Verizon Adds $30 Fee For Contract Renewals


Joins other wireless carriers who charge similar fees.



Verizon Wireless announced today that as of April 22 they will be charging a $30 upgrade fee for customers who renew their two-year agreements and upgrade to a new phone. In other words, if you get to the end of your Verizon contract and want to get a new phone, you’ll have to pay an extra $30 to re-sign your contract and upgrade your hardware.
Verizon Adds $30 Fee For Contract RenewalsNow, if you don’t want or need to keep your old phone, Verizon will be offering you the chance to trade it in as a way to offset – or even eliminate – the $30 fee. So there’s that.
Here’s Verizon’s statement:
On April 22, Verizon Wireless is implementing a $30 upgrade fee for existing customers purchasing new mobile equipment at a discounted price with a two-year contract. This fee will help us continue to provide customers with the level of service and support they have come to expect which includes Wireless Workshops, online educational tools, and consultations with experts who provide advice and guidance on devices that are more sophisticated than ever.

While the upgrade fee is not unique to Verizon Wireless, most devices can be traded in with our green friendly trade-in program at www.verizonwireless.com/tradein as a way to save money or potentially offset the fee completely.
Though Verizon doesn’t say so, it’s almost certain that this fee is to meant to help offset thesubsidies that they are required to pay for iPhone and Android smartphones. These subsidies make a dent in Verizon’s (and other carriers’) bottom line, and most of the other carriers charge a fee like this one for upgrading your phone at the end of a contract.
This isn’t the first time Verizon has looked for… creative ways to increase their profits. Late last year they announced a $2 “convenience fee” would be charged to customers who paid their bill online or over the phone. The announcement sparked the kind of public outcry you might expect, as well as drawing the attention of the FCC. Within hours of the FCC’s announcement, Verizon decided to scrap the fee.
This time, however, those who are upset about this $30 fee probably shouldn’t count on the FCC swooping in to save the day. As noted above, this kind of fee is fairly common among wireless carriers.

With Internal Routing, Chips Could Function as Mini “Internets”


Revolutionize bussing and chip operation as we know it.



Computer chips have stopped getting faster. In order to keep increasing chips’ computational power at the rate to which we’ve grown accustomed, chipmakers are instead giving them additional “cores,” or processing units. Today, a typical chip might have six or eight cores, all communicating with each other over a single bundle of wires, called a bus. With a bus, however, only one pair of cores can talk at a time, which would be a serious limitation in chips with hundreds or even thousands of cores, which many electrical engineers envision as the future of computing.
With Internal Routing, Chips Could Function as Mini “Internets”Li-Shiuan Peh, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, wants cores to communicate the same way computers hooked to the Internet do: by bundling the information they transmit into “packets.” Each core would have its own router, which could send a packet down any of several paths, depending on the condition of the network as a whole.
In principle, multicore chips are faster than single-core chips because they can split up computational tasks and run them on several cores at once. Cores working on the same task will occasionally need to share data, but until recently, the core count on commercial chips has been low enough that a single bus has been able to handle the extra communication load. That’s already changing, however: “Buses have hit a limit,” Peh says. “They typically scale to about eight cores.” The 10-core chips found in high-end servers frequently add a second bus, but that approach won’t work for chips with hundreds of cores.
For one thing, Peh says, “buses take up a lot of power, because they are trying to drive long wires to eight or 10 cores at the same time.” In the type of network Peh is proposing, on the other hand, each core communicates only with the four cores nearest it. “Here, you’re driving short segments of wires, so that allows you to go lower in voltage,” she explains.
In an on-chip network, however, a packet of data traveling from one core to another has to stop at every router in between. Moreover, if two packets arrive at a router at the same time, one of them has to be stored in memory while the router handles the other. Many engineers, Peh says, worry that these added requirements will introduce enough delays and computational complexity to offset the advantages of packet switching. “The biggest problem, I think, is that in industry right now, people don’t know how to build these networks, because it has been buses for decades,” Peh says.
Peh and her colleagues have developed two techniques to address these concerns. One is something they call “virtual bypassing.” In the Internet, when a packet arrives at a router, the router inspects its addressing information before deciding which path to send it down. With virtual bypassing, however, each router sends an advance signal to the next, so that it can preset its switch, speeding the packet on with no additional computation. In her group’s test chips, Peh says, virtual bypassing allowed a very close approach to the maximum data-transmission rates predicted by theoretical analysis.
The other technique is something called low-swing signaling. Digital data consists of ones and zeroes, which are transmitted over communications channels as high and low voltages. Sunghyun Park, a PhD student advised by both Peh and Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, developed a circuit that reduces the swing between the high and low voltages from one volt to 300 millivolts. With its combination of virtual bypassing and low-swing signaling, the researchers’ test chip consumed 38 percent less energy than previous packet-switched test chips. The researchers have more work to do, Peh says, before their test chip’s power consumption gets as close to the theoretical limit as its data transmission rate does. But, she adds, “if we compare it against a bus, we get orders-of-magnitude savings.”

Steve Wozniak: Not A Fan Of Patent-Mongering Companies

The Apple co-founder worries the patent turf war will kill invention.



It’s no secret that patent trolls are a dangerto innovation, imagination, and a whole lot of other inspiring concepts that make the world a better place to live in. Pick any major technology company and you will without fail find them involved in some sort of patent litigation.
Steve Wozniak: Not A Fan Of Patent-Mongering CompaniesSteve Wozniak, the man who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is familiar with patents in the technology world. When he designed the Apple II computer, he begrudgingly had to fork over some money to RCA because the company owned an unused patent that Wozniak unintentionally impeded upon. Speaking to the Australian Financial Times, Wozniak said, “We actually wound up paying them two bucks for every computer we shipped just for that simple idea.”
Given his experience with patent obstacles, it may not be surprising that Wozniak isn’t a fan of patent-mongering companies. Since most of the companies that are involved in the ongoing patent disputes, Wozniak shared his wonderment over the state of technological development.
Wozniak says that, while a growing number of technology specialists think the patent system should be scrapped, he still believes it is essential to encourage young inventors who aspire to do something new.
He can appreciate the argument that Apple has now come to represent to today’s entrepreneurs what RCA was to him, but Wozniak believes Apple’s record for continued innovation means it is less guiltx than any of the other large tech firms.
“Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,” he says. “It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn’t exist.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly a surprising opinion, but Wozniak does make an interesting point in saying that Apple is the only company currently trying to shape new markets instead of simply trying to carve out a take from existing markets. As far as developing new technology goes, Apple has certainly been the industry flagship. Protecting that status is part of what drove Steve Jobs to famously declare that he would spend every cent in Apple’s coffers to crush Android, Google’s rival platform, which he claimed was a “stolen product.”
Think these companies should spend less time sniping each other and perhaps more time just focusing on inventing new technology? Agree or disagree, we want to hear what you think.


Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)