Marvell, and integrated silicon provider, this week announced a mobile tablet based on its chips. Marvell says its Moby tablet prototype will cost $99 and feature 1080p full-HD and full Flash Internet support. The company says the Moby tablet could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools.

Marvell says that it expects tablets based on this design to go on sale by the end of this year. It’s not talking about actual retail prices yet. Colby’s little netbook costs $85 with a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor, 2GB of flash storage and runs Windows CE.

Marvel’s Armada chip is in multiple upcoming e-readers, including Plastic Logic’s Que, Spring Design’s Alex, and others.

Announcing the initiative this week during her keynote speech to the country’s leading publishers at the Future of Publishing conference in New York City, Marvell Co-founder Weili Dai said that the Moby tablet is a technology whose time had come. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the average cost of a single textbook for even secondary school students can range from $60 to $200. And textbook costs are going up.

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Mexican media group Televisa, Spain’s Telefonica and Mexican cable television company Megacable plan to jointly bid for fiber optic cable capacity to be auctioned off by Mexico’s government.

The three companies would hold equal stakes in the joint venture bidding for two fiber optic strands being tendered by Mexico’s state power monopoly.

The auction is designed to improve competition in Mexico’s fixed-line telecommunications sector, which is dominated by Telmex, run by tycoon Carlos Slim. Although Telmex is now a private company it stills remains as a quasi-monopoly, says WikiPedia. In 2000, Telmex spun off their mobile unit, creating América Móvil, the fourth largest mobile network operator in the world.

Telmex owns nearly all Mexico’s telephone cables and even the copper wire leading into homes, giving it a powerful hand against smaller companies offering phone or Internet services, but which need access to infrastructure.

“This new fiber optic network will represent for Televisa, Telefonica and Megacable, and also for third parties, an alternative to access data transportation services, increasing competition in the Mexican telecommunications market,” Megacable said in a separate statement.

On Thursday, Mexico’s government said it was taking steps to fine Telmex, which has a market share of about 80 percent in Mexico’s fixed-line market, for impeding smaller competitors from connecting to its network.

Televisa, Mexico’s top broadcaster, has been expanding into telecommunications, and announced in February that it had agreed to pay $1.44 billion for a 30 percent stake in mobile phone operator Nextel Mexico, a unit of NII Holdings.

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India will begin 3G spectrum auctions on April 9, with a “4G” auction for LTE and WiMAX services beginning on April 11, reports the Indian Department of Communications.

India is the biggest economy in the world that doesn’t yet have nationwide 3G phone service. India’s wireless market, with about 525 million mobile subs (Dec 2009), is the world’s biggest after China, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

The government’s 3G auction will offer three slots in 17 telecom service areas and four in the remaining five areas on April 9th.

The Department of Telecom on Friday said nine telecos have submitted their bids for the auction of 3G spectrum (auction guidelines). The bids will start at 35 billion rupees ($770 million) for a slot covering all the service areas, but analysts expect each winner to spend between $1 billion and $1.5 billion due to the huge demand for scarce spectrum and cut-throat competition.

India’s top three mobile operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, and Vodafone Essar, separately said on Thursday they had submitted applications to bid for the 3G airwaves for all of India’s 22 telecoms zones.

Firms expected to bid for 3G spectrum in the 2.1 GHz band include; Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone Essar, Tata Teleservices, State-owned BSNL, and Etisalat DB India, a unit of UAE-based Emirates Telecommunication will vye for 3G spectrum.

India plans to auction two 20 MHz unpaired blocks at 2.3 GHz in each of the country’s 22 service areas for 4G (LTE or WiMAX) on April 9th. The base price for a pan-India spectrum slot is set at $386 million.

Qualcomm said on Wednesday that it is has filed an application to bid in India’s broadband wireless auction in the 2.3 GHz band. Qualcomm plans to use the TD-LTE standard in the world’s second most populous country. Qualcomm’s technology will support both TD-LTE and 3G/2G. A winning bid would turn Qualcomm into a joint venture partner. Qualcomm would find an Indian partner if it succeeds in the auction, as per telecommunications rules in India.

The WiMAX Forum says there is limited traction or market support for TD-LTE, although Qualcomm says China Mobile has adopted the standard, and plans to use in the same 2.3 GHz band.

Motorola hopes to use WiMAX in India, and is in talks with top cellular service providers for deployment. Motorola claims that it can offer 30 – 40 per cent cheaper solutions. Motorola has deployed over 38 networks worldwide.

Qualcomm is working with Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks, to perform interoperability tests for dual-carrier HSPA+ and LTE. Among the many device manufacturers currently evaluating the new chipsets are Huawei, LG Electronics, Novatel Wireless, Sierra Wireless and ZTE.

Motorola today announced the addition of a TD-LTE-Advanced capable 4Tx/8Rx radio head with MIMO to its 4G – WBR 700 Series LTE portfolio. While similar in size to a standard 2Tx/2Rx LTE, it enables advanced MIMO schemes including multi user (MU) MIMO and beam-forming. The WBR 700 TD-LTE 4Tx/8Rx with MIMO solution will be displayed in Motorola’s booth at International CTIA Wireless 2010.

Motorola’s LTE-Advanced capable WBR 700 Series is Motorola’s fourth generation OFDM solution and its second generation LTE platform. The eNodeB portfolio supports TD-LTE as well as FDD-LTE solutions.

Motorola has been selected by China Mobile as the primary TD-LTE solution partner to provide indoor coverage for all major pavilions at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai China, and will also integrate and launch the world’s first TD-LTE USB dongle that supports both 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz. Beceem, Sequans and Qualcomm have all announced TDD-LTE chips for clients.

Related Dailywireless articles include; India’s 3g/4G Auction: On the Move , India Sets 3G Auction Price Higher, WiMax: East Meets West, China Mobile: Slow TD-SCDMA Sales.

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T-Mobile USA is looking at possible joint ventures with cable companies and network providers to boost its spectrum capacity, reports Reuters. Speaking at an investor conference in Frankfurt, CEO of T-Mobile USA Robert Dotson stated that the company had been talking with both Clearwire and cable companies about future business opportunities.

Asked whether T-Mobile USA would consider teaming up with U.S. competitor Sprint Nextel, Dotson said: “What you never want to do is take one company that is going through challenges and take another company going through challenges”.

There have been reports since September that T-Mobile USA was in partnership discussions with Clearwire, which is located only a few miles away from its Bellevue, Wash.-area headquarters.

MetroPCS and AT&T are other possible partners for T-Mobile USA, says Moco News. Deutsche Telekom has also been said to be mulling either an IPO or spinoff of the fourth-largest U.S. carrier.

Whether T-Mobile would utilize HSPA+, TD-LTE, FDD-LTE or possibly Mobile WiMAX with Clearwire spectrum remains to be seen.

T-Mobile USA (33.4 million subs) aims to supply around 185 million POPs with HSPA+ by the end of 2010, and expects to double the number of 3G smartphones in the network to around 8 million.

Meanwhile, Metro PCS (6.6 million subs) has hired advisers to look into purchasing competing carrier Leap Wireless (4.5 million subs). This news comes just days after Leap reportedly began exploring a potential sale. Rumors of a merger between these two regional CDMA carriers have been circulating for years and, increasingly, it’s looking like a matter of when the merger will happen, not if it will, opines Connected Planet.

Separately, Deutsche Telekom yesterday announced a new strategy that focuses on intelligent networks as the world moves from voice-centric wired communications to one surrounding broadband. “The industry is changing and we are transforming Deutsche Telekom,†said CEO René Obermann at the presentation of the Group strategy “Fix – Transform – Innovate†in Bonn on Wednesday.

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Sprint Nextel will sell the Google Nexus One phone and will also unveil its first WiMAX handset next week.

No availability date or pricing details were released for Sprint’s Nexus One, but the operator claimed that its CDMA EV-DO 3G network offers “ten times the network coverage of T-Mobile” (by square miles).

The Supersonic WiMAX phone, based on HTC’s Supersonic is expected to run Google’s Android 2.1 software with HTC’S Sense user interface on top of it, and have a 4.3-inch touchscreen display, a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and a 5-megapixel camera.

Sprint already offers two Android devices; the Samsung Moment and HTC Hero. The Nexus One will only be available to Sprint customers directly from Google online (and not via any Sprint retail channels). Google this week also started selling a Nexus One that will run on AT&T’s 3G network. Google’s Nexus One is also available for T-Mobile USA.

The Sprint deal means that Verizon Wireless is the only major US operator not yet supporting the Nexus One, although reports suggest a Verizon version could be unveiled at the CTIA event next week. Verizon, of course, has the Motorola Droid.

The Nexus One, (without a 2-year contract), costs $529 through Google. It hasn’t set the world on fire.

Incidently, The Oregonian’s Mike Rogoway notes that Google’s bid for a trademark on its Nexus One has been denied by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Last week the agency declared that the name was too similar to a trademark held by Portland-based Integra Telecom and their Nexus® integrated T1 services.

Meanwhile, the family of Philip K. Dick considers Verizon’s Droid too similar to the language in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.

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eMarketer says wireless usage and advertising in Brazil, Russia, India and China is expected to explode in the next few years. There will be more mobile Internet users in China in 2010 than the entire population of the US, says the market research company.

Highlights:

Aggregate mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Internet user base. Nevertheless, the growth trend is significant, concludes eMarketer.

In related news, Boston-based uLocate recently debuted WHERE ads, a “hyper-local ad network†that aims to deliver geographically and contextually relevant ads. uLocate will make WHERE Ads available to other publishing platforms as well.

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More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder gained access to a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments, reports Wired.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,†says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.â€

The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, the system lets car dealers install a small black box under vehicle dashboards that responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network. The dealer can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a reminder that a payment is due. The system will not stop a running vehicle.

Ramos-Lopez’s Webtech Plus account was deleted when he was laid off, but he reportedly got back into the system using another employee’s account. Through AT&T’s internet service, police traced the signal to Ramos-Lopez’s IP address and charged him with breach of computer security. If convicted, Ramos-Lopez could be jailed for 120 days to 2 years.

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Google, Intel and Sony have teamed to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes, reports the NY Times.

The Times says Google TV will use an Intel Atom processor on the set-top box, and run the Android operating system. The technology may also be built directly into Blu-ray players and TVs from Sony. Additionally, Google is working with Logitech to built a keyboard-equipped remote control for the platform.

Google is expected to deliver a toolkit to outside programmers within the next couple of months, and products based on the software could appear as soon as this summer.

The three companies have tapped Logitech, which specializes in remote controls and computer speakers, for peripheral devices, including a remote with a tiny keyboard.

Google TV may use a version of Google’s Chrome Web browser, says Android and Me. Android and Chrome OS are expected to merge over time. The default Android browser is based off the same WebKit core. Google recently teamed up with DISH to test a new, Android-like software on the satellite provider’s set-top box.

The partners envision technology that will make it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site. The move is an effort by Google and Intel to extend their dominance of computing to television, while Sony would get a competitive edge on IP-TV. Cable operators are investing heavily in video on demand (VOD) as analog spectrum is freed up on their 750 MHz systems.

The Boxee Box by D-Link uses a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 for graphics.

It displays TV shows and movies from the Internet or your hard drive, on your television, as well as social media, email and telephony – no PC needed.

Google could have open source competition from settops running MeeGo. MeeGo combines Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin and can run on both ARM and Atom chips.

The UK’s Virgin Media is beginning its transition to IPTV now, and aiming to serve roughly 13 million subscribers by 2012.

Virgin Media will offer 50 Mbps broadband in the UK for £28/month ($42/month). Virgin is using fibre to deliver internet access to just over half of all homes.

The Asia-Pacific IPTV market was around 9.4 million subscribers at the end of 2009, a 51 percent growth from last year’s 6.27 million subscribers, according to Frost & Sullivan.

US cable operators, like Comcast and Time-Warner Cable, which are also partners in Mobile WiMAX with Google and Intel, conceivably could extend the platform into the mobile space. But they’re likely to keep an eye on their backside.

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Portland, Oregon commissioners voted unanimously today to back the city’s pitch for Google’s fiber project.

Portland’s City Council heard about 40 minutes of testimony this morning from David Olson (right), the city’s director of cable and franchise management, who has been campaigning for an open fiber network for many years.

He was joined by Intel’s Wilfred Pinfold, who organized last year’s Supercomputing ‘09 conference in Portland.

SC09 set up a hub four times faster than the one Google proposes to perform remote supercomputing tasks during the conference, and Pinfold said that shows how much power a fast network unleashes.

Software developer Ward Cunningham, father of Wiki, shared his hopes for open-access, community fiber and recounts how early exposure to an open-access Internet connection allowed him to influence and change the world.

A group of citizens are organizing the world’s longest “Telephone Game†as an attempt to get the attention of Google. The Portland event will begin at 9am Saturday March 20th, and start at the east side of the Steel Bridge at 9:30, reaching Mayor Sam Adams in Pioneer Courthouse Square at approximately 10:30.

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A new whitepaper released by Intel (pdf) claims WiMAX technology is more spectrally efficient than HSPA or LTE. The report compares Mobile WiMAX with HSPA, HSPA+, and LTE. Intel says WiMAX can handle more subscribers per cell site with higher QOS.

According to the report, WiMAX is able to support 20 video streaming users per sector at 256 kbps, using a 10MHz channel, compared to 12 users at 128 kbps on an HSPA network. Furthermore, WiMAX networks are able to support a large number of users even with high monthly data usage of 12GB per subscriber.

Meanwhile, Rysavy Research white papers (pdf) shows another look at relative spectrum efficiency. It was created by cellular-centric 3G Americas’ members and compares 5+5 MHz for UMTS-HSPA/LTE and CDMA2000, with 10 MHz DL/UL=29:18 TDD for WiMAX.

The above chart does not include WiMAX Release 2 (802.16m) which has a spectral efficiency of 2.6 bits/sec/Hz, which would be higher than LTE.

WiMAX Release 2 (802.16m ) will use 4X2 MIMO in urban microcells, in a single 20 MHz TDD channel. The WiMAX Forum expects to see WiMAX Release 2 available commercially in 2011-2012.

Motorola sells both LTE and WiMAX gear. Their Base Band Unit (BBU) supports TD-LTE, FDD-LTE and WiMAX, with a Remote Radio Unit (RRU) that supports 2×2 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO).

Motorola says 140 MHz will be allocated in Europe for LTE; using 2500-2570 MHz for uplink and 2620-2690 MHz for downlink. Additionally up to 50 MHz (2570 MHz-2620 MHz) will be allocated as an unpaired TDD band (pdf).

Motorola has been selected by China Mobile as the primary TD-LTE solution partner to provide indoor coverage for all major pavilions at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai China, and will also integrate and launch the world’s first TD-LTE USB dongle that supports both 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz. Beceem, Sequans and Qualcomm have all announced TDD-LTE chips for clients.

What’s the upshot?

LTE-TDD and WiMAX-TDD are two peas in a pod. LTE-TDD advantages include a closer similarity to LTE-FDD gear used by cellular carriers (although incompatible) and support from cell companies (such as China Mobile). WiMAX Release 2.0 (802.16m) advantages include the ability to work with existing Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) and the potential to use additional spectral bands (such as unlicensed 3.65GHz).

Perhaps the main advantage of both these systems is their single channel (TDD) nature. Less spectrum is wasted “listening”. That’s a big deal in data-driven networks.

The PR battle between WiMAX and LTE continues unabated. According to Ovum, “By 2014, LTE will have 109 million connections worldwide. In comparison, mobile WiMAX will have almost 55 million connections. This is in stark contrast to 2013, when parity between the two technologies is expected.â€

ABI Research says more than 18 wireless operators have decided to deploy LTE. The research firm estimates that operators will spend more than $8.6 billion on LTE base station infrastructure by 2013. Infonetics Research believes LTE will be deployed rapidly and that its infrastructure market alone should reach $5 billion in 2013.

Verizon Wireless and Net4Mobility, a joint venture of carriers Tele2 AB in Europe and Telenor in Mexico will launch LTE services before the end of the year, said Scott Siegler, senior analyst for mobility infrastructure research at Dell ‘Oro which predicts wireless carriers will buy as much as $240 million in LTE gear this year.

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