Published every weekday, the Switchboard is your morning helping of hand-picked stories from the Switch team.

Comcast and AT&T deal decisions may come in March, FCC says. Bloomberg reports: "The Comcast review has 95 days remaining while the AT&T review has 110 days left, based on clocks that agency uses to set an informal 180-day deadline for considering mergers."

Sprints crazy Cut Your Bill in Half promo actually saves customers 20 percent. "Sprint is cutting in half the service portion of the bill the part that pays for calling, texting and data," writes Re/code. "However, to get that savings, customers have to either lease a new phone or pay installments on the full cost of a new phone."

Google brings better, faster TV and internet hardware to Austin for Fiber launch. "The Network+ Box is the centerpiece of Google Fiber in the home, offering four gigabit ethernet ports and full support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi," according to the Verge. "It also includes 2TB of storage for your DVR recordings."

How the NSA hacks cell phone networks worldwide. "The NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally," the Intercept reports, "including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance."

Verizon starts killing off 3G networks to make room for LTE. "About 80 percent of Verizons mobile data traffic now rides over LTE, but some 40 million (41 percent) of the total devices on Verizons networks only have 2G and 3G radios," according to Gigaom. "That means for the foreseeable future, Verizon will have to keep a modicum of EV-DO capacity online at every cell site to support those devices."

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecom, broadband and digital politics. Before joining the Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic.

Read the rest here:

The Switchboard: NSA hackers spied on international cell phone networks