Wi-Fi rides to wireless networks' rescue

February 12, 2010 4:00 AM PST

by Marguerite Reardon

Good old Wi-Fi could be the fix to an impending explosion of data on wireless networks.

Nearly three years after Apple introduced the game-changing iPhone, wireless operators around the globe are feeling the effects of the wireless data tsunami that is well under way. Even networks that don't support the iPhone are feeling the pinch as a generation of new wireless devices offering bandwidth-hungry Web applications are hitting networks.

The result, as many iPhone users in New York City and San Francisco will tell you, is a network that drops calls and offers wireless Net surfing at the speed of a turtle.

Savvy smartphone subscribers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices have already been seeking out Wi-Fi hotspots for their Internet surfing, music-streaming, and video watching. But as more devices, such as the Apple iPad come online and the forecast for wireless data shoots through the roof, wireless operators are looking at Wi-Fi as a way to offload some data traffic from their overburdened 3G networks. And as wireless data is expected to continue to grow rapidly over the next several years, they're looking at Wi-Fi as a part of their long term wireless strategies as well, even as they build out 4G wireless networks.

"The thirst for bandwidth that new devices and applications on the network create far exceeds what 3G or 4G technology can offer," said Jeff Thompson, CEO of TowerStream, a company that provides fixed wireless access using WiMax. "And you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

Data tsunami

Mobile data traffic is growing unabated, largely due to an onslaught of new devices that provide access to a bevy of Web-based applications. Internet infrastructure equipment maker Cisco Systems predicts that by 2014 there will be more than 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks, as well as billions of machine-to-machine devices also connecting to networks.

Wireless data traffic throughout the world has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs, Cisco said in a recent report. And by 2014, that figure is expected to increase 39-fold to about 3.6 exabytes per month (or 3.6 billion gigabytes).

Already some networks are crumbling under the stress. AT&T, the exclusive carrier in the U.S. for the iPhone, reported recently it has seen wireless packet data on its network increase more than 18 times in the last two and a half years. The extra traffic, particularly in densely populated regions, has caused problems for consumers in the way of dropped calls and slow Net access.

AT&T's chief executive of operations, John Stankey, said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call that during certain periods in some sections of Manhattan nearly 70 percent of the phones active on AT&T's network are data-intensive devices.

AT&T's problems are a harbinger of what's to come for other operators that are just now getting data-intensive smartphones. AT&T has already said it will boost capital spending on its network in 2010 by $2 billion, bringing the total to between $18 billion to $19 billion. The company didn't break out how it would spend the money, but it mentioned plans to add cell sites, increase backhaul capacity, and upgrade its network to the next generation of HSPA. It will eventually upgrade to 4G wireless using LTE technology.

Wi-Fi as the solution

Even with new 4G networks coming online and more backhaul capacity in the network to help open up the lanes of traffic, there will be so much demand that wireless operators are going to need to use every solution they can to address the problem. And this is why AT&T plans to continue investing in its Wi-Fi hotspot network. Today, the company has 20,000 hotspots around the U.S. in retail locations like Starbucks coffee shops, hotels, and airports.

"Wi-Fi is a very important technology for us," said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. "And it will be considered as a factor in our network plans in the future."

AT&T subscribers are already using Wi-Fi to offload some 3G traffic. A recent AT&T survey indicates that in the past month 43 percent of smartphone users said they had connected to an AT&T hotspot at least once, Siegel said. In 2009, AT&T consumers connected to an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot four times more often than they did in 2008.

Momentum is growing. In the first quarter of 2010, there have already been more than 35 million connections to the Net via an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. This is up by 10 million over the fourth quarter of 2008, Siegel said. He also pointed out that the majority of these Wi-Fi connections are being made by smartphones, such as the iPhone, rather than laptops. In fact, 73 percent of Wi-Fi connections in AT&T hotspots came from "integrated devices" in the fourth quarter compared with 61 percent for all of 2009.

One of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi is the fact that it's already in most devices. Laptops come with Wi-Fi pre-installed, and now most new smartphones also come with Wi-Fi built in.

Advances in Wi-Fi technology over the past couple of years have also made it more useful for mobile operators. The latest version of the technology--802.11n--can transmit over longer distances at faster speeds. Multiple radio technology also helps Wi-Fi signals move around corners and better penetrate walls for more coverage.

For example, at a distance of about 500 meters, 802.11n Wi-Fi device can transmit signals at 15.5 Mbps. This is compared with about 5.2 Mbps using the older 802.11g Wi-Fi standard. Compare this with average speeds of 3G wireless, which is about 400 Kbps to 700 Kbps and it's easy to see why consumers would choose to use Wi-Fi when given the opportunity. Wi-Fi is also faster than WiMax, a 4G wireless technology that offers average downloads around 1 to 2 Mbps.

"The newer 802.11n technology changed the game for Wi-Fi," said Selino Lo, CEO of a Wi-Fi networking company called Ruckus Wireless. "It offers better range and coverage. And it offers the ability to service more simultaneous customers, which allows wireless carriers to use it to build much more scalable networks."

Towerstream, a company that specializes in providing wireless backhaul solutions to wireless carriers and large companies, is exploring using its rooftop rights in densely urban areas to create Wi-Fi hotzones. Since the technology today creates larger Wi-Fi hotspots, Thompson thinks operators could extend their Wi-Fi hotspots beyond a single cafe, covering entire downtown areas.

"You can build an 802.11n hotspot that isn't much smaller than some of these cell sites in densely populated urban areas," Thompson said. "It's still a little early for us, but we're talking to carriers to see if there is an opportunity for us to leverage our rooftop rights to help them build out these networks. It's a lot cheaper and easier to install than setting up a new cell tower and it offers a lot more capacity."

AT&T has been the most vocal U.S. carrier to talk about its use of Wi-Fi to help alleviate capacity issues. In fact, during the company's earnings call, when asked how AT&T expected to handle additional traffic from Apple's iPad, an executive said he expected many consumers to use Wi-Fi.

T-Mobile has also been a big proponent of Wi-Fi. In 2006, the company began offering a service for $10 extra a month that allowed people to make unlimited phone calls using Wi-Fi. The company has since discontinued the service when it introduced an unlimited calling plan for all its cell phones, but it still allows subscribers to seamlessly switch to Wi-Fi for voice and data calls on certain phones.

All of its Wi-Fi-enabled handsets are able to switch to Wi-Fi for data. But company executives say T-Mobile doesn't view Wi-Fi as a technology for offloading data traffic, so much as it sees it as a way to extend the T-Mobile network.

Sprint Nextel is also using Wi-Fi to offload some data traffic and to extend the reach of its network. At CES in January, the company announced the Overdrive, a 3G/4G wireless router that creates a mini-hotspot for up to five Wi-Fi devices.

Verizon Wireless seems to be the least enthusiastic U.S. operator over Wi-Fi. For the past few years, Verizon has downplayed the importance of Wi-Fi. And up until recently, it routinely disabled Wi-Fi on many handsests. The company experimented with deploying its own Wi-Fi hot spots several years ago in New York City, turning old phone booths into wireless hot spots. The service never took off, and Verizon dismantled the hotspots. The company was also a vocal critic of many municipal Wi-Fi projects, including the one in Philadelphia.

But in 2009, the company had a change of heart toward Wi-Fi. It announced that some of its Verizon Fios subscribers would get free access to its own Verizon Wi-Fi hot spots as well as to hotspots offered by Boingo as part of their broadband service.

While Verizon sees the value in extending Wi-Fi to broadband customers, the company still doesn't appear to be embracing it for offloading data traffic. A spokesman for the company was not available to talk about the company's Wi-Fi strategy.

That said, Verizon has been very public about its aggressive plans for deploying its 4G network using LTE. The company will be launching some markets in 2010 with more to follow in 2011.

Even though operators may not be talking publicly about their plans for Wi-Fi, Steven Glapa, director of business development at Ruckus, said they are talking to him about deploying solutions.

"Operators are definitely interested in Wi-Fi for offloading data traffi," he said. "The normal process for a tier 1 carrier may take 12 to 24 months to evaluate, test, and deploy new radio technology, but many of the people I am talking to are telling me they need to make decisions much sooner than that."

He said carriers around the world who have had the iPhone the longest are the most eager to expand their Wi-Fi networks for offloading traffic. Glapa said consumers may start seeing more hotspots and hotzones for offloading data traffic as soon as this year. But he expects many carriers to get these Wi-Fi offload networks up and running in 2011 and 2012.

"When you start seeing CEOs talking about capacity issues, that's when you can expect to see some changes pretty quickly," he said. "So I am sure wireless subscribers will start seeing something by the end of the year."

MannKind?

2-Star Stocks Poised to Plunge: MannKind?
February 2, 2010 5:04 AM ET advertisement

Based on the aggregated intelligence of 145,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, biotech company MannKind (Nasdaq: MNKD) has received a distressing two-star ranking.

With that in mind, let's take a closer look at MannKind's business and see what CAPS investors are saying about the stock right now.

MannKind facts

Headquarters (Founded)
Valencia, Calif. (1991)

Market Cap
$1.14 billion

Industry
Biotechnology

Trailing-12-Month Revenue
$0

Management
Founder/CEO Alfred Mann

CFO Matthew Pfeffer

Return on Capital (Average, Past 3 Years)
(71.5%)

3-Month Return
94.2%

Cash / Debt
$57 million / $263 million

Competitors
Amylin Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: AMLN)

Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY)

Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO)

CAPS Members Bearish on MNKD Also Bearish on
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)

Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)

CAPS Members Bullish on MNKD Also Bullish on
Ford Motor (NYSE: F)

Sources: Capital IQ (a division of Standard & Poor's) and Motley Fool CAPS.
On CAPS, 25% of the 496 members who have rated MannKind believe the stock will underperform the S&P 500 going forward. These bears include quinpeung and All-Star zzlangerhans, who is ranked in the top 0.5% of our community.

Just last month, quinpeung warned that positive news for its inhaled insulin drug Afrezza may be more than priced into the stock:

All data I have seen looks terrific and approval seems a no brainer. But I have a hunch that the FDA will identify a flaw in the [new drug application] -- perhaps a manufacturing issue -- that prevents approval. The investors that have recently driven the stock up will withdraw, and the price will drop.

In a pitch from three days earlier, zzlangerhans expands on that line of reasoning. Here's an excerpt:

Mannkind could easily be over 25 within a week if the FDA suddenly announces approval of [Afrezza]. … [R]easons for this red thumb. ...

2. The PDUFA has passed without FDA commentary and the share price has moved higher. This is highly atypical and indicates that the market is not just drinking Al Mann's Kool-Aid but swimming in it.

3. A Complete Response will murder this stock. They didn't set up a partnership. ... What share price will they have to dilute at if they run out of funds?

4. Even with approval and a run to 25 the share price may not sustain. The company still has to make a licensing and distribution deal and with their cash position they don't have a lot of leverage. Also, Exubera got approved by the FDA too. Remember?

What do you think about MannKind, or any other stock for that matter? If you want to retire rich, you need to protect your portfolio from any undue risk. Staying away from dangerous stocks is crucial to securing your financial future, and on Motley Fool CAPS, thousands of investors are working every day to flag them. CAPS is 100% free, so get started!

Copyright 2010 Motley Fool

Saudi girl faces beating over phone at school

Rights group: Teenager sentenced after being caught with banned device
Mideast/North Africa video MORE VIDEO
Passenger jet crashes in 'ball of fire' off Beirut
Jan. 25: The Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after takeoff near Beirut. Officials do not suspect terrorism in the accident. ITV's Harry Smith reports.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Deadly blasts rock Baghdad
Bin Laden purportedly claims bomb plot

updated 8:30 a.m. ET, Sun., Jan. 24, 2010
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A teenage girl has been sentenced to a 90-lash flogging and two months in prison as punishment for assaulting a teacher, a Saudi judge said in an interview published Sunday.

Human rights group Amnesty International said the assault happened after the girl was caught with a camera phone at school.

The teenager's name was not immediately available. She could be spared with a pardon from King Abdullah, said Judge Riyadh al-Meihdib.

"The verdict was read out to her at the court and she did not object," al-Meihdib told Al-Watan, a national Saudi daily newspaper.

He said the teacher refused to forgive the girl, who will not appeal the case. The teacher's condition was unknown, and the newspaper had no details about the dispute.

Camera phones are banned at the school.

Al-Watan quoted the school headmaster describing the girl as "about twenty" years old.

Call for royal intervention

However, Amnesty said the girl is 13.

In a statement Friday, the London-based rights watchdog urged Abdullah to "intervene immediately to ensure that the flogging sentence is rescinded."

"He must also take steps to reform Saudi Arabian law and criminal procedure to ban the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, in particular floggings of children," Amnesty interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone said.

Judge al-Meihdib said his court will issue instructions to local authorities in Jubail to carry out the sentence within two days.

Jubail is located on the Red Sea. Its court sentenced the teenager with the harsh punishment Tuesday.

Comment

Here in the USA she might get a suspension or a detention. 90 lashes and 2 months in jail for a 13-year old?

What Caused the Great Recession?

Jacob Weisberg
It's finally ending. Let the blaming begin.
Published Jan 9, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Jan 18, 2010

As the financial crisis of 2008–09 draws to a close, narratives of the meltdown are flooding bookstores, think tanks are cranking out white papers, and four different congressional committees are investigating what went wrong. Now that the debate over how to prevent the next collapse has begun, it might not be a bad idea to figure out how the last one happened. The only near-consensus is on the question of what triggered the not-quite-a-depression. In 2007 the housing bubble burst, leading to a high rate of defaults on subprime mortgages. Exposure to bad mortgages doomed Bear Stearns in March 2008 and then led to a banking crisis that fall. A global recession became inevitable once the government decided not to rescue Lehman Brothers. But right about here, agreement ends.

There are no strong candidates for what logicians call sufficient conditions—a single factor that would have caused the crisis in the absence of any others. There are, however, a number of plausible necessary conditions—factors without which the crisis would not have occurred. Most analysts find former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan at fault, for varying reasons. Conservatives tend to blame Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low between 2003 and 2005 as the real-estate bubble inflated, spurring a frenzy of irresponsible borrowing.

Liberal analysts are more likely to focus on the way that Greenspan's aversion to regulation turned innovative financial products into lethal weapons. In this view, the emergence of an unsupervised market for more and more exotic derivatives—credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDSs on CDOs—allowed heedless financial institutions to put the entire financial system at risk. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke also echoes this view, attributing the crisis to regulatory failure.

A bit further down on the list are factors that didn't cause the crisis but enabled it or made it worse than it might have been. These include global savings imbalances, which put upward pressure on asset prices and downward pressure on interest rates during the bubble years; misjudgments by the bond-rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's about the safety of mortgage-backed securities; a lack of transparency about the risks borne by banks, which used off-balance-sheet entities to hide what they were doing; excessive reliance on mathematical models, which under-priced unpredictable forms of risk; and a flawed model of compensation that encouraged traders and executives at financial firms to take on excessive risk.

Other analysts look to the underlying mindset that encouraged the meltdown: shortsightedness, stupidity, and greed. But those are weak explanations, unless you think human nature changed in the final decades of the 20th century to make people greedier or more foolish. A subtler psychological argument is that investors fell prey to recurring delusions about risk and bubbles, which the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff describe in their book, ThisTime Is Different. In another new book, How Markets Fail, John Cassidy of The New Yorker focuses on the fallacies of free-market fundamentalism (Greenspan again). Still other writers, like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, in his new book, Freefall, point to the way globalization spread the toxicity from the U.S. mortgage market to the rest of the world. Not all such explanations fall according to ideological expectations. The conservative jurist Richard Posner argues in his book A Failure of Capitalismthat the free market itself is to blame for the recent troubles. Unfortunately, what these "root causes" explanations have in common is that they don't lend themselves to practical solutions.

I've left out some farther-fetched interpretations of the cause of the crisis. Libertarians and The Wall Street Journal editorial page continue to insist that government did it. In I.O.U., the only truly entertaining book I've read on the subject, the British writer John Lanchester theorizes that after the Cold War, capitalism could go wild because Western governments no longer had to worry about competing with communism. This is a fascinating idea, with no evidence to support it.

Historians are still debating what caused the Great Depression, so it's not likely this argument will be settled any time soon. But if we haven't at least learned that our financial markets need stronger regulatory supervision to prevent bad bets by big firms from going viral, we'll be back in the same place faster than you can say "30 times leverage."

Jacob Weisberg is chairman of the Slate Group, and is the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington.

Comment

A good overview.

More furor likely as banker bonuses hit $145 billion

The eye-popping compensation will almost certainly raise cries for a bonus tax.

Posted by InvestorPlace on Friday, January 15, 2010 10:21 AM

The banking industry clearly does not care about the outcry from Congress, the President and taxpayers regarding the extravagant bonuses being paid on the heels of the greatest credit crisis in four generations. The Wall Street Journal reports that it has put together research which shows bankers will make $145 billion this year, which is even higher than the phenomenal amount that they made in 2007.

Most of the money will be paid to the top managements and traders at the blue chip firms which include Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which posted a huge increase in fourth-quarter net income early today. Earnings per share rose to $.74 from $.06 in the same period a year ago.

It is clear that the culture clash between Wall Street and Main Street is becoming more violent.

A number of financial company CEOs objected to the new tax proposed by The White House to raise $90 billion over ten years by placing a 0.15% tax on balance sheet liabilities. The top 50 financial companies will bear almost this entire burden. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon reacted by saying the taxes should not be used as a form of punishment.

Politicians, on the other hand, will seize on the $145 billion number as a sign that bailed out banks used TARP money to survive the crisis and then prosper shortly thereafter. The eye-popping compensation will almost certainly raise cries for a bonus tax similar to the one instituted in the U.K. this year.

Wall Street executives will counter by saying that they already pay high income taxes on their bonuses and that their companies pay high corporate taxes. The Treasury will do just fine by its levies on the financial industry. But, that is a sign that the financial community has a tin ear. The populist reaction to the $145 billion number will drive new legislation to tax Wall Street pay or cap it at levels well below where it was last year.

By ignoring the anger of the average man, Wall Street has put itself in a position to be the government’s whipping boy as it prepares the budget for next year.

Comment

Arrogance such as this needs to be addressed by Congress. They screw up the works, coming close to dropping us into another Depression, we bail them out, and they continue to rob, rape, and plunder the system like it never happened. They use OUR bailout money to reward themselves for this series of fiscal mistakes. Ridiculous.

Biotech: Savior ?

With the battles over genetically engineered (GE) crops quieting down, at least
temporarily, it’s a good time to take stock of a technology that has been portrayed as either the scourge or savior of the world’s food supply. Genetic engineering has been used almost exclusively to make corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets resistant to herbicides or to make them produce their own insecticide. Both advances offer real benefits to farmers by increasing yields or farm income.

(Yes, organic farming would be better, but it won’t replace conventional farming
any time soon.)

Don’t bother looking for consumer benefits, though. The current biotech crops have not made any foods more nutritious, tastier, or cheaper. The nutritionally improved crops closest to market:

a novel soybean with omega-3 fats, which may help prevent heart attacks, and a soybean whose oil could replace oils that contain trans fats. But both are still a few years away.

On the other hand, the engineered crops currently being grown are safe and cause less
environmental damage than their conventional cousins. Some GE crops allow farmers to use fewer chemical pesticides. Others support notill farming, which protects topsoil and reduces agricultural runoff into rivers and streams. Meanwhile, in developing nations with millions of poor subsistence farmers, GE crops are proving highly popular. Farmers in India and China who are growing cotton engineered to produce the Bt pesticide benefit because they can use fewer chemical pesticides and enjoy sharply increased yields. That translates into fewer pesticide poisonings and
higher income. In India, cotton production doubled between 2002 and 2007. (Critics
charge that failed harvests of Bt cotton in India have led to farmer suicides, but independent researchers have found no link.)

Consumer benefits probably will come sooner overseas than in the United States.
India soon could market two dietary mainstays from genetically engineered crops: water-conserving mustard and insect-resistant eggplant. And China is becoming
a powerhouse with its own biotech crops, which won’t bear the Monsanto or DuPont logo.

The Gates Foundation is funding projects to boost nutrients in sorghum and cassava,
two staple African crops. And, with the Rockefeller Foundation’s help, Golden Rice may soon move from the lab to fields in Southeast Asia. That long-awaited variety produces betacarotene, which can prevent vitamin A deficiency and blindness. What about future genetically engineered crops (and animals)? Congress should require
the Food and Drug Administration to formally approve new GE foods to ensure that they
are safe for humans. With stronger, but not stifling, regulations, consumers should be able to continue to trust the safety of GE foods.
2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9
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Nutrition Action Healthletter
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Congress should require the FDA to formally approve new
genetically engineered foods, to make sure that they’re safe.
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Healthy Movie Popcorn?

BIG
Ready to sit back and enjoy the movie? Not yet. First, the theater is hoping you’ll stop by the concession stand for a snack. You know, something light…like, say, a bucket of popcorn with the calories of a Hamburger plus a Quarter Pounder plus a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Surely, no one expects you to sit through a two-hour movie
with nothing to eat or drink. After all, you’re burning dozens of calories in there, what with all that leg crossing, shifting around in your seat...and reaching for some popcorn. With all that activity, you can really work up an appetite,
especially if you’re still growing. And, sad to say, many
adults are.
Continued on p. 2.

2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
POPCORN

C O V E R S T O R Y
A “medium” (20 cups) or a “large” (also 20 cups) has 60 grams of sat fat. Of course, a large means a free refill (Yay!), so there’s no limit to the damage you can do.
Suggestion: Move your cardiologist’s phone number to your speed dial before
the lights go down. Just kidding. It takes years to clog those arteries…and years for your blood pressure to respond to the salt shock (550 milligrams of sodium—a third of a day’s worth—for a small and 980 mg for a medium or large). The calories, on the other hand, may show up much sooner...and where you least want them.

Budget 670 for a small and 1,200 for a medium or large. You could think of each
small as a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza and each medium or large
as two. But the two pizzas pack “only” a day’s worth of sat fat—nowhere near the
three days’ worth in a medium or large popcorn. How can a medium and large at Regal
each hold the same 20 cups of popcorn? Simple. The taller medium comes in a bag with straight sides, while the squatter large comes in a tapered tub that’s wider at the top (see photo). The tub sure looks like it holds more. Other than for the free refill (shudder), why else would moviegoers pay $8 for a large (a medium is $7)?

What’s the healthiest snack to buy at the movies? You can go for 400 to 1,200
calories’ worth of popcorn that (at many theaters) is essentially fried in one to
three days’ worth of saturated fat. Or you can buy a package of candy with 300
to 1,100 empty calories (plus at least half a day’s sat fat if it’s chocolate). Soft
drinks dispatch another 150 to 500 calories to your thirsty fat cells. The best snack at the movies? No snack at all.

Information compiled by Amy Ramsay, with help from Melissa Pryputniewicz.
“ Did you know that popcorn is among the healthiest—and tastiest—snacks around?” asks the Web site of the Popcorn Board, an industry group. “It’s a whole
grain food that’s low in calories and fat and it’s a complex carbohydrate.”
Maybe that’s one reason people fork over $4 to $8 for a bag or tub of popcorn
when they enter a movie theater. It sounds like they’re munching on a stalk
of broccoli, for goodness sakes.

Turns out the Popcorn Board is right...if you’re talking low-fat popcorn or (fat-free) air-popped. Eating a tub of movie theater popcorn is more like eating an 8 oz. bag of potato chips, and that’s assuming your theater pops in the best oil available and you get it without the “buttery” topping.

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Movie Theaters Fill Buckets …and BELLIES
Here’s what we found when we sent samples of popcorn and toppings from the three largest theater chains to an independent lab for analysis. (Each gave us nutrition facts for its popcorn. But just to be sure, we analyzed samples from three different theaters for each chain. For two of the chains—Regal and AMC—we went to theaters in the Washington, D.C., area. For Cinemark, our samples came from Texas, Illinois, and
Maryland.)

WITH 548 theaters in 39 states plus the District of Columbia, Regal is the largest chain in the United States. It pops in coconut oil, which is 90 percent saturated. (In contrast, lard is 40 percent saturated.) Translation: A “small” popcorn
(that’s about 11 cups’ worth) with no buttery topping has 34 grams of saturated fat. So even if you split it with a friend (unlikely), you each get nearly a day’s worth of artery paste. And it gets worse from there.

At Regal, a medium (left) and a large popcorn each has 1,200 calories and three days’ worth of saturated fat. POPCORN
BIG
Photos: © Valery Potapova/fotolia.com (top), Stephen Schmidt (bottom).
N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 3
C O V E R S T O R Y REGAL
(popped in coconut oil)
AMC
(popped in coconut oil)
CINEMARK
(popped in non-hydrogenated canola oil)
11 cups
20 cups
20 cups
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 5 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. butter topping adds
130 calories 9 g sat fat 0.4 g trans fat
2 Tbs. butter topping adds
260 calories 18 g sat fat 0.7 g trans fat
9 cups
16 cups
370 calories
420 calories
LARGE MEDIUM Small
210 mg
sodium
690 mg
sodium
550 mg
sodium
670 calories
60 g sat fat
1,200 calories
1,200 calories
980 mg
sodium
980 mg
sodium
1,030 calories
57 g sat fat
580 mg
sodium
760 calories
910 calories
1,240 mg
sodium
1,500 mg
sodium
Another oopsy-daisy: According to Regal, a medium has 720 calories, while a large has 960 calories. Both are lower than our lab results. Oh well. What’s an extra 200 to 500 calories when your snack hovers around the 1,000-calorie mark? They don’t call them tubs for nothing.

Toppings: For customers who think plain popcorn isn’t soaked in enough oil, Regal offers a “buttery” topping. According to Regal and the topping manufacturer, it adds 130 calories to a small, 200 calories to a medium, and 260 calories to a large.
We analyzed the topping to make sure that it had no trans fat. But we didn’t check to see how much topping the concession staff at Regal—or any other chain—adds. Odds are, it varies. And odds are, it’s more than what Regal claims.
> > > > >
590 calories
330 mg
sodium
Notes: Cup estimates based on 11 grams of popcorn per cup. Topping serving sizes for all chains based on Regal numbers. Daily limits for 2,000 cals: Sat Fat: 20 g, Sodium: 1,500 mg.
34 g sat fat
20 g sat fat
2 g sat fat
33 g sat fat
3 g sat fat
60 g sat fat
4 g sat fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
120 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
180 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
240 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
8 cups
17 cups
14 cups
6 cups
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. butter topping adds
200 calories 14 g sat fat 0.6 g trans fat

4 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9

AMC, the nation’s second-largest chain (with 307 theaters in 30 states and the District of Columbia), also pops in coconut oil. The only good news: AMC’s popcorns aren’t as super-sized as Regal’s. But they’re bigger than the company acknowledges.
According to AMC, a small popcorn contains 225 calories. In fact, the small AMC popcorns that we bought weighed about 50 percent more than the company claimed.
Our AMC smalls contained 370 calories and 20 grams of saturated fat—about what you’d get from that classic healthy snack: eight pats of butter. Based on what we were served, AMC lowballs its other sizes as well. For example, the company’s 430-calorie
medium morphed into 590 calories and 33 grams of saturated fat. And the 660-calorie large became a 1,030-calorie behemoth with 57 grams of sat fat. It’s like eating a pound of baby back ribs topped with a scoop of Häagen-Dazs ice cream (except for the extra day’s worth of sat fat in the popcorn).

What’s next: fun-house mirrors that make you look skinny on your way out of the theater? Toppings: Fake-butter fans must love AMC. The chain lets patrons pump
their own “buttery” topping. No skimpy tablespoon of extra fat on a small or two
tablespoons on a large, like Regal claims to use. With 120 calories per tablespoon,
you should be able to squeeze another 200 to 500 calories into the bucket of fat
cells in your lap.

Cinemark, with 296 theaters in 39 states, deserves some applause. The nation’s third largest chain pops in non-hydrogenated canola oil instead of coconut. Assuming you add no “buttery” topping,your heart can escape a Cinemark popcorn relatively unscathed. Your belly (and blood pressure) won’t be so lucky. If you share an unbuttered (8-cup) small with a fellow moviegoer, each of you will walk away with about 200 calories (seasoned with 340 milligrams of sodium). That’s the best you can expect from movie theater popcorn, unless you ask the theater to pop you a batch without salt. (All the Cinemark, AMC, and Regal locations we called said they would do that.) A medium popcorn (14 cups) at Cinemark reaches 760 calories and a large
(17 cups) hits 910 calories (and 1,500 mg of sodium—an entire day’s quota). Since
when is half-a-day’s-calories’ worth of corn, oil, and salt called a “snack”?
Maybe since America started competing in the Sumo Belly-Lifting Olympics.
Small at Cinemark

Small at
AMC
Small at Regal ,
Medium at AMC
Medium at CINEMARK
Medium at Regal ,
Large at AMC
Large at CINEMARK
Large at Regal
16 fl. oz.
150 calories
10 tsp.
sugar
Notes: Ice takes up about a quarter of the cup. There are 4 grams of sugar in every teaspoon.
54 fl. oz.
500 calories
33 tsp.
sugar soda
21 fl. oz.
200 calories
13 tsp.
sugar
32 fl. oz.
300 calories
19 tsp.
sugar
44 fl. oz.
400 calories
26 tsp.
sugar
combos
Calories Sat Fat (g)
REGAL
1 medium popcorn, 1 medium soda 1,610 60
1 large popcorn, 2 medium sodas 2,020 60
AMC
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,440 57
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,850 57
CINEMARK
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,320 4
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,730 4
A combo at Regal (medium popcorn plus medium soda) has 1,610 calories. That’s like eating six scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, four bacon strips, and four
sausage links before the lights come up. Photo

Comment

I love popcorn and am eating some now, but I never knew the movie popcorn was so bad for us. I just knew that it tasted good.