Skype has named Scott Durchslag COO, according to MediaPost, who will bring 20 years of experience to the position—including stints with The Chasm Group, Grand Central and McKinsey & Company.

Most recently, and more significantly, Durchslag served as Motorola's corporate vice president of Global Product & Experience Invention. The report said that Durchslag spent five years with the consumer electronics giant, taking on roles such as general manager of South Asia and Chief Strategy Officer of the personal communications sector.

As has been widely reported, Motorola is shedding high-level executives left, right, and sideways, so it's interesting to see one of them take a position at a VoIP company (and one that's wholly owned by eBay).

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Bush administration in federal court, RCR Wireless News reports, in order to obtain records on allegedly unchecked cellphone tracking by the government.

"This is a critical opportunity to shed much-needed light on possibly unconstitutional government surveillance techniques," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU and lead attorney on the case, in the article. "Signing up for cellphone services should not be synonymous with signing up to be spied on and tracked by the government."

This all began after media reports surfaced about government officials using citizens' cellphones to zero in on their locations and monitor their movements—sometimes without a warrant or any court oversight, the report said.

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It's no secret that cell phone carriers aren't particularly popular with their customers. Now Forbes is in on the action with a piece that highlights how the wireless phone industry is ranked as one of the worst in the U.S. for customer satisfaction:

"Technical support calls can take hours with endless transfers from one customer rep to another. Then there's the endless pile of service activation and cancellation fees."

One Verizon customer even faked his own death last year, complete with a death certificate and a friend's help, in an attempt to get out of his contract early. (The carrier found out and charged him anyway.)

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According to a recent report from Informa Telecoms & Media, there are now more than 100 million 3G WCDMA subscribers in Europe. The analyst firm found that, at the end of May, 101.5 million of the 910.8 million mobile subscriptions in Europe were for WCDMA devices.

Italy was the first European country to launch WCDMA technology, back when 3 Italia offered the first devices in 2003. Fast-forward five years, and Italy accounts for a quarter of the WCDMA subscriptions in Europe, says a Telecoms.com article on the report from its parent company.

In an amusing but sharply-written tribute to the copper wire landline, which has seen some serious decline in usage recently, the New York Times has a piece on someone who is very attached to the reliable, clear sound of an analog phone.

As the article states, for decades, traditional phone service has aimed to provide "five nines reliability:" a dial tone available 99.999 percent of the time. That works out to 5 minutes and 15 seconds or less of downtime a year. Anyone with a cell phone or VoIP service knows that you're lucky if you don't drop more than one or two calls per day.

Henning Schulzrinne, a computer science professor at Columbia University, said in the report that he sees similarities in cellphones and VoIP services, which consumers deem reliable only as elements of a set of redundant services. "Instead of having a single device that is very reliable," he said, "people have multiple devices that are less reliable."

And with prices for VoIP, and for cell phones, still far below what moderate to heavy landline usage could ring up on a monthly basis, it's likely that consumers will continue to gravitate toward more economical (and portable) choices, versus staying grounded to their beloved landlines.

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Starbucks, AT&T, and T-Mobile have reached a deal to resolve T-Mobile's claim that the coffee chain secretly colluded with AT&T to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access in its cafes despite an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile, Reuters is reporting.

"T-Mobile, AT&T and Starbucks have entered into a memorandum of understanding to resolve their disputes and are committed to providing a high quality Wi-Fi experience for customers," Starbucks spokesperson Stacey Krum said in the statement e-mailed to reporters. She didn't disclose the terms of the deal; an AT&T spokesperson confirmed it, while T-Mobile had no comment.

He came, he saw, he returned the company to profitability, and now he leaves. Vodafone Group PLC, the world's largest cell phone company by sales, announced the surprise resignation of chief executive Arun Sarin on Tuesday as it posted its latest numbers, according to The Associated Press.

Sarin was at Vodafone for five years, but faced investor dissatisfaction two years ago when about 10 percent of shareholders voted against his re-election amid pressure to spin off the company's stake in Verizon Wireless.

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Here's what we fear about what could happen with cell phone carriers—home cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996, which is about double the rate of inflation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in May.

A New York Times story said that cable customers, who typically pay at least $60 a month, watch only a fraction of what they pay for—on average, a mere 13 percent of the 118 channels available to them:

"The resiliency of cable is all the more remarkable because the Internet was supposed to change all things digital. Technology has led to more choices and lower prices for news and music as well as cell phone and landline minutes—not to mention computers, cameras, music players, and phones themselves."

Compared with cable providers, cell phone carriers are more restrictive, since they dictate the exact handsets we're allowed to use, and in many cases, the specific programs we're allowed to run on our cell phones. At least when you sign up for cable, you don't have to buy a computer from an approved list of outdated Dell machines, or promise to only use Internet Explorer and only play games from Electronic Arts. That's essentially what happens when you sign up for a cell phone in the U.S. Without new consumer protection laws, the carriers could jack prices up further too.

Nearly three out of four consumers say mobile phone usage on airplanes should be restricted to silent features such as text-messaging, e-mail and playing games, according to a survey commissioned by Yahoo, MediaPost reports.

Moreover, if passengers are stuck listening to cell phone calls anyway, 69% said there should be a designated area for that sort of thing, according to the article. For its part, Yahoo said that the results "show people view their mobile phones not just as phones, but handheld computers."

According to a new study Wednesdsay by IBM's Institute for Business Value, 80 percent of consumers said they'd prefer a service provider that gave them more choice in the applications and services available on their mobile device, CNET News reports.

This is something we're starting to see more of, now that carriers are claiming they're opening up their networks (although to varying degrees, and still not enough, by most accounts). "As the Internet goes mobile, companies such as Google and Verizon Wireless see a huge opportunity," the report said. "The market for mobile Internet services is estimated to reach $80 billion by 2011, according to IBM. At the same time, the number of mobile Internet users worldwide is expected to reach nearly 1 billion by 2011."

The article concluded by saying that service providers like Verizon Wireless are at the very least paying the idea of open access lip service, which is good—but "whether open access can survive as a business model depends on how affordable this access will be. If mobile operators charge a premium for choice and freedom, a truly open network business model may take longer to develop."