After Hurricane Wilma, as hundreds of thousands of customers across southern Florida remain without telephone service, BellSouth announced Monday it would assist affected customers with free services such as voicemail and inside line repair.

The Federal Communications Commission on Monday approved the mergers of Verizon with MCI and SBC with AT&T, with only minimal conditions applied to the mergers.

Multiple sources are reporting that Sprint Nextel has agreed to sell the Nextel iDEN network to the U.S. Department of Defense for an undisclosed amount. The DOD will use the network for a unified communications framework for military and civilian emergency personnel.

Two recent federal court decisions show that the U.S. Department of Justice has routinely been tracking the locations of people by using their wireless phones’ GPS capabilities, without having probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.

As announced here nearly two months ago, SBC has now come clean and said they will use the AT&T name once the merger between the two companies is approved.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday approved the mergers of Verizon with MCI and SBC with AT&T without significant conditions such as the divestiture of assets that critics had asked for.

BellSouth introduced its fixed wireless service for small business customers in New Orleans on Tuesday. The service provides high-speed data service over a fixed wireless connection.

This month’s Wired magazine has a short review of various communications technologies that either kept working or failed miserably after going head-to-head with Hurricane Katrina.

Cingular Wireless announced Monday the availability of mobile email and instant messaging for its wireless subscribers nationwide.

Verizon’s Message Alert service, which sends a text message to subscribers’ wireless phones when their landline phone receives a voicemail, is now available to all Verizon residential and small business customers nationwide.