UK’s first 4G network goes live October 30 courtesy of EE, other carriers to wait until 2013

UK network EE will launch its 4G LTE network on October 30, while other carriers wait patiently for the 2013 spectrum auction.

The UK is poised to join the USA and many other countries around the world in offering 4G LTE high speed data to its citizens. This week has seen some important developments, not only because its first 4G LTE network has been given a launch date, but also due to the long-awaited 4G spectrum auction being brought forward to January 2013.

It’s EE, the parent company of Orange and T-Mobile, that has the honor of being the first to switch on a 4G signal. After months of legal wrangling, the network has confirmed it’ll provide a 4G connection in 10 cities from October 30.

CEO Olaf Swantee said in a statement that he was “delighted” to announce the launch of both EE as a brand — a network of EE stores will be opening around the country, through which EE’s 4G LTE phones will be sold — and “the UK’s first super fast mobile 4G and fibre broadband service.”

Initially expected to launch only in London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol, delays have clearly allowed EE to boost its coverage, as 10 cities will now see the benefit of 4G from day one. A press event will be held soon, where those 10 cities and the final six expected to join them by the end of the year, will be revealed.

Early adopters of EE’s 4G service will need a compatible phone, a selection of which can be purchased through the company. The choice may be slim, but it’s eclectic, with the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE, the HTC One XL and the Huawei P1 LTE all available now. The Galaxy Note 2 will also be joining them from October 15, and the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 Windows Phone 8 devices will be added later in the year. Eligible Orange and T-Mobile subscribers will be offered the chance to upgrade too.

Tariff prices haven’t been announced yet, and will probably be discussed at the aforementioned press event, but it’s speculated that monthly costs will increase by around £10.

Spectrum auction brought forward

To enable it to be first out the gate with 4G, EE has refarmed its plentiful reserves of 1800MHz spectrum for 4G use. Its competitors, who don’t have anywhere near enough 1800MHz spectrum to compete, are understandably upset with both EE and the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, who approved the deal back in March.

Since then it has been one long round of complaints and threats from rivals, along with hastily formed partnerships — Vodafone and O2 have joined forces to jointly maintain its nationwide network infrastructure, for example — culminating this week in a meeting between them, Ofcom, EE and the UK government to sort it all out.

Competing firms Vodafone, O2 and Three have been considering legal action against EE, a move that would have delayed both EE’s 4G network launch, and Ofcom’s spectrum auction, which is essential to getting everyone else up and running for 4G.

The meeting not only saw the end of the legal threat, but also the date of the spectrum auction being brought forward to January 2013, which minimizes the period of exclusivity EE has over 4G in the UK. Everybody’s happy, then.

At the auction, all UK networks have the chance to bid on a slice of the 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum, which is currently being cleared in preparation for use with 4G. Once the auction concludes, it’s estimated that it will take five or six months to get everything ready.

These positive developments mean Vodafone, O2 and Three will join the 4G party six months earlier than previously thought, with a limited launch being touted for summer 2013. Until then, EE gets to enjoy its moment in the sun as the UK’s only purveyor of high speed 4G data.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Microsoft demands the return of Xbox dev kits from the 38 Studios liquidation sale

Debtors of Curt Schilling's 38 Studios hope a liquidation auction will help them retrieve their money. Microsoft however, wants its hardware back.

If you’ve been following the gaming industry over the past year, you’ll likely recognize the name “38 Studios.” The games developer, formerly known as “Green Monster Games,” was initially notable for being founded by former Major League Baseball star Curt Schilling (seen in the image above at right), but stumbled on more recent fame due to its spectacular public collapse. While we still await the results of official investigations launched into the firm by the state of Rhode Island and the FBI (the Rhode Island attorney general’s office recently announced that it would not pursue criminal charges against 38 Studios or its founders), the company’s assets are being sent to the auction block in an effort to raise money to pay off the $75 million loan the company received from the good people of Rhode Island.

According to this listing on the website of industrial liquidation specialist SJ Corio Company, the vast majority of hardware used in 38 Studios’ day to day operations, as well as its games development plans, will be available for purchase. This will be carried out over the course of two sales (one on October 16 in Timonium, MD, and one on October 23 in Providence, RI), and prospective buyers will be given access to huge lots of office equipment, computer accessories and, most crucially for this story, an unspecified number of “Xbox 360 XDK consoles.”

Though little information is publicly available on these items, intelligent speculation holds that these were the same Xbox 360 development kits used by 38 Studios in the creation of 2012′s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and possibly any unannounced projects that 38 Studios may have had in the development pipeline. If you’re an average gamer, you might never have seen one of these development kits, as Microsoft tends to closely guard this technology. After all, owning one of these things means that a person is able to run unsigned code on the machine, thus opening up all kinds of opportunities for piracy or the creation of Xbox 360 software that makes the console behave in ways that Microsoft would really rather it didn’t. Thus, when news broke that these kits would be going on sale to what is effectively the general public, Microsoft jumped into action to retrieve the machines.

“Xbox 360 Development Kits (XDK) are the property of Microsoft and are only licensed to authorized studios and may not be assigned or sold to any third party without the written consent of Microsoft,” reads Microsoft’s official statement on the situation. ”We will be contacting the appropriate parties involved in the auction of 38 Studios’ assets to remove the XDK units from the auction listing and to secure the return of the consoles to Microsoft.”

Whether or not Microsoft has legal recourse to retrieve the kits is currently up in the air, but it seems quite likely that due to the trade secrecy of the information inherently contained within an Xbox 360 development kit, that the company could claim, in court, that the sale of such a machine to an unknown third party could theoretically impugn the company’s ability to continue doing business as it has been since the console’s launch. Of course, that’s for the lawyers to hash out, and regardless of the outcome, those of you living in Maryland or Rhode Island suddenly have a chance to score some cut-rate office equipment that was once used by a famous pitcher. Good luck.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Marvel Heroes director talks PvP, in-game auction house, and Diablo

David Brevik discusses how to make a world with more than one Spider-man, Diablo 3-style auction houses, and PVP in a new interview.

Gazillion Entertainment president David Brevik is an interesting figure in the modern video game landscape. His current project is Marvel Heroes, a free-to-play MMO based on Marvel Comics. All of them. Every super hero from the pantheon, from the X-Men to Spider-man to Rocket Raccoon, is in his new loot-focused role-playing game. Even with Iron Man and Wolverine on board though, tackling the loot RPG market is a dicey proposition in a year when Diablo III owns the field.

Brevik’s the man to do it though. After all, he created Diablo. During his tenure as Blizzard North president, Brevik acted as lead designer and lead programmer on both Diablo and Diablo II. He’s also responsible for Blizzard’s worst game ever, the Super Nintendo super hero fighter Justice League Task Force. So he’s got a lot to prove with Marvel Heroes: First, that he can make a free-to-play loot RPG as accessibly addictive as his classic series and that he’s going to do super heroes right.

In a new interview with Spong, Brevik addressed the problem of making an MMO where every player may want to play as the same character. How do you convince people to play as weird characters like Speedball when they just want to be Spidey? You don’t. “It’s pretty well balanced as each one of the characters has been designed to be played with differing styles. So the way that my Spider-man plays may be different in the way your Spider-man plays. This is something I did when working on Diablo and Diablo II, as for example the Amazon I decided to go with bows for her and then spears and things like that.”

How will people pay for those perks though? Since Marvel Heroes is a free to play game, some expect that kitting out a character might include paying out the nose in a real money auction house like the kind in Diablo III. “The auction house stuff that Marvel Heroes will have will be much more similar to a traditional MMO,” says Brevik, “It will be more akin to World of Warcraft where you put something up in the auction house. We’re going to have a lot of items that actually bind to your character so a lot of the best items you can’t really sell them so that’s our philosophy on the issue of item acquisition.”

Brevik also teased Player vs. Player content for the super hero MMO. “[PvP] would be a lot of fun, wouldn’t it?”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com