Wireless

eBay is playing virtual Santa this holiday season with a free "Deals" app for the iPhone that leads consumers to the better buys on the auction site.

eBay Deals

(Credit: eBay)

Launched Tuesday, eBay Deals is designed to deliver a stream of the best deals on the site from across hundreds of millions of listings. Like eBay Mobile, the company's regular iPhone app, Deals lets you search, shop, and pay for your items from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

All featured deals spotlight items with no bids, no reserve price, free or fixed-rate shipping, and less than four hours remaining to bid.

You can browse deals across eight categories, including apparel, computers, electronics, and collectibles. If you spot a deal you like, just tap on it, and its listing pops up where you can watch it or bid on it. Not crazy about the current deals? Just shake your iPhone or iPod Touch, and a new set of deals appears.

If you spot a deal that may be better for someone else, you can e-mail it or share it via your Facebook or Twitter account.

Besides browsing eBay's virtual aisles, you can search for your own deals by entering a product name, category, and price range. You can save your customized search results to return to them later.

Starting Friday, eBay will also be unveiling a "12 Days of Deals" feature promoting a new promotion each day until December 8. Friday's deal will offer Samsung's N120 Netbook.

"As the world's leading online marketplace we have insights into how people really want to shop...and they clearly want to shop on their phones," eBay Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington said in a statement.

Though designed for the mobile crowd, eBay's daily deals can also be found online at the auction site's Deals page.

eBay has been busy lately sprucing up its mobile auction site for the holidays. The vendor recently added social networking to its eBay Mobile app, letting you share a listing through e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

Since its launch in 2008, eBay's mobile app has been downloaded more than 5 million times, said the company. With a purchase made every two seconds, the company said, more than $500 million worth of items are likely to be traded through eBay mobile this year.

Ericsson cast the $1.13 billion winning bid in an auction for the wireless assets of bankrupt Nortel Networks, the companies said Saturday.

The Swedish telecommunications giant picked up Nortel's CDMA and next-generation LTE wireless technologies. As part of the agreement, at least 2,500 Nortel workers supporting CDMA and LTE will be offered jobs at Ericsson.

CDMA, or code division multiple access, is one of two major networks operating in the U.S. and is used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel. LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is 4G wireless technology that will potentially replace today's mobile networks.

"This deal, along with our recently announced Sprint service agreement, truly positions Ericsson as a leading telecoms supplier in North America," Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said in a statement.

The purchase includes the CDMA contracts with Verizon and Sprint, as well as with U.S. Cellular, Bell Canada, and Leap, Ericsson said.

Ericsson was one of three bidders in Friday's auction. Nokia Siemens Networks and private equity firm MatlinPatterson were its competitors.

In mid-June, Nokia Siemens offered $650 million for Nortel's assets. That offer set others into motion and led to the auction.

"Our final offer for Nortel's assets represented a fair price, and we did not enter this process with a win-at-any-cost mindset," Bosco Novak, Nokia Siemens' chief markets operations officer, said in a statement.

Ericsson's bid is still subject to bankruptcy court approval in the U.S. and Canada.

The purchase virtually ensures that Nortel will sell off the rest of its businesses, instead of reorganizing into a smaller company.

"Nortel remains focused on finding the right buyers for our other businesses," Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said in a statement.

Once a giant in wireless gear, Toronto-based Nortel filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

Nortel was founded in 1895 as Northern Electric and Manufacturing and supplied telecommunications gear for Canada's young telephone system. At the height of its glory days about 10 years ago, Nortel was worth $250 billion and had more than 90,000 employees.

The Federal Communications Commission has canceled a meeting scheduled at which it planned to vote on a controversial free Internet plan.

The group has been considering whether it should auction off 25 megahertz of wireless spectrum in the 2155MHz to 2180MHz band. In exchange for using the spectrum, the FCC would require license holders to offer some free wireless broadband service, as a way to provide free Internet access to millions of Americans who either can't afford or don't want to pay for high-speed Internet access. That Web service would have been filtered for pornography and material deemed not suitable for children. People 18 and over would have the option to opt out of the filtered service.

The FCC was set to vote on the plan at a meeting on Thursday, December 18. But the plan has been met with opposition from several top officials, wireless providers, and even civil rights groups.

In a letter sent to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Wednesday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez expressed the Bush administration's opposition to the idea of imposing requirements on spectrum buyers.

"The administration believes that the (airwaves) should be auctioned without price or product mandate," Gutierrez wrote, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The history of FCC spectrum auctions has shown that the potential for problems increases in instances where licensing is overly prescriptive or designed around unproven business models."

The element of Web filtering worried at least one privacy group. "It's very troubling," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Los Angeles Times. "A government-mandated filter at the network level means the government can block anything it finds objectionable."

Existing wireless providers objected to the plan for entirely different issues. T-Mobile USA, which spent $4.2 billion in 2006 to acquire spectrum in an adjacent band, said that opening up this spectrum would cause interference and disrupt service, a claim the FCC says it disproved in October.

And other logistical questions--such as exactly how the service would be filtered for inappropriate content and how the age of people who opted out of the filtered service would be verified--remained unanswered.

The FCC has other problems as well. Earlier this week, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a report accusing Martin of ignoring his responsibilities and abusing his power as FCC chairman. A detailed report released on Tuesday and stemming from a bipartisan investigation in January claims Martin manipulated and withheld information from Congress and other FCC commissioners, and ignored evidence that certain national communications programs were being grossly mismanaged. The report describes a "climate of fear" that pervades the FCC and kept some people from testifying publicly.

Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.) on Friday sent a letter to Martin asking him to not to take action on any controversial policy proposals, according to the Journal. And on Friday night, the FCC reported it would, in fact, cancel the upcoming meeting.

A Federal Communications Commission engineering report released late Friday essentially backs a plan to create a free wireless Internet service by dismissing concerns about interference for existing providers.

The FCC has been considering auctioning 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz to 2180MHz band. As part of the rules for using the spectrum, the FCC plans to require license holders to offer some free wireless broadband service.

The FCC sees the plan, which is based on a proposal submitted to the FCC by M2Z Networks in 2006, as a way to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who either can't afford or don't want to pay for high-speed Internet access.

But existing providers like T-Mobile USA, which spent $4.2 billion in 2006 acquiring spectrum in an adjacent band, say that opening up this spectrum would cause interference and disrupt service.

Friday's report, however, concludes that spectrum could be used as planned "without a significant risk of harmful interference."

Click here for a PDF of the full FCC report.

It should be noted that this free Internet plan is separate from a proposal to use so called unused TV spectrum, also known as "white space" for wireless broadband services.

A Web site for matching buyers and sellers of wireless spectrum went live on Friday.

The site SpecEx.com, which is run by a start-up called Spectrum Bridge, is aiming to make sense of an existing secondary market for wireless licenses, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Federal Communications Commission periodically auctions off wireless spectrum licenses. Most of the spectrum licenses are used to provide cell phone service or to provide two-way radio communication or for emergency personnel. But there is some spectrum that is not used and lays fallow.

Big wireless operators, such as Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint Nextel, regularly trade these small slivers of spectrum licenses as do smaller license holders like universities or religious broadcasters. But now Spectrum Bridge's Web site will help make this process more efficient allowing sellers to know the clear value of their spectrum and allowing buyers to know who is selling spectrum, the Journal article

A spokesman for the FCC told the Journal that Chairman Kevin Martin has always supported the idea of secondary markets, which should prove to be a big help since buyers and sellers will need to get FCC approval for the transfer of licenses.

While the idea sounds like a good one, the article also points out that other wireless marketplaces haven't done so well in the past. The financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald launched a wireless spectrum market place that has failed to gain traction.

But as less spectrum is available for auction and licenses become more scarce, it might help spur adoption of the Spectrum Bridge marketplace. This is especially true after the FCC recently completed two major spectrum auctions in the last couple of years. What's more, as cable operators and other companies, such as Google, become interested in wireless and mobile services it creates more demand for wireless spectrum. And the SpecEx.com could end up being the place to go. Verizon Wireless told the Journal that it could be both a buyer and a seller of these licenses. But AT&T declined to comment and Sprint was unavailable for comment.

Sen. John McCain said at a campaign stop Tuesday that he will push for a national broadband wireless network for public safety.

Speaking at the National Sheriff's Association Annual Conference, McCain, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said a national, interoperable public safety broadband network was long overdue.

"You and all your colleagues in law enforcement need seamless communication across every agency and jurisdiction for emergency response," he said, according to a transcript of the event. "For more than a decade now, I have tried to persuade the Congress to provide dedicated radio spectrum and funding for communications equipment to local, state, and federal law enforcement officers."

McCain, who spent six years as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which is responsible for telecommunications policy, said during his speech Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission needs to make more radio spectrum available for law enforcement. He also said he would try to limit the amount of spectrum the FCC could auction off to the private sector.

"Just last year, I introduced a bill that provided for more than twice the capacity that the FCC has currently set aside for public safety," he said. "Special interests in Washington want the FCC to auction off more of that spectrum than I do. But no matter what price it might fetch at auction, it should be available for fighting crime and saving lives."

Ever since the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, politicians have lamented the lack of interoperability among various emergency communications networks as a key obstacle in responding effectively to disasters that arise.

Last year, the FCC auctioned off licenses in the 700MHz band of spectrum that is being vacated as part of the transition from analog to digital TV broadcast in early 2009. As part of this auction, the FCC set aside a 10MHz sliver of spectrum called the D-Block that was to be used in a public-private partnership to build a national public safety network.

When the bidding ended in March, the auction was deemed a huge success, generating about $19.6 billion in revenue for the U.S. government. But it was a failure in terms of helping establish a nationwide public safety network, since no bidder had reached the reserve price for the spectrum licenses. The FCC is currently trying to figure out how to re-auction the spectrum while still encouraging a public-private partnership for public safety.

But critics say the public-private plan is flawed. Recently, the New York Police Department filed comments with the FCC throwing cold water on the whole concept.

"The failure of the D-Block auction illustrates the problems inherent in the nationwide Public Private Partnership concept," the NYPD said in its filing. "Although public safety and commercial networks may share technology, they do not serve the same mission. Conflicts of interest arise that cannot be ignored. Public safety agencies require a robust network that will remain operational during virtually any circumstance. However, commercial network operators are motivated by commercial priorities to build networks that meet commercial requirements."

The FCC is also considering auctioning off other spectrum including "white space" spectrum, which falls between broadcast TV channels. Companies such as Google and Microsoft say that this spectrum can be used to build a wireless broadband network. And they say that devices can be developed to ensure that they don't interfere with signals broadcasting in the neighboring spectrum bands.

The FCC has also been considering a proposal to auction off spectrum in the 2.1GHz band to provide a free broadband wireless network.

McCain hasn't publicly taken a stance on these individual spectrum plans, but it's clear from his recent comments that he believes public safety organizations should get priority over any private sector companies looking to buy the spectrum licenses at auction.