Products & Services…

— It’s official: The new name of U-verse’s Live TV offering is Mobile TV. Rob Hyatt, executive director/Marketing Management at AT&T, revealed the moniker in the company’s corporate blog, touting better LTE picture quality, one-bill convenience and a set $9.99 monthly charge. In addition, three specialty add-on packages are available for $4.99/month each: Urban Zone Pack (BET programming), Playground TV Pack (for kids) and Paquete en Español móvil (popular Hispanic networks).
 
— Google continues to remind Kansas City residents that they need to actually sign up to participate in a “fiberhood” to receive the much-touted Google service. And then they need to choose a particular plan. The first eight KC areas that will be fibered up include Crown Center, Midtown, Sunset Hill, South Plaza West, Countryside, Greenway Fields, Wornall Homestead and Crossroads. Based on Google’s construction timeline, these fiberhoods are scheduled to get fiber sometime this spring.
 
— Tarana Wireless plans to begin selling what it says is the world’s first universal small-cell backhaul product that incorporates dedicated high-capacity wireless links and the ability to retain performance even as small-cell density increases. In addition, it will support throughput across range of non-line-of-sight (NLoS) to line-of-sight (LoS) operations.
 
— Fiber networker OFS now can fusion-splice silica fiber and sapphire fiber using its standard S178 portable fusion splicer — a “major step” when it comes to extending the commercial application of sapphire fibers to extremely-high-temperature instrumentation, it adds. The major drawbacks to using sapphire fibers, OFS explains, have been their high optical attenuation and their high cost, both of which have limited the fiber length between the optical sensor and detector. The new splicing technique allows low-attenuation silica fibers to act as a lead-in fiber to significantly reduce the total optical attenuation.