Tag Archives: fixed wireless

Weekly output: Google MWC updates, Nokia’s lunar LTE, anti-virus software, Bluetooth Auracast, fixed wireless 5G, most innovative robotics companies, Formic’s robots as a service, broadband and pay-TV subscribers, Microsoft’s plans for digital deserts

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I wrote three of the items below between weeks and months ago, but I still feel a little tired looking at this list now. And yes, I have had a lot of naps since coming home from MWC Thursday–because I need to rest up before I head out to Austin for SXSW on Friday.

2/27/2023: Google Kicks Off MWC With Grab-Bag of Android, Wear OS, Chrome OS Updates, PCMag

Google PR sent this embargoed announcement to me and my PCMag colleague Eric Zeman. He had enough other things to write–as in, he somehow cranked out eight posts Monday–so it fell to me to cover this.

2/27/2023: How Do You Make LTE Relevant at MWC 2023? Fly It to the Moon, PCMag

I wrote about this project last year for Fast Company, but this time I could look at a life-size model of the rover and quiz one of the researchers face-to-face on the MWC show floor. And yet despite that acquaintance with the topic, we had to correct the story after publication.

AARP story, as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 6.2/27/2023: Should You Pay for Antivirus Software? These Experts Say No, AARP

My debut at AARP covers a topic I’ve been writing about since I was way too young to let myself think about AARP membership: Should you pay for a third-party anti-virus app or stick with the security tools that came with your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone?

2/28/2023: A Quick Listen With Bluetooth Auracast: Like a Hotspot, But for Audio, PCMag

I got a demo of this short-range audio broadcast technology Tuesday morning, then wrote it up after in the afternoon after multiple meetings and at least one nap.

3/1/2023: Questions over FWA capacity, competition dominate MWC, Light Reading

I watched this panel about fixed-wireless access late Monday morning and found time to write it up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, when jet lag once again left me staring at the ceiling of my Airbnb and I gave up trying to sleep for a bit.

3/2/2023: The 10 most innovative companies in robotics of 2023, Fast Company

My introduction to the Most Innovative Companies feature consisted of judging candidates in this category, then narrowing my choices over a couple of rounds and finally writing up profiles of the 10 finalists. It was fascinating and educational work, and I hope I can do it again.

3/2/2023: This startup is reviving American manufacturing with robots as a service, Fast Company

One of those 10 “MIC” honorees in the robotics category, a Chicago startup called Formic, also earned a spot in the overall top 50, so I interviewed the CEO and wrote this profile that print Fast Co. readers can see in the March/April issue of the magazine.

3/3/2023: Brutal Year for Pay TV Sees Wireless Carrier Broadband Picking Up Steam, PCMag

The telecom consultancy Leichtman Research Group posted their summary of 2022 broadband subscriber trends on Thursday (when I was too tired to think about writing that up) and then posted their 2022 pay-TV recap Friday morning, allowing me to cover both in one post.

3/5/2023: Microsoft’s ambitions for digital deserts, Al Jazeera

Having covered this topic for PCMag in December, I was happy to accept AJ’s invitation to come into their D.C. studio for a quick interview (overdubbed live into Arabic as usual) about the ambitions of Microsoft and others to get hundreds of millions of people online in the world’s poorest countries.

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Weekly output: telco rights commitments, Facebook cross-check, T-Mobile home 5G, content moderation politics, abandoned Twitter usernames (x2)

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As you may have noticed, I did not go to Wallops Island, Va., this week to see a rocket launch, because Rocket Lab first delayed the first U.S. launch of its Electron Rocket from Dec. 9 to Dec. 13 to avoid forecast bad weather and then pushed it from Tuesday to Thursday because of an airspace-clearance issue. Unfortunately, the weather forecast for Thursday doesn’t look good either, so I fully expect this launch to slip once again.

12/5/2022: Global Telecom Companies Struggle to Deliver on Human-Rights Commitments, PCMag

I wrote up the latest report from Ranking Digital Rights, a project that grades tech and telecom companies on the commitments they make to uphold human rights and on how well they document their compliance with those commitments.

12/6/2022: Oversight Board: Facebook ‘Cross-Check’ System for VIPs Is ‘Flawed in Key Areas’, PCMag

Meta’s equivalent of a Supreme Court–a level of accountability that Twitter could desperately use now–issued a scathing report about Facebook and Instagram’s “cross-check” program adding an extra level of review for posts by VIP users.

Screenshot of the story as seen on Safari for iPadOS, illustrated with an artsy shot of a T-Mobile home 5G receiver12/7/2022: Here’s what T-Mobile has learned about stealing home broadband customers from Big Cable, Fast Company

I got an advance look at a report T-Mobile commissioned about its fixed-wireless service for homes, including some interesting details about how much data these subscribers have been using on this data-cap-free service.

12/9/2022: With or Without Elon, Social Media Content Moderation Is Still Complicated, PCMag

I thought writing up an hour-long panel at a conference hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology would take an hour, tops. That was not the case.

12/9/2022: Twitter’s abandoned-accounts plan, Alhurra

This U.S. government-funded Arabic-language news channel had me on the first time since 2019 to discuss Elon Musk’s intention to reclaim 1.5 billion Twitter usernames that had been abandoned for an unstated number of years and let other people grab those handles.

12/9/2022: Elon Musk: Twitter to Put 1.5 Billion Abandoned Handles Up for Grabs, PCMag

Talking about this abandoned-accounts plan made me want to find out more about it, so I researched and wrote this post for PCMag–and along the way discovered, with a major assist from a reader, that the 1.5 billion number seems entirely plausible.

Weekly output: pay-TV predictions, T-Mobile’s work-from-home bundle

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I try to space out the posts here so the blog doesn’t go too many days without an update. Since I write these weekly-output posts on Sundays, in an ideal blogging universe I’d publish each week’s other, less self-promotional post around mid-week. In this imperfect and stressed world, however, I often wind up not getting that second post up until Saturday. And this week, the non-weekly-output post went up Sunday afternoon–because as I rushed to finish writing that ode to two good newsletters Saturday evening, I forgot that the Block Editor here has a confirmation dialog you need to click through before a post gets published.

3/2/2021: Analyst Report: The Pay-TV Bundle Looks Even More Doomed—And Streaming Won’t Save It, Forbes

I wrote up a MoffettNathanson report with grim predictions for pay-TV bundles.

Screenshot of story as seen in an Android phone's Chrome browser.3/5/2021: T-Mobile wants your employer to give you home-office wireless broadband, Fast Company

T-Mobile’s announcement of a new bundle of services for larger government and business customers to buy for their working-from-afar employees glossed over a lot of details. I failed to fill in the blanks about the speeds of the upcoming Home Office Internet 4G/5G service that leads off T-Mobile’s “WFX” offering, but I did manage to document how extensively this fixed-wireless connectivity can block services not obviously related to people’s work. As in, the list of sites cut off by default includes Netflix and Amazon and even T-Mobile’s own T-Vision streaming-TV app.

Weekly output: Starry Internet

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Merry Christmas to all who observe! And to all who observe by bestowing gadget gifts: good luck with the setup and tech support.

Yahoo Finance Starry post12/18/2017: This startup could replace your cable internet, but faces hurdles, Yahoo Finance

Some of you may remember my coverage a few years ago of the TV-via-Internet firm Aereo. After the Supreme Court shut down that startup on questionable copyright-infringement grounds, founder Chet Kanojia went into the fixed-wireless Internet market. Starry offers 200 megabits-per-second, no-data-caps access to some buildings around Boston, and when I was there in early December I quizzed Kanojia for an hour and change about his new venture’s progress.

Note that this story has been updated since posting: One caption got egregiously mislabeled, and one analyst I talked to didn’t spell out (which also means that I should have asked) that he wrote his case study without quizzing Starry directly.

Weekly output: 5G, broadcast TV on online video, wireless broadband, machine-learning platforms

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Having our kid come down with strep throat put a serious dent in my productivity on this week. (She’s fine now.) The next five days, meanwhile, have a much more crowded schedule that includes an overnight trip to Cleveland. You’ll find out why Tuesday.

9/18/2017: 5 things to know about what’s next for wireless internet, Yahoo Finance

Too-soon hype about 5G wireless is already getting customers confused–as I realized anew when a reader asked how it couldn’t be coming until 2020 if she already had a 5G router. (Answer: It was a 5 GHz router.)

9/18/2017: Broadcasters aren’t going OTT ASAP, FierceBroadcasting

The latest in a steady series of features I’ve written for Fierce’s monthly (registration required) bundles, this one looks at the tangled availability of local channels on “over the top” online-video services. I missed it when it first came out because, I guess, I didn’t see the download link in Fierce’s daily newsletter at the time.

9/20/2017: Why you might trade your wired internet connection for your phone, Yahoo Finance

This headline overstates the story a little. My answer to the question–newly raised by an FCC proceeding–of whether we should count the wireless carriers’ mobile broadband as competition for wired cable, fiber and DSL is that a mobile-only strategy doesn’t work as long as you still need to use a desktop or laptop computer.

9/22/2017: Machine-learning cloud platforms get to work, Ars Technica

This piece focuses on a much wonkier subject than my usual consumer-tech coverage, but I carved some time out of my schedule to write it anyway. On one hand, it allowed me to get into the weeds on the workings of some technologies that I do write about all the time. On the other hand, the story was for a site at which I hadn’t written in way too long (my last Ars byline happened over four years ago) and involved a great per-word rate.

That rate, in turn, was a product of this post being part of a set of stories sponsored by Siemens. I didn’t know the sponsor going in and, as I wrote in a comment below the piece, my editor neither told me which companies to feature nor instructed me on any conclusions the article should reach.

Updated 10/3/2017 to add a link to the broadcasters story.