1.3million Data Requests Made by Government to Sprint & Other Mobile Networks: [11th Jul 2012]

The congressman Ed Markey has been running a campaign of letter writing to mobile carriers asking them if and how many times they have handed over user information to the government. This week he received details which showed that there were 1.3 million requests made by the government for user data in the last year. Sprint was the company which was most often asked with 500,000 requests for data and 325,000 court orders for wiretaps. It has been pointed out that the numbers (which were estimated by Sprint) are much higher than the figures given by the government. The government was required to release the figures under federal law and stated that 27,000 less wiretaps were requested from the carrier than Sprint has claimed.


Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile have expressed their concern over a Federal Election Commission proposal which could see election campaign donations made by text. They feel that this could lead to liability issues, with the carrier being forced to determining if the donor is eligible to make such a donation. The FEC have been asked to give more information about how the scheme would run and what the carriers would have to do if they took part. It is thought that text donations would be capped at $10 per text and $50 per month. This type of donation system is already used by a umber of organizations including the Red Cross.


It has been reported that the FCC are ready to approve the purchase of spectrum from cable companies by Verizon, but that one final stumbling block may be the marketing deals which have been worked out between the carrier and the cable companies. It is thought that the deals may affect competition. The Justice Department is deciding on the competition matter and the FCC will wait until this outcome is known. The DoJ is thought to be uneasy about the joint operating entity which would be created which would help them create new technologies to move customers between cable and wireless services. Creating a block to competition from elsewhere. Verizon have also stated that their proposed swap of spectrum with T-Mobile will make the deal with the cable companies even more consumer friendly. It would also mitigate the issue of having too much spectrum in the hands of one company. Verizon is offering to give spectrum to T-Mobile if the cable deal goes through.


AT&T has announced it will be launching a service this week which will prevent access to its network by phones which have been stolen. The move is part of an industry wide campaign to prevent phones from reaching the black market. The stolen phone database will be used to prevent stolen phones from accessing wireless networks. The system will be able to be used by AT&T customers soon and other carriers will become involved later this year. The move is part of the national database of stolen phones which is being developed by all major carriers, the police and the FCC. It is expected that the individual databases being built by each carrier will be merged to form one national database. The phones will be disabled as soon as they are reported stolen and prevented from being reconnected or sold-on.