Good Great news for those who managed to snag one of Verizon Wireless’ unlimited data plans before they took off into the night earlier this week: if you’re rocking a 3G smartphone, you can eventually upgrade to an LTE handset, keep the unlimited plan, and have access to a / month 4G tethering plan. That’s according to VZW’s official Support account on Twitter, and it’s decidedly lovely news for those who were concerned that they’d be locked into EV-DO forever. So, anyone had any luck taking Big Red up on its offer?

Verizon: unlimited 3G customers can upgrade to 4G, keep data pack and grab tethering originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon Wireless customers will be able to jet on to the LTE network in nine new cities, taking advantage of lightening-fast speeds on their HTC Thunderbolts and 4G mobile hotspots. The expansion includes Mobile and Montgomery (AL); Greater Fairfield and New Haven (CT); Gainesville, Pensacola, and Tallahassee (FL); Fayetteville-Lumberton (NC); and Bryan-College Station and Temple-Killeen (TX). We also have access in Albany, though VZW has yet to confirm launching LTE in New York’s capital city. The carrier has also expanded coverage in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, so if you haven’t been able to connect in the past, dust off that enable-4G button and give it another shot. This week’s additions bring the list of LTE cities to 55, so we’re just over the 35 percent mark towards the carrier’s goal of 147 cities by year’s end.

Continue reading Verizon adds 4G LTE to nine more cities, expands coverage in Chicago, Philadelphia

Verizon adds 4G LTE to nine more cities, expands coverage in Chicago, Philadelphia originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 May 2011 11:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nice timing, Verizon. Just as thousands — possibly zillions — of smartphone users are pondering the switch to Big Red for Apple’s iPhone 4, the carrier has slipped in two critical policy changes that are apparently effective immediately. Tucked within loads of fine print in a new PDF that surfaced on the company’s site, there’s this:

“Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95 percent of data customers aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.”

To our knowledge, this is the first time that VZW has taken a notable position on throttling, and the link to its stance on net neutrality (as it applies to wireless, anyway) is fairly obvious. What’s most interesting to us is the five percent figure; the top one or two percent isn’t a huge amount, and there’s a good chance that bandwidth abusers are up in that echelon. But we’re guessing that quite a few business travelers will fall within this particular range, and given that VZW now holds the right to throttle data for your existing billing cycle and the next one… well, good luck gritting your teeth and lasting through that two-year contract.

In related news, the company is also implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in its network, which is a politically correct way of explaining that it can downres any multimedia you try to send through Verizon’s pipes. Head on past the break for the full quote.

Continue reading Verizon can now thottle top five percent of bandwidth hogs, downres multimedia uploads

Verizon can now thottle top five percent of bandwidth hogs, downres multimedia uploads originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 12:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been hearing a lot about VZW getting the Nexus One the last few weeks. The latest unverified report states that Nexus One shipments are currently en route to both Verizon and Vodafone and the phone should be available later this month or early April. That is all. Move along.

For me, the best part of the Super Bowl is the commercials. And after you see this one, you may have to agree. Just note that you’ll have to play the video several times over before you realize there’s a phone there – the Motorola DEVOUR with MOTOBLUR, to be exact. So, what happens when Megan Fox uses her DEVOUR to send out a hot, wet image via a social network?

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Well that didn’t take too long at all. Just this morning, the Motorola DEVOUR with MOTOBLUR was announced, and now in-the-wild pics and hands on impressions are surfacing on the web. Pictured next to the Nexus One, the DEVOUR looks much smaller than it does in press images. So how does it feel and what can be expected from the device?

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch>>