Brian Chen

With plans ranging from $60 to $200 a month for individuals and families, the price of a cellphone is soon eclipsed by the recurring service bills. What if I told you that it no longer had to be this way? Your phone bill could shrink to as little as $25 a month if you picked a wireless plan from a lesser-known service provider known as a discount carrier. The cheaper plans, based on my tests, offer sufficiently fast internet speeds and reliable phone service.

Many of us have been putting up with a persistent annoyance: a lousy internet connection. Average internet speeds all over the world have slowed. Some broadband providers are feeling crushed by the heavy traffic. And dated internet equipment can create a bottleneck for our speeds. What’s causing your slow speeds — your internet provider or your equipment at home? Here’s a method to figuring that out.

It has been weeks since the coronavirus brought our lives to a halt, shutting down our schools, offices and gyms. Stuck at home, we have had nothing but time to reflect on the things that matter. Consumer technology — most of it, anyway — is low on the list. That’s right.

The European Union wants Google to stop tying together its search, browser and app store products for handset makers. The regulators would love it if Google simply let handset makers like Samsung ship Android phones loaded with their own browsers and app stores instead of Google’s. Yet the European Union is letting Google decide how it wants to comply with its ruling. Keep in mind that Google is staffed with some of the world’s top lawyers and engineers, who will probably find compliance solutions that have a minimal impact on its business.

By the time you finish reading this column, you would be foolish not to download the messaging app Signal onto your smartphone and computer. The free encrypted messaging service has won the acclaim of security researchers and privacy advocates, including Edward J. Snowden. All have said that Signal goes above and beyond other chat tools in keeping electronic communications private. And now more than ever, we may need it. That’s because hacks are on the rise — look at how the activist group WikiLeaks posted a trove of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, for all to see.

Many are also watching for how government surveillance may grow under Donald J. Trump, who has chosen Mike Pompeo, who advocates greater surveillance, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Signal is one of many encrypted messaging services, but it stands out for its uncompromising security and ease of use. The chat service retains virtually no information from users, including messages and address books, on its servers. What’s more, messages remain encrypted when passing through Signal’s servers, meaning that the app’s creators can’t read them.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, has a vision for the future if regulators approve his company’s blockbuster bid for Time Warner. It goes like this: In a few years, your cellphone’s data connection will be so fast that you can download a television show in the blink of an eye and a movie in less than five seconds. (That compares with up to eight minutes now for a movie.) When that happens, Stephenson has suggested, you may as well just watch TV with your cellular connection and cancel your cable subscription.

Yet the vision may be a mirage. That is because 5G is unlikely to be deployed in any meaningful capacity in the next decade. The technology, which is supposed to offer connectivity at least 100 times faster than what is now available, is at the center of a bitter fight between carriers and telecom equipment makers about how it should work. No resolution is expected until at least 2020, said Bengt Nordstrom, co-founder of Northstream, a telecommunications consulting firm. “Anything before that will just be window dressing,” he said. Even after companies and telecommunications groups define 5G and how it should operate, they face the high cost of installing a wireless network capable of handling the fast wireless speeds. “They take a tremendous amount of money to build,” Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst, said of 5G networks. “The obvious question for AT&T is, where is the money going to come from to build out 5G networks on a large scale?”

Apple may well be the only tech company on the planet that would dare compare itself to Picasso.

In a class at the company’s internal training program, the so-called Apple University, the instructor likened the 11 lithographs that make up Picasso’s “The Bull” to the way Apple builds its smartphones and other devices.

Steven P. Jobs established Apple University as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses are not required, only recommended, but getting new employees to enroll is rarely a problem.

Although many companies have such internal programs, sometimes referred to as indoctrination, Apple’s version is a topic of speculation and fascination in the tech world.

Last quarter, Xiaomi was the top smartphone seller in the largest market in the world: China. A report published by Canalys highlighted Xiaomi’s remarkable growth, surpassing giants like Samsung and Lenovo to become the top player in China.

Because of its huge growth in China, Xiaomi became the fifth largest smartphone maker in the world.

For years, phone carriers have wanted to find ways to make it easy for mobile customers to buy things and charge them to their phone bills. That has legitimate uses, like buying ringtones and apps, or even making political donations or financial pledges to a nonprofit radio station. But it is easily abused, in ways not always easy to spot: Consumers, for instance, could start getting text messages about sports scores or horoscopes for which they never wanted to sign up.

As with 900 numbers, it’s ripe with potential for abuse, and in some cases that potential has become reality,” said Jan Dawson, an independent telecom analyst for Jackdaw Research.

Such practices recently returned to the spotlight when the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit accusing T-Mobile USA of profiting from “cramming” -- the tacking on of unauthorized charges that appear, often without a coherent explanation, on customers’ bills.

The practice of cramming is common on bills for traditional phone lines, but only recently began to appear on bills for mobile phone usage. Regulators say that in the context of cellphones, cramming typically occurs when a user is browsing the web with a smartphone, encounters an advertisement and inadvertently agrees to something. The phone number then subscribes to a text-message service, which delivers texts on topics like celebrity gossip, dating and the weather for a monthly fee that is usually around $9.

Despite those consumer protections, some companies still manage to drop in those extra charges on unwitting consumers. Since 2010, the Federal Communications Commission has taken nine anti-cramming enforcement actions against companies and proposed more than $33 million in fines. That is much less than 1 percent of the amount consumers may have lost to cramming charges in the same period.

T-Mobile US, the fourth-largest American phone carrier, has spent the last year and a half introducing aggressive new offerings to lure customers. Most recently, the company said it would add to those offerings with unlimited streaming music and the ability to test-drive an iPhone.

The company’s moves have helped attract millions of people to T-Mobile. And they have also impressed federal antitrust regulators, who have publicly patted themselves on the back for resisting a potential merger between T-Mobile and AT&T in 2011.

Now, T-Mobile is in talks with Sprint, the third-largest carrier, for a $32 billion merger. A deal could be announced this summer.

William Baer, the chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, noted that the effect of regulators blocking the AT&T and T-Mobile merger was “driving enormous benefits in the direction of the American consumer.”

But John Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, said that innovation and competition would only intensify with a merger.

T-Mobile said that it had teamed up with popular streaming music services including Pandora, Slacker Radio, Spotify, Rhapsody and Apple’s iTunes Radio. Music streamed from those services will not be counted against a user’s data plan.

All T-Mobile customers subscribed to its current plans, called Simple Choice, will be eligible for the free streaming.

T-Mobile also said that it would introduce UnRadio, a new online radio service with Rhapsody. Unlike many traditional Internet radio services, UnRadio will be an ad-free service that allows people to listen to specific songs and skip others as much as they want. It will be free for customers subscribed to T-Mobile’s unlimited data plans and $4 a month for other T-Mobile customers.