Yesterday I found myself sitting at home, contemplating life’s big problems. No, not how to find happiness or balance work and family or reach spiritual enlightenment. No, those are trivial dalliances. Yesterday I was contemplating how I was going to get over this super-duper combination of sinus infection and bronchitis that I’m currently suffering from while simultaneously finding the time and energy to create the most fantastic duck costume ever…by Friday. (And you thought your life was hard.)

Of course the best way to do this would be to

1. Go to a Doc in the Box and be diagnosed with near-death syndrome.
2. Visit a pharmacy and pick up my prescribed cocktail of antibiotics and cough syrup to be taken twice a day for four days.
3. Awake from my haze just in time to rent a giant duck suit from a costume shop so I can waddle my way to a Halloween party.

(more…)

Here’s an update from Wireless Week about Verizon’s proposed 3-cent charge to mobile content providers:

“Verizon Wireless said today that contrary to reports last week, it has not decided to increase per-message text fees for content aggregators from 1 cent per message to 3 cents.

“The prospect of an increase is just one proposal and Verizon could not act unilaterally to implement it, a company spokesman explained this morning.

“Initial reports last week cited a letter from Verizon to aggregators in which the wireless operator said the increase is effective Nov. 1.

“That was a misstatement, the nation’s second-largest wireless operator said today.”

I just read that Verizon will begin charging content providers $0.03 for every message they send to Verizon subscribers.

According to the article on RCR Wireless, the carrier said that “the new fee was necessary to cover the carrier’s overhead in delivering MT messages.”

The fee will apply to standard and premium programs but not to free-to-end-user, mobile giving, or non-profit organizational programs.

That’s all, folks. For more information, check out the article.

Looks like Verizon will get to retain many more midcycle customers by next year because the carrier acquired 1.5 million new customers in Q2.

According to RCR Wireless, Verizon “ended the first half of the year with 68.7 million total customers on its network, with 66.7 million of those being direct, retail customers.”

For the rest of the article, check out RCR Wireless.

Verizon sent me a pretty cool text message on July 7. I would have written about it sooner, but I was, um, washing my hair…for, um, over two weeks.

Here’s what it said:

From: 900070003548
Free Verizon Wireless
Msg: We will give you a
$10 bill credit AND plant a
tree on your behalf when
you sign up for paperless
billing & autopay! Log on
to vzw.com/myverizon,
click profile, & update bill
options. Offer ends
7/13//08. To opt out of
future messages, reply X.

I thought that was a pretty cool offer, especially since I always view my bill online and never actually open the paper bill I receive at home. And a tree! Just for me? Just for getting rid of something I didn’t like anyway? Very cool. (more…)

Well, I’ll be.

Verizon is giving its prepaid customers a bit of a break. For just $10 a month, it’s letting those subscribers send unlimited text, picture, and video messages to other Verizon users, and to non-Verizon subscribers, they can send 250 messages. (You can read the RCR article about it here.)

This comes just a few weeks after T-Mobile raised its charge for texting from 15 to 20 cents a message, just as Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T have done in the recent past. This raised quite a few dogs’ hackles. One in particular at CrunchGear.com had a bone to pick with AT&T when he did the math and realized that at $0.20 per 160 bytes, 1MB of data would cost $1310.72.

I suppose that Verizon got a whiff of the stink that followed that whole texting debacle and decided to throw us dogs a bone.

Woof.

Hello mobileteers!

I thought you all might find this interesting. I know that I’m always looking for mobile stats, and as far as stats go, this is a good one.

Last week RCR Wireless posted the top ten mobile carriers in the US. Here’s the list with each carrier’s subscriber base:

1. AT&T Mobility     71.4 million
2. Verizon Wireless     67.2 million
3. Sprint Nextel     52.8 million
4. T-Mobile USA     30.8 million
5. Alltel     13.2 million
6. US Cellular     6.2 million
7. MetroPCS     4.4 million
8. Leap Wireless     3.09 million
9. Centennial     662,700
10. Rural Cellular     790,431

For the rest of the article, check out RCR Wireless News.

Verizon Wireless just announced that it will acquire Alltel Communications. For a mere $28.1 billion ($5.9 billion plus $22.2 billion to pay off Alltel’s debt), this deal will make Verizon the nation’s largest carrier with 80 million customers. (more…)