An outage heat map available online illustrated large outages in major metro areas, like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. In other words, where millions of people are making plans and trying to stay in touch.

Messages were received hours after they were sent, and were delivered out of order. Luckily no examples have been discovered outside of the odd dinner fail, but imagine if a text read "grandma gets the red pill," only to receive a follow-up message like "oops, I meant the blue pill" four hours later. 

People will no doubt make new plans, and life will go on; but it begs the question: how reliable is T-Mobile's network? And what is the future of operator-delivered messaging if Facebook Messenger works better over a mobile network than the operator's own SMS service?

Maybe this also pushes a deeper question regarding the importance of real-time communication. Because at the end of the day, without real-time communication, that glittery iPhone is just a pricey media device. 

One thing is certain: T-Mobile can't be the competitive "Un-Carrier" it wants to be if its text messaging doesn't work. That's a "pain point" CEO John Legere should address the next time he prances about in magenta. 

Feds Give Nokia-AlcaLu Merger the Green Light

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent today announced that the United States Department of Justice has granted early termination of the U.S. antitrust waiting period for the combination of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, permitting the transaction to proceed. Early termination of the U.S. antitrust waiting period takes us one important step closer to the closing of the pending transaction.

The parties continue to make good progress with the regulatory approval processes in the remaining relevant jurisdictions, with the parties having already obtained antitrust clearances in Brazil and Serbia. Both companies will continue to cooperate with the remaining authorities to close their reviews as quickly as possible.

The transaction remains subject to approval by Nokia shareholders, Nokia holding over 50.00% of the share capital of Alcatel-Lucent on a fully-diluted basis upon completion of the public exchange offer, receipt of other regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2016.

LTE-Advanced Updates

LTE-Advanced deployments are beginning to pick up speed. This week, Huawei announced the launch of a commercial LTE-A network with Zain Saudi Arabia and Nokia Networks lit up an LTE-A net in UAE. Carrier aggregation is a key component of LTE-A, but can it unify FDD and TDD LTE? Vodafone and Ericsson answered with an emphatic "YES!" as the companies unified the two flavors of LTE for carrier aggregation in a commercial network.

EE Innovates with Connected Cam

GoPro cams are cool, but what if they had native 4G connectivity? EE answered that question this week with its own 4G connected camera, the 4GEE Action Cam, which was the centerpiece of EE's greater connected strategy. The strategy also includes Connected Home, Connected You, Connected Business, and Connected Car, and is built on EE's 4G mobile network. EE says the 4GEE Action Cam provides an opportunity to live broadcast unmissable life moments - such as a child’s first steps - with family and friends. Interestingly, this is one carrier who has monetized quite a few consumer devices, including chargers. A trend to follow? Let's wait and see how many 4GEE users there are at the end of the year.