Since most people’s contracts are usually 2 years long, you don’t usually see any significant movements of subscribers from one carrier to another. They happen slowly and quarterly, after all, it would take at least 8 quarters for a company to theoretically lose all of their subscribers if every single person wanted to leave. So, it comes as little surprise that Sprint still holds the numbers 3 spot in terms of subscribers when compared to T-Mobile. Based on T-Mobile’s last earnings call, they ended the first quarter of this year up 2.4 million with nearly 50 million customers, coming ever closer to Sprint’s 54 million. And if you take into consideration T-Mobile’s JUMP program and the millions of customers that are involved in that, it seems logical that T-Mobile would be buying more phones from manufacturers. Also, keep in mind that T-Mobile also offers a no-contract plan option and actually encourages a lot of users to buy their owns outright and just pay the base price of T-Mobile’s service.

According to Reuters, the fact that they had added more subscribers than any other carrier in the US significantly added to this overtaking of Sprint. T-Mobile bought 6 million smartphones in the first quarter of this year while Sprint only bought 5 million, according to Neil Shah of Counterpoint Technology Market Research. There wasn’t much other useful information from Reuters or Neil Shah in the article, although one can surmise that if a carrier is ordering more phones than their larger competitor that they’re clearly doing more business ans signing up more customers for plans. And now that T-Mobile is selling more phones than Sprint, its merely a matter of time until they surpass Sprint in subscribers as well. However, that might change if the T-Mobile-Sprint merger/acquisition is approved by the DoJ and FTC.

This is also possibly because T-Mobile is also a leader in technology, adopting certain technologies like VoLTE ahead of their competitors, especially Sprint who has yet to deploy enough of an LTE network to even consider the idea of VoLTE. T-Mobile is also vastly faster and cheaper than Sprint in a lot of scenarios so, I have a feeling that a lot of T-Mobile’s customers are AT&T and Sprint customers, which could be why Softbank, Sprint’s parent, want to buy them.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has charged five Chinese Military Official with the charge of Cyber Espionage based on the hacking of US companies’ systems and the theft of their trade secrets. According to the Department of Justice (DoJ) Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, U.S. Steel, the United Steelworkers Union and SolarWorld were all victims of Chinese Military hacking.

The charges claim that the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) officials (mostly Generals) cooperated to steal information from US companies and access proprietary information from those companies and use them for the benefit of Chinese companies. This has been an ongoing charge by the US Government and US companies that the Chinese have been hacking them and stealing their proprietary IP and information for use by Chinese companies or the Chinese military. There have been a multitude of US defense contractors charging the same thing on Chinese hackers, however, those companies were not involved or mentioned in this DoJ charge.

Ultimately, the Chinese Government is likely not doing anything any differently from how the NSA and the US Government are being claimed to be responsible for hacking. There have been claims that the NSA’s hacking of both US and foreign companies and governments has been passed to companies that are beneficial to certain US companies.

Honestly, the US Government really won’t be able to accomplish anything with these official hacking charges other than making their claims and complaints official. The reality of the situation is that China is the most populated country in the world and the second biggest economy in the world. Based on that simple fact alone, not much will happen to any Chinese officials especially if the Chinese government also makes these PLA officers diplomats in some form or another. There are a lot of ways that the DoJ could go after these guys but realistically these charges really wouldn’t be enforceable outside of the US. So, now, these military officers are going to just avoid travel to the US, even though considering the activities that they were already known for participating in.

The post DoJ Charges Five Chinese Military Officers with Hacking appeared first on VR World.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged five Chinese Military Official with the charge of Cyber Espionage based on the hacking of US companies’ systems and the theft of their trade secrets. According to the Department of Justice (DoJ) Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, U.S. Steel, the United Steelworkers Union and SolarWorld were all victims of Chinese Military hacking.

The charges claim that the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) officials (mostly Generals) cooperated to steal information from US companies and access proprietary information from those companies and use them for the benefit of Chinese companies. This has been an ongoing charge by the US Government and US companies that the Chinese have been hacking them and stealing their proprietary IP and information for use by Chinese companies or the Chinese military. There have been a multitude of US defense contractors charging the same thing on Chinese hackers, however, those companies were not involved or mentioned in this DoJ charge.

Ultimately, the Chinese Government is likely not doing anything any differently from how the NSA and the US Government are being claimed to be responsible for hacking. There have been claims that the NSA’s hacking of both US and foreign companies and governments has been passed to companies that are beneficial to certain US companies.

Honestly, the US Government really won’t be able to accomplish anything with these official hacking charges other than making their claims and complaints official. The reality of the situation is that China is the most populated country in the world and the second biggest economy in the world. Based on that simple fact alone, not much will happen to any Chinese officials especially if the Chinese government also makes these PLA officers diplomats in some form or another. There are a lot of ways that the DoJ could go after these guys but realistically these charges really wouldn’t be enforceable outside of the US. So, now, these military officers are going to just avoid travel to the US, even though considering the activities that they were already known for participating in.

The post DoJ Charges Five Chinese Military Officers with Hacking appeared first on VR World.

In an attempt to placate the FCC, DoJ, FTC and basically every government agency on earth against their acquisition of Time Warner Cable, Comcast has announced that they will be divesting 3.9 million subscribers from the potential Comcast-TimeWarnerCable merger. This new announcement is a huge farce on the part of Comcast attempting to make it look like they’re seriously divesting from certain markets and giving subscribers to Charter. When in reality this new deal they are proposing actually muddies the waters further than a straight Comcast-TimeWarner acquisition and lines Comcast up for a quiet re-acquisition of those 3.9 million subscribers as well as “New Charter” which will be a new version of the current Charter Communications that will be eastablished to enable this deal.

Time Warner will divest 1.4 million of their video subscribers to “New Charter” which will 100% own the old Charter and 33% of the “SpinCo” which is going to be a publicly traded company that will take on the 2.5 million video subscribers that Comcast has “divested” from, even though 77% of that “SpinCo” remains to be accounted for by Comcast and how much of that remainder they will own. They also haven’t said how much they will be selling these divested customers to the “New Charter” for nor how much of a stake in SpinCo they will have, which i suspect will be bigger than anyone wants to believe. I suspect that Comcast will take a fairly large share of this new “SpinCo” even though Charter will be contracted to operate it and hold 33% of the shares.

This is all being done by Comcast to reduce their overall subscriber base numbers to levels that make them appear smaller and less monopolistic even though the land line internet services are much more important to us and the future of the company. They are not talking about internet subscribers whatsoever but rather video subscribers, which, if you remove 3.9 million from a unified Comcast-Time Warner merger, would bring the new company down from about 33 million to  28 million, a mere drop in the bucket of around 11%. This is merely a symbolic gesture on the part of Comcast to placate the regulators that say that Comcast and Time Warner Cable need to divest in order to be able to move forward with the acquisition. In my eyes, no divestment is good enough to allow the two companies to merge, especially knowing Comcast’s behavior with competitors like Netflix. And the weirdest part is that their plan to divest of the 3.9 million video subscribers would ultimately create Charter as the second biggest cable operator in the nation after Comcast-Time Warner Cable and they would have a pretty significant hand/stake in that venture’s creation, meaning that they wouldn’t have much trouble gobbling it up if they felt like it.

All of this stinks really badly and I simply don’t see how consumers stand to benefit from this acquisition whatsoever. Sure, it furthers Comcast’s thirst for acquisition, more subscribers and more growth as well as Time Warner Cable’s desire to be bought out by someone bigger so that they can move on from their ‘skimpy’ profits. It also satisfies Charter’s desires to expand as they were once a suitor of Time Warner Cable, prior to Comcast, and now they get 1.4 million of Time Warner Cable’s subscribers AND they also get to manage 2.5 million of Comcast’s ‘SpinCo’ new cable operator entity. So, yes, the companies will be happy, but they will ultimately screw the customers more than anything else and this complicated deal serves no real benefit other than scale to Comcast. Their plans to divest are merely a bone to throw to the regulators so that the regulators can say that Comcast made an effort to be ‘fair’ and balance out the market power across the market even though Comcast + Time Warner Cable would still be more than 4 times bigger after the plan to divest as their next biggest cable competitor.

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