Verizon CTO Anthony Melone in a talk [sub. required] today asserted that the carrier’s first 4G phones should arrive in the middle of 2011. The unnamed handsets would come roughly a year after the Long Term Evolution-based network goes live for pure data but would be about six months ahead of the originally predicted timeframe.

Alaska Airlines today said it would bring Wi-Fi to all its flights. The service will on Gogo’s 3G-to-Wi-Fi system and, like with other carriers, will vary in price depending on the device and duration of the flight

Sprint on Wednesday announced plans for releasing its high-speed mobile broadband WiMAX network in new cities in 2010. Newly added are Denver, Kansas City and Minneapolis, in addition to the already announced plans for launches in New York, San Francisco, Washington (DC,) Boston and Houston later this year

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski today proposed (PDF) a more detailed plan to address the feared spectrum shortage for cellular carriers. The approach would take as much as 500MHz of wireless space currently used by broadcasters and repurpose it for data networks. Those operators that agreed to drop spectrum would get a share of the proceeds as a financial incentive….

Elgato on Wednesday announced its latest TV tuner, the EyeTV Netstream DTT, which will stream DVB-T and Freeview digital free-to-air programming to all Macs or PCs on a home network. The dual tuner will let users watch, record or perform a combination of each to two different programs at the same time.

Cox Communications’ Stephen Bye, vice president of wireless service, says tests of the company’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G network technology reached peak speeds in the 25Mbps range. The tests, occurred in atypical conditions, employing a single user with a multiple-antenna setup at very close range. Toward the limit of the test cell’s coverage, data rates dropped to 10Mbps.

AT&T today landed a surprise win in a new test of 3G performance in the US.

A source at cable service provider Comcast says the company is making improvements to its Internet service that will provide 20 percent of its subscribers with 100Mbps download speed by the end of the year. Enhancements to the company’s existing DOCSIS 3.0 modems and cable systems make the higher data transfer rates possible, according to BBR.

Multiple cities have already queued up to volunteer for Google Fiber. Palo Alto, Seattle and a coalition of 16 towns in Utah have or will soon have responded to Google’s request for information as the first step to getting the service. The municipalities in most cases have argued that they already have the infrastructure to make the 1Gbps Internet access easy to deploy, such as Utah’s UTOPIA fib…

AirLive has introduced the Air3G, a multifunction router capable of working with USB-attached wireless broadband modems. Users can configure the the router to choose the wired connection for primary use, while the 3G modem is automatically enabled only if the primary connection is disrupted.