Daily Tech Briefing: April 2, 2014

Hewlett-Packard officials recently showed off many new offerings at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. The company unveiled OpenFlow-enabled 802.11ac wireless access points, a Software-Defined Networking app designed for location awareness and new unified management appliances. HP says it will use new cloud-based and SDN capabilities in an effort to give its mobile users the best possible experience, expand on its unified wired and wireless solutions and boost network management. According to HP officials, the solutions are aimed at helping businesses manage demands from mobile employees, and turn the network from a cost center into a business asset.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere recently announced that the company is eliminating employer rate-plan discounts and replacing them with $25 reward cards for business partner employees each time they purchase a new device. Legere explained, “The old programs were designed to help big carriers close big corporate contracts, with employees as bargaining chips. We aren’t playing that game anymore.” However, it is unclear how much of a discount the employees of corporate customers were previously receiving, and whether the gift card will come close to the annual savings enjoyed on an employer discount plan.

The FCC recently announced that it has modified the rules regarding how Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure devices can operate in the 5 GHz spectrum band. The organization made 100MHz of spectrum more accessible for WiFi connections in public areas and homes. The FCC also increased the amount of allowed power for U-NII devices. What does all this mean for the average American? That faster Wi-Fi connections will hopefully be available soon in more places than ever before.

Finally, users of Open-Xchange’s cloud-based OX App Suite will now be able to create spreadsheets that work with files from Microsoft Office and other office suites thanks to the addition of the OX Spreadsheet. The OX Spreadsheet lets users edit and share spreadsheets from anywhere using an HTML5 Web browser on any device. The OX Spreadsheet is “the first browser-based spreadsheet app that can read and write native spreadsheet files without losing the original file format or detail,” according to Open-Xchange.