The move comes just ahead of a vote of Clearwire shareholders scheduled for later Tuesday — a vote that clearly wasn’t going to go Sprint’s way. Sprint, which already owns just more than half of Clearwire, needed the approval of the majority of Clearwire’s minority shareholders — some of which vocally opposed the deal.

With the new offer, Clearwire said it is adjourning the scheduled meeting without taking any action, and its board will review the new offer. The meeting is now set to resume May 30.

“Consistent with its fiduciary duties and in consultation with its financial and legal advisors, the Special Committee of the Clearwire Board of Directors will review this revised proposal from Sprint,” Clearwire said.

It’s unclear, though, whether the bump will be enough to satisfy shareholders such as Crest Financial, who have said they believe that Clearwire is worth significantly more than Sprint’s original $2.97-per-share offer. Sprint’s offer has also been contingent upon its deal with SoftBank going through, and Dish Network is also offering a rival bid for Sprint.

Sprint touted the benefits of its increased bid, while also saying it was the company’s “best and final offer.”

“The revised offer demonstrates Sprint’s commitment to closing the Clearwire transaction and improving its competitive position in the U.S. wireless industry,” Sprint said in a statement. “Sprint’s proposal provides a clear path forward for Clearwire and the merger provides attractive value for shareholders of both companies.”

Update, 10:25 a.m.: Crest Financial said it opposes the new bid as well and took issue with Clearwire’s handling of things, saying it should have a competitive bid process if it is going to sell itself.

“Clearwire is acting in its usual stockholder-unfriendly way by adjourning the special meeting to grant Sprint the ability to pose a new, still inadequate offer,” Crest general counsel David K. Schumacher said in a statement. “This is a consistent theme of this Board: Do everything possible to secure an undesirable merger with Sprint at a below market price.”

Crest also sent a letter to Clearwire’s board, urging them to reject the new bid.

But imagine a world where you can buy a few hours worth of streaming audio or add unlimited email but only a modest amount of data for other purposes.

That’s just the kind of world being created by a Marc Andreessen-backed startup called ItsOn. The company’s main business plan is selling systems to carriers that would let them offer these kinds of services.

However, to get that business off the ground, ItsOn felt like it needed to create its own service. So on Monday the company is announcing Zact, a consumer cellphone service designed to be cheaper and far more flexible than others on the market.

“We need to do a service and become our own customers to show what’s possible,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh said in an interview.

Whether you want to give your kid more texts, boost your data plan or drop your ex from the account, all these kinds of options can be changed from the phone and on the fly. Want to buy just an hour of video or a month’s worth of email? You can do that, as well.

And if the plan you pick is more than you need, Zact will refund the difference between that plan and the least expensive one that would have matched your usage.

“There’s a way to give people exactly what they want and make a profit,” Raleigh said. Although Zact customers have to pay full price for their phone, they can still save thousands over a two-year contract, Raleigh said.

Another feature is controls that let parents choose not only how much voice, data and texts to give their kids, but also when they can use their device and which apps can run at which times.

Preorders for the service will start on Monday, with devices shipping to consumers by June. Though ItsOn created the service that enabled the flexibility, the underlying network for Zact is Sprint, with ItsOn buying capacity on a wholesale basis.

One big downside initially is Zact’s very limited device portfolio — and that’s putting it mildly. Zact initially only works with two Android phones, the $199 LG Optimus Elite and the $399 LG Viper 4G LTE.

Over time, Zact plans to add phone models as well as tablets and other devices.

But the goal is also to show carriers what’s possible using its service, so that eventually ItsOn can be used by the major operators. And the message is resonating, Raleigh said.

“You see it in their eyes,” he said. “They say, ‘We can be popular.’”

Aio Wireless (pronounced Ay-Oh) is launching Thursday in three cities — Houston, Orlando and Tampa.

Plans range from $35 to $70 a month, and devices offered include smartphones from ZTE and Samsung, as well as the Nokia Lumia 620 (a Windows Phone model that previously hadn’t found its way stateside). Customers can also bring their own devices to the network.

It also has the iPhone at standard unsubsidized prices, meaning that a 16 gigabyte iPhone 5 sells for $649. At the other end of the spectrum, the ZTE Prelude, an entry-level Android device, is priced at $49.

Aio’s website has a decidedly non-corporate feel, with a woodgrain background and promises of being “simple” and “delightful” — two words not always associated with wireless carriers.

AT&T is taking another page from T-Mobile’s playbook, offering unlimited data with all its plans, but pricing the different options based on how much of that data customers want at full speed.

The heftiest plan offers a whopping 7GB of high-speed data for $70, while a 100MB plan costs $35 a month.

AT&T is not alone in establishing separate brands aimed at different segments of the market. Sprint, for example, sells prepaid service under both the Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile brands. Sprint has used both to try out different pricing and marketing tactics than it uses with its main brand.

What does Glass and its successors aim to turn us into? Is it something we want to become, or can become? And if it’s to fail, can it please, please be for reasons more profound than fashion or lack of 4G?

– From a blog post entitled “Project Glass is scary enough to deserve some respect”

Crest Financial — Clearwire’s largest minority shareholder — last month hired proxy solicitation firm D.F. King to help in its opposition to the deal. Crest has also sued Clearwire and its board in Delaware, arguing they have breached their fiduciary duties, and asked the Federal Communications Commission to block the deal.

“The filing of Crest’s proxy statement is the next step in our ongoing effort to block Sprint’s unfair merger offer and we are optimistic that we can do so,” Crest General Counsel David Schumacher said in a statement. “We look forward to the SEC clearing our preliminary proxy statement so that we can begin educating Clearwire shareholders in earnest about the disadvantages of the Sprint offer and the alternative future for Clearwire and its valuable trove of wireless spectrum.”

According to Crest, Sprint’s $2.97-per-share offer significantly underestimates the value of Clearwire’s wireless spectrum and other assets.

“Crest is of the opinion that it would be better for Clearwire to remain a stand-alone company, while examining opportunities to consummate alternative transactions, rather than accept the merger consideration of $2.97 in cash per share being offered to Clearwire stockholders in the Proposed Sprint-Clearwire Merger,” it said in the proxy statement.

The full preliminary proxy statement is posted on D.F. King’s website.

The Houston-based investment company owns 3.9 percent of Clearwire and has already sued Clearwire and its directors, arguing that they have breached their fiduciary duties in accepting Sprint’s offer.

The deal still requires the approval of shareholders representing a majority of the shares not held by Sprint. In hiring proxy-solicitation firm D. F. King & Co., Crest is signaling its intent to extend its opposition into a full-on proxy fight. Crest also demanded that Clearwire make available its list of shareholders.

“Crest Financial believes that Clearwire’s shareholders will reject Sprint’s unfair offer for Clearwire,” Crest general counsel Dave Schumacher said in a statement. “Crest is determined to do whatever it can to stop Sprint’s efforts to extract for itself the value of Clearwire’s trove of wireless spectrum and to harm minority shareholders and the public interest.”

Satellite TV company Dish Network has made its own bid for Clearwire, which holds a significant amount of spectrum in addition to operating a wholesale wireless network.

In a regulatory filing with the commission, Sprint confirmed the meeting as well as details of its pitch for approval of the deal.

SoftBank has proposed acquiring a controlling interest in Sprint as well as enabling Sprint to acquire the rest of Clearwire — a move supported by Clearwire’s board but opposed by some Clearwire shareholders.

Clearwire CEO Erik Prusch also attended the March 14 meeting with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and other members of the commission.

The company is willing to pump more than $20 billion into Sprint, with more than $12 billion going to shareholders and $8 billion funneled into improving Sprint’s network.

During the meeting, Son explained what he had done in creating one of Japan’s largest wireless providers after entering as an upstart in 2006 by purchasing Vodafone’s Japanese wireless interests.

“Through innovative products, pricing, and marketing, SoftBank is now poised to become the second largest wireless provider in Japan,” Sprint said in the filing. “Mr. Son explained that through SoftBank’s investment in Sprint, he hopes to bring a similar competitive spark to the U.S. wireless marketplace.”

Ah, how times have changed.

Now the two companies are spending big bucks to take potshots at one another. AT&T placed newspaper ads last week insisting that its smaller rival drops more calls. On Wednesday, T-Mobile fired back with ads of its own, suggesting that AT&T is staying up nights worrying about its little company.

“We love a good scrap, especially when the winner is the consumer,” said Mike Sievert, T-Mobile’s chief marketing officer (and, once upon a time, an AT&T wireless executive himself).

But while Sievert and T-Mobile’s marketing team prep ads, T-Mobile is also working on a new network that it hopes will make it a more serious longer-term competitor.

After trailing all its major rivals in building an LTE network, T-Mobile is preparing a rapid nationwide deployment this year, expecting to cover more than a third of the U.S. population by mid-year and reach 200 million people by the end of the year.

And, at long last, T-Mobile has said it will begin selling Apple products, filling the biggest hole in its product lineup.

“We’re feeling really confident,” T-Mobile engineering VP Mark McDiarmid said in an interview this week.

T-Mobile plans to offer the 4G LTE network alongside its existing HSPA+ network, which it has also dubbed 4G. But after years of touting how HSPA+ can be nearly as fast in some real-world scenarios, the company is now proudly showing test numbers that show just how much faster LTE will be, especially when uploading data.

McDiarmid has plenty of work to do, though. For now, T-Mobile has yet to turn on its LTE network for customers anywhere, though it has things ready to go in Las Vegas and Kansas City as soon as the company is ready to sell devices and make an announcement.

The company also has other technical battles on the horizon, including merging its operations with MetroPCS, once that deal is completed later this year. The move will give the new T-Mobile the spectrum it needs, along with greater scale, but will also be a fair bit of work, given that MetroPCS and T-Mobile are based on different network technologies.

In the meantime, McDiarmid said, he is happy just to see the company’s name staying in print — even if it is in ads from its rival.

“I was kind of excited to see our name printed so boldly,” he said.

That remains the company’s main pitch, especially for the consumer market. However, the company is testing an offer for small businesses that lets them share a pool of data across up to 30 devices.

Sprint, which announced the plans on Friday, is pitching its shared data plans as a time-limited option through June 13, available only to businesses through certain of Sprint’s channels.

Under the new plans, businesses can share 20 gigabytes of data across up to 10 phones, 40GB on up to 20 devices, or 60GB on up to 30 devices. Customers pay a set fee for the data and the first device, with an additional per-device fee for each phone, hotspot or tablet that is added to the plan.

That’s similar to the way that AT&T and Verizon handle pooled data plans. Both carriers introduced their shared data options last year, and have made them standard fare for new consumers, though AT&T still offers other options.

The move may be a competitive necessity, but erodes the sharp line that Sprint has taken in criticizing shared data plans. The company made the challenges of such plans, albeit in the context of families, a staple of its recent advertising:

In ads that ran in major papers this starting on Thursday, AT&T claims T-Mobile drops twice as many calls and has 50 percent slower download speeds. The ads, AT&T says, are a response to T-Mobile’s years of attack ads rather than any one particular spot.

“T-Mobile’s advertising is a combination of being misguided and just plain wrong,” AT&T said in a statement. “This is just a friendly reminder of the fact that independent third-party testing says AT&T’s network delivers faster speeds and fewer dropped calls than them.”

T-Mobile says that AT&T’s move shows it has found a sore spot.

“Looks like we struck a chord,” CMO Mike Sievert said in a statement. “AT&T doth protest too much. Glad they’re spending their money to print our name.”

And, of course, it wasn’t so long ago that AT&T was trying to buy the company whose network it is now is attacking.

Those who want to auction every last hertz of spectrum overlook two basic economic facts about unlicensed spectrum:

First, if spectrum is as valuable as mobile carriers claim it is, reducing the amount of spectrum available for auction by dedicating some of it for unlicensed use should drive up the price of the remaining auctioned spectrum. So designating some unlicensed spectrum will not reduce proceeds delivered to the Treasury. Given the inelastic demand for spectrum, the price increase for the spectrum that is auctioned will result in no loss of revenue. Some of the spectrum that is likely to be useful if set aside for unlicensed use is not likely to fetch much of a price at auction (e.g. the “duplex gap”) because it is not suitable for high power 4G (LTE) wireless networks.

Second, unlicensed spectrum is the most valuable part of the wireless broadband product space by a wide margin. It supports half the traffic delivered to consumer smartphones and tablets and is the final link to the consumer for one quarter of all traffic flow delivered to users with fixed, wireline broadband. The massive amount of economic activity in the unlicensed space generates huge economic value, which in turn maximizes large tax revenues for the federal government.

Those who think that more unlicensed spectrum will lead to “free” Wi-Fi also overlook basic economic realities. Even though unlicensed spectrum is very good for consumers and the economy, it is important to recognize that not paying money at auction to gain access to unlicensed spectrum does not mean that it is free to put it to use. Quite the opposite is true. There are real costs involved in moving the exaflood of bits to and from an unlicensed hotspot. There are real costs in building and acquiring the equipment that will receive the data transmissions and to manage an unlicensed wireless network. If you talk about service for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and billions globally, one thing is certain — if the cost of building and operating an unlicensed network are not recovered from consumers, the network will not be built or operated.

A substantive debate on spectrum policy is a good thing. The clash of ideas will produce better decisions at the FCC. But let’s all take a deep breath and get our facts straight. A hundred years ago, public policy to allocate spectrum concluded that interference could only be controlled by giving a small number of broadcasters exclusive licenses to operate in specific frequencies. Twenty years ago, the FCC decided to try a radical new approach by allowing anyone to transmit signals into spectrum that had been considered garbage, as long as they adhered to simple technical rules. We now recognize that this radical decision led to modern-day Wi-Fi. The remarkable success of Wi-Fi demonstrates that hotspot operators and consumers will willingly pay hundreds of billions of dollars to build and use the Wi-Fi infrastructure even without the ability to exclude others granted by a license — and they are likely to do the same for the FCC’s more recent innovations related to unlicensed use between TV channels, and new unlicensed designations in the 600 MHz, 3.5 GHz and 5 GHz bands in the future.

Could new, unlicensed designations lead to new competition for cellular wireless broadband service? Maybe, but the important point is that it will be an important input to the wireless broadband space, particularly the Internet of Things that connects hundreds of billions of objects.

There are two extremely important lessons to learned from the remarkable success of unlicensed spectrum.

• Policy should expand possibilities, not foreclose them.
• Having dramatically different business models occupy a single product space spurs and maximizes innovation and efficiency.

It would be a huge mistake to try to pick winners and losers by favoring cellular licensed service to the exclusion of unlicensed spectrum.

Mark Cooper is the Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America and a fellow at the Donald McGannon Center for Communications Research at Fordham University.

The funding will come from its existing investors, but at a higher valuation than its Series A round, CEO Stephen Stokols said in an interview. Since last year, FreedomPop has been selling various add-on sleeves, hotspots and data cards that customers can use to access free and low-cost mobile data plans.

More cash will help the company continue to come up with new plans and social features for its service. Already, the company plans to boost the amount of free data each customer gets for referring a friend to the service, and to add the ability for friends with more data on their plan to share with those running low.

“It takes family plans to a new level,” Stokols said.

In its initial products, FreedomPop has been using Clearwire’s WiMax network; later this year, the company will look to offer devices on Sprint’s LTE network, once it covers more places.

The company has run into challenges with one of its devices — the add-on sleeve that adds WiMax capabilities to an iPhone 4. That device is still awaiting FCC approval, months after it was originally scheduled to ship.

Stokols said that FreedomPop hopes to be able to ship the device in a few weeks’ time, but said the company is offering refunds to those who ordered the $99 device. FreedomPop hopes to also soon start shipping a home broadband product, announced in December, that offers low-cost Internet using a fixed WiMax modem.

The company posted a net loss of $3.8 billion, or 68 cents per share, on revenue of $32.6 billion. That compares to a net loss of $6.7 billion, or $1.12 per share, on revenue of $32.5 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Excluding various pension, storm and other charges, the company said its adjusted per-share earnings would have been 44 cents per share, up 10 percent from a year ago but a penny below what some analysts were expecting.

On the wireless front, AT&T said it added 1.1 million total wireless subscribers, including 780,000 new contract customers. It also added 246,000 non-phone “connected devices” in the quarter.

The company added that 6.6 million subscribers, or 9 percent of contract customers, are on one of its new shared data plans. In all, the company said that two-thirds of its smartphone customers — some 31.7 million — are on some sort of tiered data plan. Interestingly, the company said more than 25 percent of shared data plans are opting for a pool of 10 gigabytes or more of data.

It said it had a record quarter for Android and Apple smartphones, selling 8.6 million iPhones in the quarter. Roughly 9 in 10 new contract customers are opting for a smartphone.

AT&T also saw gains for its U-verse high-speed Internet TV service. The company added 192,000 TV subscribers, reaching 4.5 million in total and added 609,000 U-verse Internet customers. That gives it 7.7 million total U-verse Internet subscribers and allowed the company for the first time to have more U-verse Internet subscribers than it did DSL.

The company also said last week that it would have a variety of one-time items this quarter including a $10 billion pension-related charge as well as $175 million in costs due to Hurricane Sandy and other storms.

It also said it would be under profitability pressure after selling 10.2 million smartphones last quarter, given that such devices typically carry higher subsidies than traditional phones.

But, on the call, AT&T’s CFO said that the company is more than happy to make such an investment, given the higher monthly revenue generated by smartphone customers.

Update, 1:30 pm PT: On a conference call with investors, AT&T said it has closed 50 different deals to boost its wireless spectrum holdings, moves that increased average national spectrum by a third.

Also of note, greater than 15 percent of its shared data customers are switching over from an unlimited data plan. The 6.6 million devices on such plans represent about 2.2 million accounts, for an average of three devices per Mobile Share account.

1:55 pm: CEO Randall Stephenson said the company expects per-share earnings growth at least in the high single digit percentage range as well as greater than 2 percent revenue growth for 2013.

“I like how we are executing,” Stephenson said. “I like the moves we are making.”

Asked about recent quotes saying AT&T might be interested in making acquisitions overseas to continue its growth, Stephenson said that the U.S. is outpacing other countries in next-generation networks which could create opportunities amid inevitable consolidation.

“Most people expect the rest of the world will catch up,” Stephenson said.

One of the questions, Stephenson said, is whether AT&T can expand at the service or application level outside the United States. For example, AT&T is licensing its new Digital Life security service to other carriers.

Also of note, AT&T said it will be watching to see how consumers take to T-Mobile’s shift to handset financing as opposed to subsidies. Stephenson said he “kind of likes the idea” and AT&T might follow suit.

Not what you’d call major markets, but progress is progress. And at this point Sprint needs to push its Network Vision plan ahead as quickly as it can. The company currently has LTE service available in just 49 cities, with 200 more in the works. And it has pledged to blanket its entire 3G footprint in LTE by year’s end.

That’s an aggressive schedule. And it doesn’t take into account unforeseen complications like those that have waylaid Sprint’s LTE rollout in the past. Recall that, last summer, Sprint blamed birds for slowing its LTE progress. “We’ve got several hundred sites that are done and ready to turn on and we’re waiting for backhaul,” Sprint Networks Operations President Steve Elfman said at the time. “And we’ve got several hundred others that … have birds nesting on them. Once the birds leave, we’ll be able to turn those sites on.”

To that end, RIM this week expanded its patent agreement with InterDigital to include the wireless research company’s 4G, LTE and LTE-Advanced technology. The deal allows RIM to integrate InterDigital’s tech into its BlackBerry 10 handset portfolio with the company’s blessing and ensures that there will be no unexpected IP licensing issues following BB10’s launch on January 30 — licensing issues like those Samsung, Nokia, ZTE and Huawei find themselves facing today.

InterDigital filed complaints against all four companies with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging they engaged in unfair trade practices by selling 3G and 4G wireless devices that violate seven InterDigital patents.

Until very recently, T-Mobile had very little shot at being able to carry the iPhone. Although it uses the same type of network technology as AT&T, it uses a different band of spectrum for its higher-speed data network.

That has meant that one of two things would have had to happen in order for there to be a T-Mobile-capable iPhone. Either Apple would have to build in support for T-Mobile’s unique spectrum band, or else T-Mobile would have to rework its entire network to carry data over a more iPhone-friendly piece of spectrum.

For much of the past year, T-Mobile has been doing the latter. Several cities are already up and running, with T-Mobile promising even more progress by the end of the year.

Merrill Lynch said this week that the T-Mobile will be taking things a whole lot further with plans to finally start selling the Apple phone.

Without the iPhone, T-Mobile has been bleeding contract customers. In the past two years, not only have Verizon and Sprint started carrying the iPhone, but also a variety of regional and prepaid carriers, as well, leaving T-Mobile (and merger partner MetroPCS) among the few major carriers without an iPhone to sell.

T-Mobile has been careful not to say that it is getting the iPhone, only that it would like to sell Apple’s phone. However, it would certainly help the company justify the big network switchover if it wasn’t relegated to convincing customers to bring their own iPhone.

Though it has never had an iPhone of its own, T-Mobile has long let customers bring their own device. Even before its effort to enable high-speed data for the iPhone, T-Mobile had more than one million iPhones running on its network.

Now, as the company prepares to spend billions on an LTE network and gobble up MetroPCS, it arguably needs Apple now more than ever. And, typically, a relationship with Apple doesn’t come cheap. Companies have to spend a pretty penny on each device and, at least in the case of Sprint, agree to hefty commitments that make the iPhone an expensive, if much-needed, device.

“Sprint and Microsoft are partnering to bring Windows Phone 8 to Sprint’s customers — operating on its 4G LTE network — next year,” the No. 3 carrier said in a statement, without offering further details.

AT&T and T-Mobile have been pretty big backers of Windows Phone, while Sprint and Verizon have taken a back seat. The initial Windows Phone 7 devices didn’t run on their CDMA networks and even when there were models available, neither carrier put much behind the products.

With Windows Phone 8, Verizon is putting a stronger effort into Microsoft’s phone operating system, offering devices from HTC and Nokia, among others.

The No. 4 U.S. carrier said it lost 492,000 contract customers in the third quarter. That’s down slightly from the 557,000 it lost in the prior quarter, but more than the 389,000 it lost a year ago. The company blamed the iPhone 5 launch in part for the continued defections.

With the addition of Sprint last year, all three larger rivals now sell Apple’s phone.

The company saw its total revenue drop 6.4 percent, to $4.9 billion, as higher device sales partly offset a larger 8.7 percent drop in service revenue.

T-Mobile is hoping to shore up its business and improve its long-term position with a pending deal to merge with MetroPCS.