Wayne Rash

The announcement by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on July 6 that Facebook will be launching a newvideo chat capability using Skype was interesting on several levels. Perhaps the most interesting is that it appears to be a quick turnaround reaction to Google+, a new social networking service launched the previous week. Google+ has been described […]

Federal Communications Commission approval of two big decisions are even more uncertain since one member resigned and another intends to leave later this year, almost certainly before either AT&T’s proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile or LightSquared’s application to operate a wireless broadband network near the GPS bands comes to a vote.Currently one of the […]

The long-awaited 750-page report of the GPS Interference Technical Working Group released June 30 confirmed what multiple government agencies and private industry interests have been saying since the group began its work: that LightSquared’s plan for awireless broadband network would prevent GPS devices from working properly anywhere in the United States. But even before the […]

Now that Microsoft is buying Skype, new complications have cropped up that its management may never have thought of when it inked the deal a couple of months ago. While Microsoft obviously knew that it was buying a phone company, did the company’s lawyers warn it that this would mean working with a whole new […]

By the time you read this, Microsoft will have released itslong-awaited Office 365 cloud-based office-productivity suite to general availability. The product is intended to compete directly with Google Apps for Business, which has been out for a while. As the product was being readied for market, Microsoft asked the analysis arm of my company, Wayne […]

The powerful U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted June 23 to insert language into a spending bill that would block the Federal Communications Commission from spending any money approving LightSquared’s plan to launch a controversial Long-Term Evolution broadband system until concerns about interference with GPS signals are resolved. If the entire spending measure is […]

I was sitting with two executives from Nvidia in the Truman Lounge of the National Press Club. On the screen in front of me was an almost unrecognizable view of a terrorist speedboat taken from the helmet-mounted camera of a Marine in a helicopter. Even the best-trained observer would be hard-pressed to count the four […]

One rule of covering the news in Washington is to expect the strange, the weird and frequently, the deceitful. Things are rarely what they seem to be, and motives are rarely pure. In some cases, of course, people and groups with interests before Congress and federal agencies just plain lie. And sometimes they get away […]

The fact that Vivek Kundra has decided to leave the federal government to accept a fellowship at Harvard should surprise no one. There are several reasons why it should have been expected, even predicted, despite the fact that Kundra probably didn’t realize it himself initially. First, trying to implement a huge but vague mandate such […]

If everything goes according to AT&T’s grand plan, T-Mobile customers will be offered two choices in about a year. The first is go get sucked into AT&T with its dropped calls and legendary bad service, or they can find another carrier. Fortunately for T-Mobile customers who don’t want to be part of AT&T, there are […]

Two government bodies have now reported their findings confirming that LightSquared’s satellite-based LTE broadband data system interferes with the global GPS system run by the U.S. government. The short answer is that the interference ranges from significant to completely blanking out GPS signals required for navigation and many other uses. When this issue first emerged, […]

AT&T and Deutsche Telekom filed their replies to motions calling on the government to deny their proposed $39 billion merger application on July 10, the deadline for filing such motions with Federal Communications Commission.The 229-page document, prepared jointly by AT&T and T-Mobile, asserts that the opponents to the merger are wrong in their claims that […]