A jury has found that Vonage infringed on patents held by Sprint Nextel, fining the Internet telephony company $69.5 million in damages, which amounts to 5 percent of the revenue it made during the period it was using the patents. The jury also ordered Vonage to pay Sprint 5 percent of the revenue it makes from here on using the patented technology.

By Teresa von Fuchs

The upcoming auction of 700 MHz could give birth to an unprecedented infrastructure that could serve countless rural consumers as it provides a crucial boost to the nation’s public-safety industry. But they’ll also need to invest heavily to build out the network.

By Colin Gibbs

Sylantro Systems, which makes telephony application feature servers, and The Thomas Howe Company, a telephony mashup application developer, are hosting a telephony mashup contest with winners judged and announced at Sylantro's user conference in Las Vegas at the end of this month.

Mashups are made by "mashing" together content and features from multiple locations via publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs). They've become popular in the Web area, but as telephony providers and application vendors begin to open up their own systems via APIs, adding voice and call management features, telephony mashups are becoming more possible.

By Rich Karpinksi

AT&T will start upgrading its 3G network for faster upload speeds using HSUPA starting next quarter, the carrier announced today. This upgrade on the uplink side of the network. increases the upload speeds from about 120 Kbps to 500-to-800 Kbps.

By Brad Smith

Virgin Mobile USA, a joint venture of Sprint Nextel and the Virgin Group, expects to raise about $375.6 million after expenses in its initial public offering (IPO), according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VM.

By Teresa von Fuchs

AT&T has temporarily suspended its new parental control service after the carrier discovered a problem with the 911 calling feature. The carrier's service allows parents to set limits on their children's phones such as blocking certain numbers, limiting the phones data functions and blocking service entirely during certain hours. While emergency calls are always allowed, AT&T discovered that when a user calls 911 during a time when the phone's service is restricted, should the call get disconnected, the 911 operator cannot call the user.

By Teresa von Fuchs

Motorola is showcasing its latest WiMAX solution, the CPEi 300, during the WiMAX World USA show in Chicago this week. The new CPEi 300 Series is a desktop consumer device that provides wireless broadband connectivity; it features one data port for data-centric operations and two analog terminal adaptors (ATAs) so end users can plug in analog phones for VoIP service. The WiMAX CPEi 300 is scheduled to be available to operators in Q4 2007.

By Wireless Week Staff

Fox Interactive Media, who purchased MySpace last year, announced that wireless users will soon have yet another way to access the popular MySpace.com social networking site: an ad-supported mobile Web site.

By Kelly Hill

Virgin Group announced plans to shut down its online music subscription and download service in the U.S. and U.K. next month. As of Friday only existing customers in the U.K will be able to access the subscription service, and the site will shut down for good on Oct. 19, meaning subscription-based users will no longer have access to any of their downloaded music.

Virgin also stopped selling song downloads Friday. The company said that U.S. users can use their account credit on Napster's download service.

By Teresa von Fuchs

New York City Transit is one step closer to building a cellphone network in its 277 subway stations. Next week, the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is expected to vote in favor of letting Transit Wireless, a consortium of telecom and construction companies, build an underground cellphone network. However, it remains to be seen if mobile phone providers such as Verizon Wireless are going to pay to offer the service to their customers.

By Amanda Fung