Tag Archives: spectrum

Weekly output: mm-wave 5G, broadband and pay-TV subscriptions, Apple product events (x2), Firefox add-ons, White House cryptocurrency policy, Charter CEO, Paramount CEO, YouTube vs. Russia, Mark Vena podcast, public diplomacy via TikTok, Lifekey

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AUSTIN–I’m clearly out of practice at keeping one foot in the conference reality-distortion field that is SXSW here and one foot in my real-world schedule, as I completely spaced on writing this post yesterday. I’m going to blame that on the Daylight Saving Time switch.

3/7/2022: mmWave 5G advocates try to refocus their sales pitch at MWC, Light Reading

My final bit of MWC coverage came in this recap of a two-hour session covering the possibilities of millimeter-wave 5G broadband.

3/7/2022: 2.95M Americans Added Broadband in 2021, and Almost All of Them Got Cable, PCMag

I wrote up a summary of 2021’s trends in broadband subscriptions from Leichtman Research Group that once again showed cable running away with most of the growth there.

Screenshot of the column as seen in USAT's iPad app3/8/2022: To time your Apple purchases wisely, shop to the rhythm of Apple’s events, USA Today

I wrote this reminder about Apple’s product-introduction patterns as a curtain-raiser for the Tuesday event at which it introduced the updated iPhone SE and iPad Air as well as the new Mac Studio.

3/8/2022: Still Got Cable? Pay TV Providers See Subscriber Exodus in 2021, PCMag

A day later, Leichtman released their 2021 report on pay-TV subscriptions.

3/9/2022: Mozilla: The Pandemic Expanded Our Appetite for These Browser Extensions, PCMag

Mozilla released a study of which browser add-ons saw the most downloads at the start of the pandemic two years earlier, and of course a Zoom extension topped that list.

3/9/2022: White House Executive Order Starts Wheels Turning on Cryptocurrency Policy, PCMag

The Biden administration’s executive order on cryptocurrency policy directs the Federal Reserve to consider issuing a government-backed digital currency.

3/10/2022: Charter CEO: The new bundle is broadband and mobile, FierceVideo

I filled in at my trade-pub client this week, the first such piece being a writeup of a cable exec’s talk at a Morgan Stanley conference.

3/10/2022: Paramount CEO touts two-fer strategy at Morgan Stanley, FierceVideo

I then wrote up a second interview streamed from this Morgan Stanley event, this one with much better audio quality.

3/10/2022: YouTube ices out Russian subscribers, joining other U.S. video services in boycotting the country over Ukraine invasion, FierceVideo

I was lucky enough to have an analyst I quizzed on short notice have some useful stats about the Russian streaming-video market.

3/11/2022: S02 E10 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

This edition of the weekly podcast (also available in video form) focused on one issue: Apple’s product introductions.

3/11/2022: White House courts TikTok influencers, Al Jazeera

Right after I did this Skype interview from the house I’m renting here about the Biden administration’s understandable extension of public-diplomacy efforts to social media, I got a Facebook message from a friend with a picture of a TV showing my appearance–he was visiting family in Morocco and was surprised/amused to see me on the news.

3/13/2022: For Wearables, Doing a Thing Well Beats Trying to Do It All, Grit Daily House

I interviewed Lifekey CEO Jason Kintzler onstage at the media house set up offsite by my conference pal Jordan French’s startup-news publication.

Updated 3/23/2022 to fix formatting glitches and correct a site misidentification.

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Weekly output: Devin Nunes, Mark Vena podast, tech journalists about tech PR, Instagram and kid safety, your data for sale, Charter CEO

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As I wrote on my Patreon page Thursday, I continue to be happy to be off the gadget-gift-guide treadmill.

12/7/2021: Devin Nunes Quits Congress to Run Trump’s Social Media Venture, PCMag

I enjoyed noting how this famously litigious representative will now get to square his dislike of online mockery with running a social platform that touts its opposition to censorship.

12/8/2021: S01 E21 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

My contribution to this week’s episode was unpacking Qualcomm’s attempts to sell an “always-on camera” as a privacy upgrade for smartphones.

12/8/2021: NPC Lunch & Learn: Meet the Technology Media, National Press Club

I joined fellow panelists Musadiq Bidar of CBS News and CIO Dive and Cybersecurity Dive editor Naomi Eide in this Zoom panel, in which we discussed our interactions with tech-PR types.

12/8/2021: Instagram kid-safety moves, Al Jazeera

I joined the Arabic-language news network via Skype to discuss the Facebook-owned app’s moves to tamp down overindulgence by teenage users. One early thought: I’d like to see more like that from YouTube.

12/9/2021: Guess What? The Cops Can Buy Your Data Instead of Going to Court for It, PCMag

I wrote up a new report from the Center for Democracy & Technology about how often and easily government agencies can get the information they want by buying it from data brokers instead of getting a search warrant. The piece closes with a reminder that Android and iOS include useful tools to limit how an app can get your location; if you haven’t looked at those settings, please do so now.

12/9/2021: Charter CEO: Wireless is the future, video is not yet the past, FierceVideo

I’m getting tired of seeing cable CEOs profess that they’ve moved past from relying on video subscriptions even as their pricing continues to favor TV subscribers.

Weekly output: Verizon Tracfone purchase approved, spectrum-sharing progress, cloud-storage choices

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This year’s Thanksgiving, unlike last year’s, did not warrant descriptions like “house arrest.” And now I will follow up that overdue family time by flying almost 5,000 miles away from my own for a tech event, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021. I have clients awaiting coverage of this event (and who are fine with Qualcomm covering the airfare and lodging, another departure of sorts for me) and I’m sure I will learn a lot and appreciate connecting with other telecom nerds starting Monday afternoon in Hawaii. But… yeah, if this travel schedule leads you once again to question my life choices, I can only reply “fair.”

11/23/2021: FCC Greenlights Verizon’s Purchase of Tracfone, With Conditions, PCMag

The Federal Communications Commission seems confident that a set of temporary rules can ensure that the nation’s largest wireless carrier buying the nation’s largest wireless reseller will not lead to harm to customers.

11/24/2021: Spectrum-sharing task force chair: ‘It really doesn’t have to be a spectrum fight’, Light Reading

This post offered a welcome chance to get into the weeds about the finer points of freeing up wireless spectrum currently in use by some non-trivial military hardware.

11/27/2021: Apple, Google or Microsoft? How to match cloud storage to your computers – and cut costs, USA Today

Yes, you’ve read a version of this column before, down to its emphasis on picking an online backup service that pairs best with the hardware you’re most likely to take out of the house. But unlike the 2018 release, this one incorporates some money-saving tricks I’ve picked up over the past few years–like checking to see if credit cards have cash-back offers on one company’s cloud storage, or if you can buy a gift card good for that storage at a discount from a third-party retailer.

Weekly output: Spotify privacy, Halo’s 5G-powered car service, Internet providers

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Our kid was out this week at camp, but in a few days it will be my turn to be out of the house: I’m doing some of the drive testing for this year’s edition of PCMag.com’s Fastest Mobile Networks guide. Yes, on the road for actual business travel.

7/7/2021: At Spotify, private listening is not a simple proposition, USA Today

I’ve had the idea for a while of a column unpacking the inconsistent and often unhelpful privacy settings in Spotify, but the chance to interview a Spotify executive for the virtual edition of Dublin Tech Summit last month gave me quotes to anchor the piece.

Screenshot of the Fast Company story on Halo as seen on an iPad mini.7/8/2021: This driverless car-sharing service uses remote human ‘pilots,’ not AI, Fast Company

I was supposed to write this story last month about the Halo car service and its use of T-Mobile 5G to have remotely-driven vehicles show up before car-share customers. But then T-Mobile said they wanted to push the embargo back; that gave me time to get an industry analyst’s perspective and write an explainer for Patreon supporters about PR embargoes.

7/8/2021: Internet Providers, U.S. News & World Report

My latest round of work at U.S. News–consisting of profiles of AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon; comparisons of Spectrum and AT&T, Comcast and AT&T, and Verizon and Spectrum; and guides to fiber broadband, cheaper Internet access, and ways to speed up your connection–was much more work than my previous efforts. That is mostly the fault of the many large Internet providers that show no interest in clearly displaying their prices, speeds and terms of service. Las Vegas hotels and their resort fees are models of transparency compared to this lot–although maybe I can’t be too cranky about their willful opacity, since it gave me the material for a USA Today column.

Weekly output: Scripps’ broadcast bet, AT&T CEO, Discovery downgrade, Betacom, ransomware lessons, Boost Mobile + DraftKings, exploding ISP prices

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This month is ending in a flurry of deadlines, and I am profoundly grateful to have tomorrow as a day off to think about people who have had much harder jobs than me.

5/24/2021: Scripps CEO on why he’s bullish on OTA TV, FierceVideo

I talked to E.W. Scripps CEO Adam Symson about his ambitions for distributing the company’s new Newsy channel via old-school broadcast TV.

5/24/2021: AT&T’s Stankey defends WarnerMedia spinoff at J.P. Morgan event, FierceVideo

My editors at Fierce asked if I could fill in to cover some breaking news Monday, and the first result was this recap of AT&T’s CEO defending his decision to unwind the company’s expensive media strategy.

5/24/2021: MoffettNathanson disses Discovery with ratings downgrade, FierceVideo

I also filed this post on a clueful market-research firm’s pessimism about one apparent beneficiary of AT&T’s retreat from media.

5/25/2021: Betacom makes its private-wireless-network bid with $15M in funding, Light Reading

My other trade-pub client wanted me to cover a wireless-infrastructure firm’s pivot.

Screengrab of ransomware post5/26/2021: Why the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack is a sign of things to come, Fast Company

I spent a fair amount of the previous week watching panel discussions at the RSA Conference, and a series of talks about the ransomware plague at that information-security event yielded this piece.

5/27/2021: Boost Mobile bets on DraftKings as a partner, FierceWireless

FierceVideo’s sister publication requested my help in covering another bit of breaking news: an unusual marketing tie-in between an online sportsbook and an ambitious reseller of T-Mobile’s service.

5/30/2021: Buyer, beware: Internet providers may have ‘exploding prices’ after year one or two, USA Today

As I wrote to my editor when I filed this piece: “After I invoice USAT for this, I would like to invoice Comcast for pointing out their broken Web design.” It’s one thing to offer promotional prices that end after a set period of time, but it’s another to send a would-be customer on a dark-pattern detour to figure out what the real price will be after the new-subscriber honeymoon ends.

Weekly output: KnowRoaming, Apple Watch app rules, wireless spectrum, Comcast (x2), cable unbundling, wireless broadband

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I didn’t decide to attend the cable industry’s INTX trade show until late March. But seeing that convention would take place in one of my favorite cities, Chicago, made it an easy call. And I’m glad I went to the cable confab for the first time since 2012. I picked up a lot and wrote a lot, as you can see below. For more about the event, see my Flickr album.

All this work did catch up with me on Friday, in the form of my filing my USAT column ridiculously late. A contributing factor to that tardiness: I stepped out for an hour or so to watch the WW2 flyover down the Potomac. There’s a Flickr album for that, too.

5/4/2015: Hands-on with the KnowRoaming Sticker that Cuts Smarphone Costs for International Travelers, Yahoo Tech

This review concludes my coverage of Mobile World Congress–yes, I probably could have written it weeks earlier. Speaking of overdue tasks, I only just now noticed the typo in the headline; I’ll ping the editors to get that fixed.

5/5/2015: Apple’s Rules Tell Developers Precisely Whose Time It Is, Yahoo Tech

It had been a while since I’d last written about Apple’s App Store rules. As you can see, I still don’t like them but can no longer pretend the company hasn’t made them scale in a way that I thought impossible five years ago.

5/52015: Across the Spectrum: Strategies for a Changing Wireless Marketplace, INTX 2015

At this panel, I discussed the coming arrival of higher-performing wireless spectrum with Liberty Global’s Timothy Burke, Arris’s Charles Cheevers, Comcast’s Evan Koch, and T-Mobile’s Tony Silveira. I’d like to see cable companies use some of this to reach new customers–maybe people who find themselves a couple of thousand feet from the closest Comcast line?–but I don’t know that cable’s ready to take that step.

Yahoo Tech Comcast-service post5/6/2015: Comcast Really, Really Wants You to Like It, Yahoo Tech

Most reader reactions to this description of Comcast’s moves to upgrade its customer service ranged from “yeah right” to “screw them.” The company has its work cut out for it.

5/7/2015: Big Cable CEOs Insist Viewers Like Their Bundles, but the Tide Is Turning, Yahoo Tech

When I started writing this answer to a question many friends asked after learning I was headed to the cable industry’s annual gathering, I was a little more pessimistic about the future than I was by the time I’d finished it.

5/8/2015: Comcast customer service, WBAL

I talked about Comcast’s customer-service initiative with the Baltimore news station’s Mary Beth Marsden. I did not get to hear the story but assume they used some part of my interview; if you did, please let me know in the comments if I sounded coherent.

5/10/2015: Unlimited wireless broadband possible, just not beyond phone, USA Today

A reader’s question about replacing her Clear unlimited residential wireless broadband gave me an invitation to update readers about the impending retirement of Sprint’s WiMax broadband (it’s kind of awful that some WiMax resellers still offer WiMax devices that will go defunct in six months without clearly warning potential customers of the network’s coming demise) and note the continued inability of wireless broadband to compete with the wired kind for residential use.

Weekly output: laptop, Android and iOS security, spectrum, Galaxy Note (x2)

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The lineup of sites that have run my work lately is a little different this week.

2/19/2012: Tip: How to secure your laptop data, USA Today

I was a little worried that some of the advice I was throwing around in this column–using apps like TrueCrypt to encrypt files, adding third-party DNS services to your Internet setup–would be too technically-involved for a general-interest audience. (I rewrote the DNS item to make some definitions clearer because of that concern.) Did more than a handful of readers add OpenDNS or Google Public DNS to their computers after reading the piece?

2/21/2012: Samsung Galaxy Note: Large, Not In Charge, Discovery News

I wondered what Samsung was up to when it splashed enormous ads on the side of the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES to tout this oversized Android device–“Phone? Tablet? It’s Galaxy Note!”–then ran that goofy Super Bowl ad . I’m even more puzzled by its intentions after reviewing the Note itself. Then again, check out all the comments from people professing that they love this phone and would even prefer that it came with a larger screen.

2/22/2012: Samsung Galaxy Note Review, Boing Boing

I’ve been reading Boing Boing for years; this is the first time I’ve written for the site. The piece decries some of the more common problems in Android phones, as exhibited by this device. Note the extensive comments thread: Many readers critiqued some assumptions I made while writing the piece, but they were generally civil about it. I can appreciate that.

2/22/2012: A Change of Channels on Spectrum Policy, CEA Digital Dialogue

The wonkiest thing I wrote all week, this post unpacks the deal the government worked out–contrary to my own predictions of two years ago–to transfer some airwaves from TV stations to wireless services. Everybody seems content with the outcome, which I can’t recall ever happening with a tech-policy issue affecting so many different interests.

2/24/2012: Who Defends Your Phone: Robots or Humans?, Discovery News

I’d meant to write this right after Google announced its “Bouncer” automated screening of Android Market apps for signs of malware, but got sidetracked by other items for a few weeks. That delay allowed me to put a lot more reporting into the piece and broaden it to address some app-trustworthiness issues that have cropped up more recently with Apple’s App Store.