April 22 - 9:30am EDT   AT&T today said it had generated "strong" results for the first quarter of 2008 that it says are owed primarily to its cellphone business. The American telecoms firm earned a total of $30.7 billion over the three-month span, up 4.6 percent from the same quarter in 2007 after adjusting for marketing income related to the past BellSouth acquisition (otherwise at 6.1 percent); however, wireless income grew by about 18.3 percent over the same period and was helped by an increase in the amount spent on data features for these plans: spending on Internet access, over-the-air downloads, and messaging spiked by 57.3 percent, AT&T says. Data in various forms now accounts for ... [full story]

February 8 - 2:40pm EST   After decades in service, analog cellular networks in the US will ramp down later this month but may cause problems in the process, says a new report. FCC officials have granted both AT&T and Verizon permission to shut down their last AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) networks on February 18th, leaving strictly digital calls through either CDMA or GSM networks. AT&T will also shut down its very early TDMA (Time Division Multiplex Access) digital network at the same time. For phone use, the impact is predicted to be minimal as less than one percent of either AT&T or Verizon's customers rely on the older standards. [full story]