spend $1B on a Fleet of 180 Satellites Providing Internet Access to Remote Areas

As reported by Market Watch: Details remain in flux, the people said, but the project will start with 180 small, high-capacity satellites orbiting the earth at lower altitudes than traditional satellites, and then could expand.

Google’s satellite venture is led by Greg Wyler, founder of satellite-communications startup O3b Networks Ltd., who recently joined Google with O3b’s former chief technology officer, the people said. Google has also been hiring engineers from satellite company Space Systems/Loral LLC to work on the project, according to another person familiar with the hiring initiative.  

The projected price ranges from about $1 billon to more than $3 billion, the people familiar with the project said, depending on the network’s final design and a later phase that could double the number of satellites. Based on past satellite ventures, costs could rise.

Google’s project is the latest effort by a Silicon Valley company to extend Internet coverage from the sky to help its business on the ground. Google and Facebook Inc. are counting on new Internet users in underserved regions to boost revenue, and ultimately, earnings.

“Google and Facebook are trying to figure out ways of reaching populations that thus far have been unreachable,” said Susan Irwin, president of Irwin Communications Inc., a satellite-communications research firm. “Wired connectivity only goes so far and wireless cellular networks reach small areas. Satellites can gain much broader access.”

Google also is hoping to take advantage of advances in antennas that can track multiple satellites as they move across the sky. Antennas developed by companies including Kymeta Corp. have no moving parts and are controlled by software, which reduces manufacturing and maintenance costs.

This isn't Google's first attempt at connecting remote parts of the world, last year's Project Loon saw Google launch 30 balloons that offer 3G-like speeds in the areas of New Zealand that have no Internet connection.  The satellite project is a possible extension of Project Loon.  Google's Internet balloons have been recently linked to UFO reports.

Google also recently purchased drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace to deliver high-altitude solar-powered drones that can stay airborne for five years at a time.

Facebook is also challenging for space in the unconnected world with its own project, which is being run by its Connectivity Lab.  In a statement earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook wants to "beam Internet to people from the Sky" and that his goal is to bring "affordable access to basic Internet services available to every person in the world".

Facebook has been hoarding experts and companies to turn this idea into reality.  It has been working with scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Ames Research Center.  There's also the UK-based solar-powered drone company Ascenta, which Facebook recently purchased as part of its Internet org initiative.                                       

                                         

GPS Ground Stations in Russia Can’t be Used For ‘Military Purposes’

As reported by RT: Russia has “taken under control” the operation of 11 American GPS sites and ensured they cannot be used for military purposes, as Washington and Moscow show no progress in negotiations on setting up Russian GLONASS stations on US territory.  

May 31 was the last day when Russia and the US could have reached a deal on the issue.  

“In compliance with the Russian government’s instruction, Roscosmos and the Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations implemented measures on June 1, 2014, which excluded the use of information from global seismographic network stations working on signals from the GPS system and located on the territory of the Russian Federation for purposes not stipulated by the existing agreements, including for military purposes,”Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said on Sunday morning.

The statement referring to agreements between Russia and the US, which date back to 1993 and 2001, stirred up some confusion in the media with some outlets reporting GPS stations work has been suspended, while other said they continued to work. Russia's deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, the official behind the move elaborated:

"We have worked out and implemented measures that exclude the use of these [GPS] stations for military purposes. Now they are under our full control," Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries, wrote in his Twitter micro blog.

The Differential GPS ground stations located on Russia’s soil will continue to operate under existing agreements to fulfill civil purposes. The so-called DGPS provides differential corrections to a GPS receiver in order to improve position accuracy.

The correction is received by the roving GPS receiver via either a radio signal or a satellite signal, depending on whether a source is land-based or satellite-based, and applied to the position it is calculating.

According to Rogozin, Moscow has initiated talks with the United States on GLONASS deployment on the US territory.

If agreement is reached by the August-31 deadline, "new decisions will be taken."

“We hope that by the end of summer, these talks will bring a solution that will allow our cooperation to be restored on the basis of parity and proportionality,” Rogozin said back on May 13, the day when he first announced plans to shut down 11 American correctional GPS stations.

The development of the GLONASS global navigation system began in the Soviet Union, which put the very first satellite of the system into orbit on October 12, 1982. The system was officially commissioned on September 24, 1993.

Today GLONASS is supported on products from world-leading handheld device producers, such as Samsung, Nokia, Apple, Motorola and others, simultaneously with GPS.

So far there are 14 monitor stations in Russia, one in Brazil and one in Antarctica at Russia’s Bellingshausen station.

More GLONASS stations are expected to be built in the nearest future: eight in Russia, two in Brazil, one in Australia, Cuba, Indonesia, Spain, Vietnam and an additional station in the Antarctic.

Uber Gets Cozy with AT&T

As reported by GigaOm: Typically we look at preloaded apps on our smartphones as carrier bloatware to be deleted or minimized, but a lot of people will have second thoughts about removing AT&T’s newest promoted app from their handsets. Starting this summer, Uber will come preloaded on all new Android phones sold by AT&T.  

That isn't the extent of Uber’s new relationship with Ma Bell, Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalankick said at the Code Conference in LA. Uber is moving its own drivers onto AT&T’s voice and data networks. The iPhones Uber distributes to all of its contractors will be configured for AT&T, which, according to Uber’s blog, will give it the coverage it needs to expand beyond its current urban city focus into the far flung corners of the U.S.:

Uber’s goal is to make sure that anyone can open the Uber app anywhere and be able to connect with a safe, reliable and seamless ride through the Uber app. We are marching toward UberEVERYWHERE, and to do it, we are moving beyond expansion to individual cities and simply toward coverage, maximizing the reach of the Uber network. Today, the Uber platform serves over 137,000,000 Americans (43% of the population in just 4 years) and AT&T will help power UberEVERYWHERE and our continued expansion.

AT&T lately has been delving deep into the connected car lately powering the 3G and 4G connections linking Tesla, GM, Audi and many other automakers’ new infotainment and telematics systems. In many ways the deal with Uber is an extension of that strategy. Most of the Uber fleet may be unconnected but the drivers in them certainly are.

Though neither Uber nor AT&T went into specific details, AT&T may be providing more than just rote 3G and 3G links. It could be providing fleet tracking and logistics services that would help Uber manage its driver operations on a national scale.

As for the preloaded app, it’s really more a marketing relationship than a technology partnership. Carriers strike these deals with app developers all the time, and even if the app icon is on the home screen, AT&T customers will still have to register and load their credit card details into the app. But this deal could definitely put Uber in front of a lot more eyeballs previously unfamiliar with the car-hailing service, especially outside the core metropolitan areas Uber has traditionally focused on.