By Chris Ziegler
posted Nov 10th 2010 6:46PM
Though fellow regional carrier MetroPCS has been arguably the most aggressive carrier in all of North America in getting LTE live, it looks like US Cellular is taking a slightly more laid-back approach. At a conference in New York today, USCC's CFO announced that they're looking at deploying one LTE test market in the latter part of 2011, moving on to a full-force launch in 2012. In the same breath, he mentioned that they'd be interested in making a deal with a company like Clearwire or LightSquared that would give them access to more spectrum for 4G (or make that 4G-like) services, but that they're not "feeling a sense of crisis or urgency" on the matter -- in other words, let's not everyone switch over to US Cellular at once when LTE goes live, lest the network spontaneously melt into the Earth's crust.
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MVNO Consumer Cellular is now offering Mobile Captions Service, an on-phone text relay system that allows deaf and hard of hearing users to see what's being said to them on the screen. Needless to say, speech-to-text isn't accurate enough to make it work, so the company has partnered with Hamilton Relay Service to have actual relay operators push the text to you. In order to use it, you'll need a Nokia E5 -- an odd choice for a carrier that thrives on hardware simplicity, except for the fact that a smartphone platform like S60 probably gives Consumer Cellular the flexibility it needs to deploy a usable relay app. In states where Hamilton is authorized to provide relay service, Mobile Captions is available now -- for free -- to qualified users.