Apple iPhone 6S selling at Best Buy for $1

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The 16GB version normally sells for $200 with a two-year contract.CNET

Best Buy is trying to woo holiday shoppers by offering the latest iPhone for a buck.

As of Friday, the retail chain is selling the 16GB version of the iPhone 6S for $1 with a two-year contract with Verizon Wireless or Sprint. The 16GB version normally retails for $200 with a two-year contract.

With less than a week left in the holiday-shopping season, retailers are pushing last-minute deals to lure consumers. For tardy shoppers, that means potentially big discounts.

The $1 sale also applies to the 16GB iPhone 6. The retailer is offering the 16GB iPhone 6S in all four colors: silver, gold, Space Gray and Rose Gold. The iPhone 6 is available in Space Gray.

The sale, which ends Sunday, is good both online and in-store, a Best Buy spokeswoman said. To further sweeten the deal, Best Buy will give you a $200 gift card if you trade in an iPhone 5 or newer model iPhone when you purchase the 6 or 6S.

Google, Microsoft, others form group to expand Wi-Fi

In response to the expansion of mobile technology and data-hungry consumers, a number of cable and technology companies have formed a coalition to expand access to Wi-Fi networks.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Google, and Microsoft were announcing the new drive on Thursday.

Now confirmed, the 18 companies and groups involved in WifiForward also include Motorola, Best Buy, and the Consumer Electronics Association.

A mission statement describes the coalition as "ad hoc, broad-based group of companies, organizations and public sector institutions working to alleviate the Wi-Fi spectrum crunch and to support making Wi-Fi even better by finding more unlicensed spectrum." In addition, the alliance aims to protect and strengthen existing unlicensed spectrum designations, free up spectrum for unlicensed use at a variety of frequencies, and establish transparent and predictable unlicensed rules that encourage the growth and deployment of networks.

WifiForward will lobby the US government to free up additional spectrum resources that can be used to create new Wi-Fi networks, the allocation of which could lessen the burden on congested networks already under strain due to the expansion of mobile technology, data-hungry applications and both audio and video streaming.

According to Cisco, about 57 percent of all mobile data traffic in the United States is carried over Wi-Fi, and users consume roughly 1.4GB of data per month. However, the tech firm predicts that by 2018, 64 percent of mobile traffic will be supported by Wi-Fi and data consumption will increase to 9GB a month.

Improving Wi-Fi access makes sense for companies such as Google and Microsoft, as they rely on spectrum for their cloud-based and Web services. Google, for example, believes that improving speeds of networks will bolster software as a service in the future, and to this end isresearching ways to boost data transmission speeds to 10Gbps.

The announcement of the coalition comes in as Comcast revealed plans to acquire Time Warner Cable for $45.2 billion through a stock swap. It is unknown if this acquisition will have any effect on Time Warner Cable as a partner within WifiForward.