Vox

T-Mobile has started offering fiber home internet in a limited pilot program

T-Mobile has quietly started selling fiber-based home internet. T-Mobile says it’s testing fiber optic internet in certain residential buildings in Manhattan as a complement to its fixed wireless offering, which it made available to the public in April. The company isn’t deploying an entirely new fiber network for the pilot; it’s running on a local provider’s fiber lines. T-Mobile claims the service offers 940Mbps upload and download speeds.

SpaceX to acquire small satellite startup Swarm Technologies

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is acquiring the small-satellite data provider Swarm Technologies, scooping up the startup’s roughly 30 employees and its network of 120 tiny satellites.

Dish to launch wireless 5G service in beta at end of September 2021

Dish Network said that its Las Vegas 5G wireless service is in the final phase of construction and will launch in beta by the end of September 2021. The beta launch is an important first step toward its commitment to covering 70 percent of the US population by June 2023, a target that’s looking more ambitious by the day as the company continues to lose wireless customers.

T-Mobile confirms it will shut down Sprint’s LTE network in 2022

T-Mobile has committed to a June 30, 2022 shutdown date for Sprint’s LTE network. It’s an expected move as T-Mobile continues to absorb Sprint’s network and customers into its own base, and comes six months after its contentious planned January 1, 2022 shutdown of Sprint’s 3G CDMA network.

T-Mobile wants to lure back Boost customers it sold to Dish

T-Mobile is introducing a new prepaid promotion with incentives for customers on other prepaid MVNOs to switch to Metro by T-Mobile, including waiving switching fees, a discount on an unlimited plan with 5G, and a trade-in offer for a new 5G phone. In other words, it’s doing exactly what it told regulators it wouldn’t do when it acquired Sprint a year ago.

Zuckerberg on why Facebook is becoming ‘a metaverse company’

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision. The metaverse is having a moment; coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space.

Predictably, T-Mobile’s merger promises weren’t enough to make a carrier out of Dish

When T-Mobile acquired Sprint in April of 2020, it brought our major wireless carrier choices from four down to three. Recognizing that this would indeed be a bad thing for US wireless customers (aka all of us), T-Mobile agreed to a set of conditions with the FCC’s blessing that would theoretically position Dish Network to fill the Sprint-shaped hole in our wireless landscape. In other words, one wireless competitor was allowed to reduce competition only if it agreed to help set up another competitor in its place. Sounds a little suspect, right?

The Dish ‘fix’ for the T-Mobile-Sprint merger seems more shortsighted than ever

To sell regulators on their $26 billion mega merger, T-Mobile and Sprint executives told anyone who’d listen that the deal would provide near-miraculous benefits. But economists warned that US telecom merger promises are historically meaningless, and the reduction in overall competitors would — sooner or later — result in higher prices and job cuts.