U.S. regulators will announce a major Internet policy this week to revolutionize how Americans communicate and play, proposing a dramatic increase in broadband speeds that could let people download a high-definition film in minutes instead of hours.

Dramatically increasing Internet speeds to 25 times the current average is one of the myriad goals to be unveiled in the National Broadband Plan by the the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.

The highly anticipated plan will make a series of recommendations to Congress and is aimed at spurring the ever-changing communications industry to bring more and faster online services to Americans as they increasingly turn to the Internet to communicate, pay monthly bills, make travel plans and be entertained by movies and music.

At 18, she could hold dinner conversations with her family while surreptitiously texting with friends, hiding her cellphone under the table.

Everyone in the Rogers, Ark., high school senior’s circle had warned her about texting while driving; they’d see her car swerve and know what she was doing. It cost her her life.

Last May, on the day before graduation, Mariah was driving to a Minor League Baseball game in Springfield, Mo., texting with the player who’d invited her. As she was sending him a text, she lost control of the car, which clipped a bridge, skidded on its roof along the edge of the bridge and flipped back into oncoming traffic.

BARCELONA – Twenty-four telecom operators have formed an alliance to build an open platform that will deliver applications to all mobile phone users in an effort to compete with Apple’s successful apps store.

The move is supported by three of the world’s largest device makers — LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson the telecoms industry body GSM Association said on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

AT&T said Thursday that it will invest an additional $2 billion in its network in 2010 to make sure it keeps up with the growing demand from new smartphones and other 3G data devices, such as the Apple iPad, on its network.

AT&T’s 3G network has already drawn complaints about its availability. Though the iPhone has given the wireless provider a vast stream of new subscriber revenue, the data-hungry device has weighed heavily on its network. Now AT&T has been named as the cellular data provider for 3G-enabled iPads, too. Can it take on the extra traffic?

The two largest U.S. wireless carriers, Verizon and AT&T, cut their rates on Friday, escalating a price war that began with smaller carriers.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and the companies that sell software for the iPhone and iPod touch at the App Store have lost over $450 million to piracy since the store opened in July 2008 according to an analysis by 24/7 Wall St. There have been over 3 billion applications downloaded since the App program began.

Alcatel-Lucent formed a consortium of telecoms operators, chip makers, and university labs aimed at inventing new technologies to reduce the electricity consumption of communication networks by a factor of one thousand.

The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that’s been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that’s sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.

The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.

The Federal Communications Commission staked out new ground nearly three months ago when it began drafting rules that would require Internet providers to give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.
Now the FCC hopes to use a dispute with the nation’s largest cable TV and Internet provider to establish its legal authority to [...]