In March the CEOs of Sprint, Verizon and AT&T took the stage at CTIA in Orlando for a lively discussion about the state of the mobile ecosystem and its future. The keynote was affable with an undertone of drama, coming two days after AT&T announced that it was acquiring T-Mobile for $39 billion.

The CEOs returned to the stage today at the CTIA Enterprise & Apps conference in San Diego. A lot has changed from March. Sprint has sued AT&T to prevent the T-Mobile merger and is fighting for its livelihood as a major U.S. carrier. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse took a couple swipes at AT&T head man Ralph de la Vega but overall the carriers spoke about working together and how they are pushing the bounds of mobile innovation in the United States. Check out our Storify of the keynote below.

The company, which is the third largest wireless carrier in the United States, reiterated its concerns over the deal, primarily that it would push the wireless industry toward a duopoly controlled by AT&T and Verizon, limiting innovation and consumer choice. The proposed merger, which the lawsuit calls "brazenly anticompetitive" would make life harder for smaller carriers like Sprint, who would be in less of a position to competitively challenge the two dominant players.

In response to Sprint's lawsuit, AT&T accused the plaintiff of being "more interested in protecting itself than it is in promoting competition that benefits consumers." AT&T has argued that the merger would help expand 4G wireless coverage nationwide and create jobs.

Of course, Sprint is indeed concerned about the impact a potential merger would have on its own business. As the lawsuit charges, the deal would result in AT&T and Verizon collectively controlling 90% of wireless industry profits and 75% of customers nationwide. As a result, the companies would have "exclusive early access to iconic handsets" like the iPhone and "preferential access to the other products and services that make wireless services attractive to consumers."

The lawsuit also expresses concern over AT&T's ability to "directly raise the costs that their rivals must incur for backhaul and roaming" which would "ensure that Sprint and the smaller fringe carriers would be injured in their businesses and would be unable to restore the competition lost by the elimination of T-Mobile.

In addition to being harmful to smaller competitors, the merger would hurt other companies in "connected markets" like those for things like mobile operating systems and application development and present issues for consumers, who would face higher prices, the lawsuit charges.

In making its case against the merger, the Sprint lawsuit draws heavily on history and is quick to point out that prices remained high and innovation minimal during the Bell System monopoly in the wireline telephone industry, which was broken up by the Department of Justice in 1984.

The controversial plan, which was announced in March, would result in AT&T paying $39 billion to acquire T-Mobile from its parent company Deutsche Telekom. AT&T touted the merger as a way to roll out Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G networks to more customers and foster innovation. Some of its competitors and a few lawmakers have been more skeptical of the deal, while a group of customers have sued AT&T in an attempt to block the merger.

If it were to be approved, the merger would effectively result in a duopoly in the wireless industry, with AT&T and Verizon dominating the space and, some fear, leaving little room for competition and the interests of consumers.

"AT&T's elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market," the U.S. filing said.

The acquisition will allow AT&T to improve network quality for both companies' customers, says AT&T, while also enabling it to expand its 4G/LTE deployment to 95% of the U.S. population.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO, notes the importance of this move, explaining that "mobile broadband networks drive economic opportunity everywhere, and they enable the expanding high-tech ecosystem that includes device makers, cloud and content providers, app developers, customers, and more. During the past few years, America’s high-tech industry has delivered innovation at unprecedented speed, and this combination will accelerate its continued growth."

AT&T also pointed out via its press release that the LTE rollout would help achieve the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and President Obama’s goals to connect “every part of America to the digital age.”

Business Insider calculated the customer numbers involved in this deal, noting that at the end of 2010, AT&T had 95.5 million wireless subscribers and T-Mobile had 33.7 million subscribers. Their new combined total would be 129.2 million subscribers. In comparison, Verizon Wireless had 94.1 million wireless customers.

But the news isn't all rosy, cautions Forrester research analyst Charles Golvin.

“AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile, if approved, brings good news and bad news. The good news: high-speed mobile broadband service will improve in quality and coverage, including — in the long run — those in rural communities outside the reach of terrestrial broadband today. The bad news: the cost of that service won't come down nearly as fast as customers would like, since AT&T and Verizon Wireless combined would own nearly three out of every four wireless subscriptions in the US. While clearly troublesome for Sprint and other mobile smaller mobile competitors, It's also bad news for cable operators, whose incipient mobility products will suffer in comparison to what AT&T and Verizon can offer.”

T-Mobile customers, of course, just want to know if this new deal means they can finally get the iPhone, but there's no word on that just yet.

Is this an unjust restriction on the use of data we've already paid for? Is it a logical move to keep the whole of the network sustainable at a time of heavy demand? Is it, in a way, good news to know that despite the fact that it's a violation of your contract - you'll still be allowed to use tethering if you just pay a small monthly fee? That really depends on your perspective.

DataPro 4GB for Smartphone Tethering
• $45 per month (this gives you 4GB in total, combining both your smartphone data plan for $25 and the tethering feature, $20)
• $10 per each additional GB thereafter, added automatically as needed
• Mobile Hotspot capabilities are included for compatible Smartphones

People in the bandwidth business may not feel this way, but I feel most inclined to say that bandwidth needs to be as cheap, reliable, high-speed and available as it possibly can. In a time when economic and cultural growth and development are so impacted by connected activities, it seems essential that business and cultural activities can be performed as quickly and easily as possible anywhere and at any time. Especially if I'm already paying for the data.

What are your thoughts, readers?

Remember this Attack?

If this story sounds familiar to you, it should. This summer, the news spread like wildfire around the Web, not just because of the hack attempt itself, but also because of the name of the so-called "security firm" itself, which refers to a decidedly NSFW (not safe for work) Web prank. The news story was broken by Gawker originally. For a refresher, you can read all the details here.

The security firm, really just a group of hackers calling itself a firm, exploited a security flaw on AT&T's Web servers which allowed them to obtain email addresses from the SIM cards of iPad 3G users. This hack did not affect users of Wi-Fi only iPads.

At the time of the original report, the number of comprised accounts was said to be around 114,000. Today, it seems that number was just a bit higher: 120,000.

How the Attack Worked

The hackers had used a specially formatted HTTP request, which would return a user's ICC-ID, that is, their iPad 3G SIM card address. This number, which stands for "integrated circuit card identifier" is used to identify SIM cards by associating a mobile subscriber with their device. A script on AT&T's website allowed anyone to submit an ICC-ID and it would then return the subscriber's email address.

The hackers found the ICC-ID's thanks to many public photos hosted on the photo-sharing website Flickr and other similar sites. They were also able to guess a large number of ICC-ID's just by looking at known IDs and making educated guesses.

To harvest the data from the AT&T servers, the hackers wrote an automated PHP script which would send a request to the website that made it appear as if the request came from a specific iPad user's device.

Goatse Security said it notified AT&T of the breach, but only after sharing the script with an unknown number of third-parties. AT&T closed the security hole shortly after being notified.

Who Was Affected?

Among the users affected were many high-profile government officials and military personnel. Based on the email addresses gathered, the hackers had managed to snoop out accounts from the major service branches of the military, NASA, the FCC, DARPA, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Health.

In other industries, the affected individuals included top executives from The New York Times Company, Dow Jones, Condé Nast, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, HBO, Hearst as well as others from Google, Amazon, AOL, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

AT&T said it would inform customers whose email address had been obtained through this attack, but generally downplayed the breach saying "the only information that can be derived from the ICC-ID's is the email address attached to that device."

From Reuters' report, it sounds as if there is other personal data involved, too. However, we may not know if that's an accurate statement until this afternoon's press conference.

Soon after the attack occurred, the FBI announced it would open an investigation into the iPad breach. Today's charges are the result of that investigation. We imagine that with a name like "Goatse," this hacker group wasn't too hard to track down.

According to Retuers, the defendants Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer were each charged with one count of fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Spitler will appear in federal court in Newark, New Jersey on Tuesday and Aurenheimer will appear in an Arkansas federal court.

According to AT&T, the added spectrum will be used to enhance the company's 4G network, where it will help deliver "substantial capacity gains."

AT&T says it will deploy the spectrum to serve as "supplemental downlink, using carrier aggregation technology," which will "address increased consumer demand for rich mobile media content." Or, in simpler terms, AT&T is beefing up its network so you can watch more YouTube videos on your phone.

Qualcomm says that it will integrate the carrier aggregation technology into its chipset roadmap and AT&T said it will begin deploying this spectrum once compatible handsets and network equipment are developed (iPhone 5, anyone?)

Why We Care

What's so great about the 700 MHz block of spectrum? Well, if you go by what the Engadget commenters are in a tizzy about, it's the fact that this spectrum frequency has better building penetration, as it falls on the lower end of the scale.

And, as is usually the case, those Engadget commenters are well clued-in. Bloomberg quoted Craig Moffet, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., as saying much of the same thing. "This is very high-quality spectrum. It's especially concentrated in the urban areas," he said.  "It provides a very strong signal inside buildings and it's extremely good at penetrating walls and windows."

Moffet said the spectrum will help AT&T with the network congestion problems such as those experienced by iPhone users.

However, AT&T doesn't just focus on the "customer service" aspect of Twittered complaints - it also watches Twitter posting volume to look for red flags. 

Yes - sometimes actual outages are spotted thanks to Twitter. And did you ever wonder what that looks like?

In this photo, for instance, you can see the number of Tweets today (per hour) compared with Tweets from a week ago. A spike on this graph would indicate something that needs looking into.

Of course, a screen of Tweets is only one of the many, many screens AT&T engineers stare at all day long:

Hmm. This multi-monitor setup in my home office all of a sudden looks very sad in comparison.

According to the statement Isis released today, its focus will be on building a mobile payments network that uses "smartphone and near-field communication (NFC) technology to modernize the payments process." The service will be released over the next 18 months in key geographic markets.

With Isis, the newly launched website explains, customers can leave their credit cards, loyalty cards and coupons behind, and instead set their preferences on their mobile devices to receive the savings and offers they want.

Involved in the project are Discover Financial Services and Barclays US, part of U.K. bank Barclays PLC, which is expected to be the first issuer on the network.

Combined, the carriers will offer Isis to over 200 million customers. Additionally, it will leverage Discover's merchant network, which now has over 7 million locations nationwide.

"We believe the venture will have the scope and scale necessary to introduce mobile commerce on a broad basis," Abbott said. "In the beginning, we intend to fully utilize Discover's national payment infrastructure as well as Barclaycard's expertise in contactless and mobile payments. Moving forward, Isis will be available to all interested merchants, banks and mobile carriers."

NFC Making Waves

Near-field communications, or NFC technology, has yet to make major inroads here in the U.S., but an initiative like this, combined with concurrent advancements in mobile smartphone technology will soon change that. Yesterday, for example, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the next version of Android, the company's mobile operating system (code-name Gingerbread) will include support for NFC.

He also showed off an unannounced Samsung phone, reportedly the so-called "Nexus S," the future Google flagship phone that will feature the latest stock build of the Android mobile OS. The phone will include NFC features, Schmidt revealed to the audience at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where he was speaking at the time.

Although less publicly, Apple, too, appears to be working on adding NFC technology to its iPhone devices. In August, the company hired NFC expert Benjamin Vigier as its new product manager for mobile commerce. Apple has also filed a number of NFC-related patents, including those for a mobile payments service, "iPay," "iBuy" and "iCoupons," among others. However, little is known about how or when Apple plans to implement these services. Meanwhile, given that Android's Gingerbread mobile OS update is only days away from launch, it appears that Google will be first to ship with NFC support. (Other handset makers have already announced support for NFC, including Nokia, which plans to ship the technology in all smartphones in 2011, for example).

Outside of these high-level efforts from carriers, handset makers and OS vendors, startups like the Palo Alto, California-based Bling Nation have created ways to work around the lack of NFC technology in U.S. mobile devices with the introduction of NFC-enabled stickers for phones and the accompanying readers, the latter of which are provided free to businesses for use at the point-of-sale. As NFC takes off in the smartphone market, with Android and iPhone potentially leading the way, Bling Nation could serve as the alternative method for feature phone users and others without NFC to take part in NFC-enabled mobile payments - that is, assuming Bling Nation can achieve wide enough merchant adoption.

More information about Isis and its plans are now available online at the website www.paywithisis.com

Wang explained how AT&T uses two different levels of filtering to parse the data. First, it pulls all tweets somehow related to AT&T and then it uses more specific queries to find tweets directly related to service issues. In the latter case, it looks for messages saying things like "call dropped" or "3G," for example.

"We are trying to identify three pieces of information: where the customer experienced problems, what type of problem, and when they experienced it," Wang explained. Gathering information via Twitter is fast - issues discovered via Twitter were found, on average, 20 minutes prior to customer service phone calls reporting the same problem. It can also help discover issues that would have never been reported otherwise, it was noted. AT&T says it's using the data it collects from Twitter to help prioritize fixes.

Twitter Customer Service Now Becoming Standard?

What's most remarkable about this story, perhaps, is how unremarkable it is. So a company uses Twitter to listen for customer service complaints - well, don't they all?

But the fact of the matter is, they don't. Not yet. We begin tracking this trend over two years ago, when we reported that several companies, including Comcast and Southwest Airlines, had begun to use the young social network to track and respond to customer complaints. (To give you an idea of how new of an idea this was at the time, one of the hot tools being used to tracks tweets was a complicated creation over on Yahoo Pipes!)

Over the years, the Twitter customer service trend has continued. In December 2009, Dell, which ran a number of Twitter initiatives including customer service channels, announced it sold over $6.5 million on Twitter through its @DellOutlet deals. Salesforce.com integrated Twitter into its Service Cloud platform last spring. Helpdesk provider Zendesk announced Twitter monitoring abilities this July.

Today, Twitter sees a number of major brands participating, from Ford to Starbucks and from Samsung to Best Buy. And there are so many others, too. 

There may come a time when your every tweet is captured and analyzed by a company somewhere, somehow. DataSift, a new real-time Twitter analytics product from Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, may enable this, in fact. (We're hoping!) But we aren't there yet, not by a longshot.

In the meantime, however, the next time your iPhone drops a call, tweet about it. At least AT&T is listening.

As a result of this new data, the analyst firm upgraded AT&T's stock from "Neutral" to "Outperform" (a buy rating) noting that the stock would retain its position even if Verizon gets the iPhone next year, as many industry insiders expect.

As for iPhone users in particular, Credit Suisse found that only 18% would leave AT&T when their contract expired - that is, sans termination fee. While that's more than the 9% of AT&T's subscriber base who plan on switching when their contract is up, it's still a lower number than many would have expected.

Chaplin determined that the AT&T exodus to Verizon would end up costing the network around 1.4 million subscribers, while boosting Verizon's new subscriber count from 2 to 4 million - this assuming, of course, that the mythical Verizon iPhone turns out to be real.

AT&T iPhone Satisfaction: Not as Horrible as We Thought

Meanwhile, iPhone users are slightly less satisfied with AT&T's service overall than the subscriber base as a whole: 51% of AT&T users are satisfied with the service, but only 42% of iPhone users feel the same. However, that's still a much higher number than previously imagined.

In fact, this data seems somewhat in opposition to the market research data released just last month from Morspace. According to their survey of 1,000 customers, 34% of AT&T iPhone owners are waiting for the iPhone to become available on another carrier before upgrading their handset, and 47% are considering switching to Verizon. When technology news site TechCrunch reported this news, it said: "When AT&T's monopoly on the iPhone ends... it's not going to be pretty."

But which is it? Forty seven percent of iPhone owners will go to Verizon? Or only 23%?

For what it's worth, Credit Suisse isn't the only firm to upgrade AT&T's stock as of late. MarketWatch also noted that Deutsche Bank analyst Brett Feldman upped shares to a buy rating in July, saying that concerns about the potential loss of iPhone exclusivity have been "overblown."

At the moment, all this news is much to-do about nothing, given that the Verizon iPhone exists only as a rumor, not as an official proclamation from Apple. That being said, it's still somewhat startling the number of everyday people I encounter who have taken the rumor to heart, telling me they're "waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon" before getting one. The rumor has been around long enough that people believe it's a tried-and-true fact.

We'll have to wait until next year to see if that's actually true.

That little twist of language (is it 4G or isn't it?) comes on the heels of AT&T chiding T-Mobile earlier this year after T-Mobile called its own network 4G when in fact it's a revamped kind of 3G. Big carriers having a spat over marketing language? Or genuine disagreement over what those networks really are?

T-Mobile, the nation's fourth largest carrier, is in the middle of upgrading its existing 3G network to what's called HSPA+ - a faster version of 3G. So what's 4G? That term, like 3G, refers to each generation of cellular wireless standards. According to the ITC, the fourth generation (4G) has to have download speeds of at least 100 mbps. Companies using technology that's faster than 3G (Sprint, using WiMax) or that will be using it in the near future (Verizon and AT&T using LTE) advertise that they're "4G" - but none of them offers that kind of speed.

Whatever category they fall into, at this point there isn't a huge difference between T-Mobile's HSPA+ and Sprint's 4G network. Limited studies done earlier this year found that T-Mobile had a slight edge on downloading speeds and a significant advantage when it came to uploading.

But speed isn't the only issue: 3G networks are already burdened to the point that users are subjected to caps on monthly data usage. To catch up to the other carriers, T-Mobile could build its own WiMax or LTE network - or invest in an existing one. Last week The Wall St. Journal reported that T-Mobile is interested in a relationship with Clearwire, the Sprint-backed company that provides WiMax 4G service.

As each carrier races up its network's speed, there's one thing to keep in mind:

"Next generation technologies like pre-4G and 4G with their promise of greater speed and spectral efficiency become all the more appealing to the players involved in [information and communication technologies]," wrote the authors of a recent Business Insights report. "However, the reality is that 80% of mobile connections are still on 2G networks and 3G connections are only available in some areas, even in developed countries, with the exception of a few leading countries."

In the race to the mobile internet, the machines have quickened their pace beyond what we humans have, at least in the US. Dishwashers, refrigerators, home heating units and other objects are next in line, then perhaps very widespread tiny sensors - and that's a lot more exciting than it might sound.

What Does This Mean for Consumers?

As our own Richard MacManus wrote last month in an article titled Beyond Social: Read/Write in The Era of Internet of Things, there's an incredibly potent combination coming of social network user activity data, structured data offered as a platform by governments and a tidal wave of data from Things like sensors and connected devices.

Hopefully, the sophistication of connected devices and the data they publish to the internet will continue to grow. Where there are large sets of data, especially data connected to our real-world lives, there is a rich opportunity for data analysis. That analysis can lead to improved personal recommendations, detection of opportunities for innovation, pattern recognition and problem pre-emption, or illumination of inefficient or inequitable allocations of resources that ought to be resolved. This is data as a whole new platform, a greenfield for as yet unforeseeable innovations.

The coming explosion of data won't just be cross-referencable and sortable by the contact lists of people represented in the data, or patterns of consumption activity by people, as today's stream of social data is. It will include data points like temperature, tilt, sound, pressure and many other things measurable by the sensors inside the washing machines and heat pumps inside our homes. Transmission of all this data is shaping up to be a major point of competition for data network providers.

Those machines could become co-participants in our social networks as their data comes online and is made available to programmers. Imagine your Facebook news feed: "Your sister Jenny changed her relationship status to 'in a relationship' and your toaster is using more electricity than it should be."

Programmatically readable sensor data isn't making up the bulk of the growth of object data today, but it likely will in the future.

And the future is fast approaching. Today we learned that the machines are running faster towards it than we are.

Preview: Every time there's major Internet of Things news, the need to discuss privacy in this sector grows stronger. That's the subject of a forthcoming post here on ReadWriteWeb.