An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T smartphone users who see their network indicators switch from "4G" to "5G" shouldn't necessarily expect that they're about to get faster speeds. In PCMag's annual mobile-network testing, released today, 5G phones connected to AT&T got slower speeds than 4G phones in 21 out of 22 cities. PCMag concluded that "AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless," though AT&T's average download speed of 103.1Mbps was nearly as good as Verizon's thanks to a strong 4G performance. Of course, AT&T 5G should be faster than 4G in the long run -- this isn't another case of AT&T misleadingly labeling its 4G network as a type of 5G. Instead, the disappointing result on PCMag's test has to do with how today's 5G phones work and with how AT&T allocates spectrum.

The counterintuitive result doesn't reveal much about the actual differences between 4G and 5G technology. Instead, it's reflective of how AT&T has used its spectrum to deploy 5G so far. As PCMag explained, "AT&T's 5G slices off a narrow bit of the old 850MHz cellular band and assigns it to 5G, to give phones a valid 5G icon without increasing performance. And because of the way current 5G phones work, it often reduces performance. AT&T's 4G network benefits from the aggregation of channels from different frequencies. "The most recent phones are able to assemble up to seven of them -- that's called seven-carrier aggregation, and it's why AT&T won [the PCMag tests] last year," the article said. 5G phones can't handle that yet, PCMag analyst Sascha Segan wrote: "But 5G phones can't add as many 4G channels to a 5G channel. So if they're in 5G mode, they're giving up 4G channels so they can use that extremely narrow, often 5MHz 5G channel, and the result is slower performance: faux G. For AT&T, using a 5G phone in testing was often a step backward from our 4G-only phone."

Wired has interviewed Irwin Jacobs, a founder of Qualcomm. They talk about a wide-range of topics. Here's an excerpt that addresses Chinese tech giant Huawei's growth globally: At first, Qualcomm manufactured its own phone headsets, selling them in Asia. That was around the time it went public in 1991. Eventually, though, it sold off those parts of the business and became strictly an under-the-hood company. This decision wound up having implications in the current competition between the US and China, particularly with the telecom giant Huawei. Because of security concerns, the US is currently doing all it can to stifle adoption of Huawei's products. All of this might be easier if there were an American equivalent to Huawei -- a company working to pioneer the infrastructure of the next generation of wireless that also sold products directly to people. (In this case, that next generation is the much anticipated 5G standard.) Why didn't Qualcomm pursue that?

"We did think about that, but we wanted CDMA to go worldwide," says Jacobs. He says that Qualcomm was still fighting its Holy War, trying to get CDMA accepted everywhere. Being a competitor to carriers would impede that. In 1993, the strategy paid off, when CDMA became the wireless standard. Jacobs says he thought that other US companies, like Motorola, would stay in the business. But one by one, they either shut down or sold out to foreign companies. Qualcomm, by selling companies a comprehensive chipset that could power a cellphone, actually made it easier for new Chinese competitors to hit the market, because they had the tools to create a product instantly. "Unfortunately," he says, "nobody in the US has really run with it" and done the same thing. Another complicating factor is that governments in China and Europe have had industrial aid policies that helped their telecom firms in a way that the US has not. "Our government has not provided R&D support or other support that Huawei and ZTE (another successful Chinese firm) managed to get from their own government," Jacobs says.

Today, Lenovo has released a ThinkPad with Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. ZDNet reports: First in this new Linux-friendly lineup is the X1 Carbon Gen 8. It will be followed by forthcoming versions of the ThinkPad P1 Gen2 and ThinkPad P53. While ThinkPads are usually meant for business users, Lenovo will be happy to sell the Fedora-powered X1 Carbon to home users as well. The new X1 Carbon runs Fedora Workstation 32. This cutting-edge Linux distribution uses the Linux Kernel 5.6. It includes WireGuard virtual private network (VPN) support and USB4 support. This Fedora version uses the new GNOME 3.36 for its default desktop.

The system itself comes standard with a 10th Generation Intel Core 1.6Ghz i5-10210U CPU, with up to 4.20 GHz with Turbo Boost. This processor boasts 4 Cores, 8 Threads, and a 6 MB cache. It also comes with 8MBs of LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately, its memory is soldered in. While that reduces the manufacturing costs, Linux users tend to like to optimize their hardware and this restricts their ability to add RAM. You can upgrade it to 16MBs, of course, when you buy it for an additional $149. For storage, the X1 defaults to a 256GB SSD. You can push it up to a 1TB SSD. That upgrade will cost you $536.

The X1 Carbon Gen 8 has a 14.0" Full High Definition (FHD) (1920 x 1080) screen. For practical purposes, this is as high-a-resolution as you want on a laptop. I've used laptops with Ultra High Definition (UHD), aka 4K, with 3840x2160 resolution, and I've found the text to be painfully small. This display is powered by an integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. For networking, the X1 uses an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX with vPro (2 x 2) & Bluetooth 5.0 chipset. I've used other laptops with this wireless networking hardware and it tends to work extremely well. The entire default package has a base price of $2,145. For now, it's available for $1,287. If you want to order one, be ready for a wait. You can expect to wait three weeks before Lenovo ships it to you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Engineers at Purdue University have created a printing process by which you can coat paper or cardboard with "highly fluorinated molecules." This then makes the coated paper dust, oil, and water-repellent, meaning you can then print multiple circuit layers onto the paper without smudging the ink. According to a paper the engineers published in Nano Energy, these "triboelectric areas" are then capable of "self-powered Bluetooth wireless communication." That's science-speak to say that paper printed and coated in this way doesn't require external batteries as it generates electricity from contact with a user's finger.

You can see a demonstration of how the tech works in these two videos. In the first video, Purdue engineers have a paper keypad that's been treated with the aforementioned "omniphobic" coating. The paper keypad is then doused in some neon-green solution. In the second video, you can then see a person use the paper keypad to actually type on a laptop with a disabled keyboard. In a third video, Purdue's team printed a forward, back, mute, and volume bar on the back of a piece of paper. In it, you can see someone controlling audio playback by dragging their finger along the volume bar, as well as skipping forward and back in the music queue. While the tech itself is pretty cool, another neat aspect is that because it works on paper and cardboard, it would be relatively inexpensive, flexible, and quick to make. That makes it a good candidate for things like smart packaging.

As 5G networks have continued to spread across the world, the biggest issue with ultra-fast millimeter wave (mmWave) towers has been their short transmission distance, which is generally measured in city blocks rather than miles. Today, Qualcomm announced a breakthrough in mmWave transmission range, successfully achieving a 5G data connection over a 3.8-kilometer (2.36-mile) distance -- over twice the range originally promised by its long-range QTM527 antenna system last year. VentureBeat reports: It's important to put today's news into perspective, as the record is specific to broadband modems rather than smartphones. Qualcomm is touting the achievement as evidence of mmWave's viability as a fixed wireless access solution, enabling carriers to offer fiber-speed 5G coverage in rural, suburban, and urban communities that might have had poor wired home broadband options in the past. The successful test was conducted in Regional Victoria, Australia, presumably with minimal physical interference between the sending and receiving devices. The test relied on two existing Qualcomm hardware solutions -- the Snapdragon X55 modem and QTM527 antenna -- inside a consumer premises equipment broadband modem, communicating with Ericsson's Air5121 and Baseband 6630 tower hardware, enhanced by extended-range software. No details were provided on speeds or other details of the connection, but Qualcomm characterized the successful range test as "the first step in utilizing mmWave for an extended-range 5G data transfer," hinting that there may have been compromises in speed or other areas. The company previously noted that carriers would be able to deliver up to 7Gbps download speeds if the QTM527 could access a full 800MHz of mmWave spectrum. Existing tower hardware has hit 4.3Gbps for a single device or 8.5Gbps for two devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: AT&T is once again looking to sell its DirecTV unit, a business that has lost billions of dollars in value since the wireless carrier acquired it in 2015. The sooner it waves goodbye, the better. The question is, who wants it? DirecTV has faded into the background at AT&T, a company now entirely focused on competing in 5G wireless connectivity and online television. Any DirecTV user can attest to how the service has been neglected in recent years, and the business might be forgotten by investors if it weren't for the headline-grabbing subscriber losses it's mounted each quarter.

AT&T, which also owns the U-Verse brand, has lost about 6 million traditional pay-TV customers overall in just the last two years. The Covid-19 pandemic is causing cord-cutting to accelerate as consumers look to save money by switching to streaming-video services such as Netflix and AT&T's own HBO Max. So while AT&T paid $49 billion when it bought DirecTV, it'd be lucky to fetch even half that now. One analyst, John Butler of Bloomberg Intelligence, estimates a potential sale price of just $20 billion. Some may be wondering, what on earth would any buyer want with a satellite-TV business anyway? The answer is cash. DirecTV still throws off quite a bit of it, which explains why private equity firms including Apollo Global Management Inc. and Platinum Equity are said to be taking a look. Financial suitors want businesses that generate lots of cash because they can support dividends and the debt load needed to take them private -- although DirecTV's ability to do so is certainly diminishing.

"Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt," writes futurist Bernard Marr in Forbes, describing a technology being researched by companies like IBM, General Electric, and Cisco. "These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process.

"Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real and they very well could be coming to a neighborhood near you. Whether this fact excites or strikes fear in you it's good to know what it's all about." Outfitted with miniature sensors, MEMS can detect everything from light to vibrations to temperature. With an incredible amount of power packed into its small size, MEMS combine sensing, an autonomous power supply, computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust. They can:

- Collect data including acceleration, stress, pressure, humidity, sound and more from sensors

- Process the data with what amounts to an onboard computer system

- Store the data in memory

- Wirelessly communicate the data to the cloud, a base or other MEMs

Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome. The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images.

The potential of smart dust to collect information about any environment in incredible detail could impact plenty of things in a variety of industries from safety to compliance to productivity. It's like multiplying the internet of things technology millions or billions of times over.

Friday night CNET reported: With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night.
Some reactions from Twitter:

- "The potential of #Neuralink is mind-boggling, but fuckkkk why would they use Bluetooth???"

- "they're using C/C++ too lmao"

But then videogame programming legend John Carmack responded: "Quality, reliable software can be delivered in any language, but language choice has an impact. For me, C would be a middle-of-the-road choice; better than a dynamic language like javascript or python, but not as good as a more modern strongly static typed languages.

However, the existence of far more analysis tools for C is not an insignificant advantage. If you really care about robustness, you are going to architect everything more like old Fortran, with no dynamic allocations at all, and the code is going to look very simple and straightforward.

So an interesting question: What are the aspects of C++ that are real wins for that style over C? Range checked arrays would be good. What else?
When asked "What's a better modern choice?" Carmack replied "Rust would be the obvious things, and I don't have any reason to doubt it would be good, but I haven't implemented even a medium sized application in it."

But then somewhere in the discussion, Elon Musk made a joke about C's lack of "class" data structures. Elon Musk responded: I like C, because it avoids class warfare
But then Musk also gave interesting responses to two more questions on Twitter: Which is your fav programming language? Python?

Elon Musk: Actually C, although the syntax could be improved esthetically

Could Neuralink simulate an alternate reality that could be entered at will, like Ready Player One? Implications for VR seem to be massive. Essentially, a simulation within a simulation if we're already in one ...

Elon Musk: Later versions of a larger device would have that potential

Launching today is America's classified NROL-44 spy satellite, which German public broadcaster DW calls "a massive, open secret": NROL-44 is a huge signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellite, says David Baker, a former NASA scientist who worked on Apollo and Shuttle missions, has written numerous books, including U.S. Spy Satellites and is editor of SpaceFlight magazine. "SIGINT satellites are the core of national government, military security satellites. They are massive things for which no private company has any purpose," says Baker... "It weighs more than five tons. It has a huge parabolic antenna which unfolds to a diameter of more than 100 meters in space, and it will go into an equatorial plane of Earth at a distance of about 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles)," says Baker...

Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. "The move from wired communication to digital and wireless is a godsend to governments because you can't cut into wires from a satellite, but you can literally pick up cell phone towers which are radiating this stuff into the atmosphere. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic," says Baker...

Some people worry about congestion in space, or satellites bumping into each other, and the threat of a collision causing space debris that could damage other satellites or knock out communications networks. But that may have benefits, too — little bits of spy satellite can hide in all that mess and connect wirelessly to create a "virtual satellite," says Baker. "There are sleeper satellites which look like debris. You launch all the parts separately and disperse them into various orbits. So, you would have sensors on one bit, an amplifier on another bit, a processor on another, and they'll be orbiting relatively immersed in space debris."

"Space debris is very good for the space defense industry," says Baker, "because the more there is, the more you can hide in it."

With a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink device showed the pig's activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night. CNET reports: The demonstration shows the the technology to be significantly closer to delivering on Musk's radical ambitions than during a 2019 product debut, when Neuralink only showed photos of a rat with a Neuralink connected via a USB-C port. It's still far from reality, but Musk said the US Food and Drug Administration in July granted approval for "breakthrough device" testing. Musk also showed a second-generation device that's more compact and that fits into a small cavity hollowed out of a hole in a skull. "It's like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," Musk said of the device. It communicates with brain cells with 1,024 thin electrodes that penetrate within brain cell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Average 5G download speeds in the U.S. are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The U.S. came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the U.S. The U.S.'s average 5G speed is 1.8 times higher than the country's average 4G download speed of 28.9Mbps. User tests in neighboring Canada produced a 4G average of 59.4Mbps and a 5G average of 178.1Mbps. Taiwan and Australia both produced 5G averages above 200Mbps, while South Korea and Saudi Arabia produced the highest 5G speeds at 312.7Mbps and 414.2Mbps, respectively.

In the U.S., average download speeds for users who accessed 5G at least some of the time was 33.4Mbps -- that figure includes both their 4G and 5G experiences. This was the second lowest of the 12 countries surveyed by OpenSignal, with the highest speeds coming in Saudi Arabia (144.5Mbps) and Canada (90.4Mbps). The U.S. fared better in 5G availability, the percentage of time in which users are connected to 5G; the U.S. figure in that statistic is 19.3 percent, fifth best, with Saudi Arabia placing first at 34.4 percent and the UK placing last at 4.5 percent. OpenSignal says it collects "billions of measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally."

A federal appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission's rules that limit municipalities' ability to negotiate with telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon that are seeking to deploy thousands of 5G antennas on city streets and neighborhoods. From a report: The ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a blow to dozens of cities that sued the agency, claiming the FCC's 2018 rules takes away their leverage and autonomy in deciding how the telecom industry can install "small-cell" antennas to build 5G networks. The FCC maintains that its rules -- which prohibit excessive fees and permitting delays by municipal governments -- will speed up the deployment of 5G networks throughout the country by removing burdensome barriers to telecom providers. "The wind is at our backs: With the FCC's infrastructure policies now ratified by the court, along with pathbreaking spectrum auctions concluded, ongoing and to come, America is well-positioned to extend its global lead in 5G and American consumers will benefit from the next generation of wireless technologies and services," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement.

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling against chip supplier Qualcomm in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission. From a report: The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also vacated an injunction that would have required Qualcomm to change its intellectual property licensing practices. The decision amounted to a near complete victory for the San Diego company, the largest supplier of chips for mobile phones and also a key generator of wireless communications intellectual property and industry standards. Qualcomm was fighting a May 2019 decision by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California. That judge sided with antitrust regulators, writing that Qualcomm's practice of requiring phone makers to sign a patent license agreement before selling them chips "strangled competition" and harmed consumers.

SuperKendall (Slashdot reader #25,149) shared this review of the recent 5G standards codified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in Release 16 (finalized on July 3).

"5G just got weird," writes IEEE Spectrum: 4G and other earlier generations of cellular focused on just that: cellular. But when 3GPP members started gathering to hammer out what 5G could be, there was interest in developing a wireless system that could do more than connect phones... One of the flashiest things in Release 16 is V2X, short for "Vehicle to Everything." In other words, using 5G for cars to communicate with each other and everything else around them... The 3GPP standards bring those benchmarks into the realm of gigabytes per second, 99.999 percent reliability, and just a few milliseconds.

Matthew Webb, a 3GPP delegate for Huawei and the other rapporteur for the 3GPP item on V2X, adds that Release 16 also introduces a new technique called sidelinking. Sidelinks will allow 5G-connected vehicles to communicate directly with one another, rather than going through a cell-tower intermediary... Tseng says that sidelinking started as a component of the V2X work, but it can theoretically apply to any two devices that might need to communicate directly rather than go through a base station first. Factory robots are one example, or large-scale Internet of Things installations.
Some other "weird" highlights of the new 5G standards:

• "5G incorporates millimeter waves, which are higher frequency radio waves (30 to 300 GHz) that don't travel nearly as far as traditional cell signals. Millimeter waves means it will be possible to build a network just for an office building, factory, or stadium. At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks."

• "In past generations of cellular, three cell towers were required to triangulate where a phone was by measuring the round-trip distance of a signal from each tower. But 5G networks will be able to use the round-trip time from a single tower to locate a device."

• "Release 17 includes a work item on extended reality — the catch-all term for alternate reality and virtual reality technologies."

News outlet OneZero crunched the numbers on just how inefficient wireless charging is -- and the results are pretty revealing. From the report: On paper, wireless charging sounds appealing. Just drop a phone down on a charger and it will start charging. There's no wear and tear on charging ports, and chargers can even be built into furniture. Not all of the energy that comes out of a wall outlet, however, ends up in a phone's battery. Some of it gets lost in the process as heat. While this is true of all forms of charging to a certain extent, wireless chargers lose a lot of energy compared to cables. They get even less efficient when the coils in the phone aren't aligned properly with the coils in the charging pad, a surprisingly common problem. [...]

To get a sense of how much extra power is lost when using wireless charging versus wired charging in the real world, I tested a Pixel 4 using multiple wireless chargers, as well as the standard charging cable that comes with the phone. I used a high-precision power meter that sits between the charging block and the power outlet to measure power consumption. In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable. Charging the phone from completely dead to 100% using a cable took an average of 14.26 watt-hours (Wh). Using a wireless charger took, on average, 21.01 Wh. That comes out to slightly more than 47% more energy for the convenience of not plugging in a cable. In other words, the phone had to work harder, generate more heat, and suck up more energy when wirelessly charging to fill the same size battery. [...] The first test with the Yootech pad -- before I figured out how to align the coils properly -- took a whopping 25.62 Wh to charge, or 80% more energy than an average cable charge. Hearing about the hypothetical inefficiencies online was one thing, but here I could see how I'd nearly doubled the amount of power it took to charge my phone by setting it down slightly wrong instead of just plugging in a cable.

Samsung today unveiled two Galaxy Note 20 models -- the Note 20 (which starts at $999) and Note 20 Ultra (which starts at $1,299) -- arriving later this month on August 21. Both Note 20 smartphones come with an S Pen, but there are some major differences. Notably, the screen and the cameras are a little bit different. From a report: The smaller Note 20 has a 6.7-inch display with flat edges and the larger Note 20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch 120Hz screen with curved sides. Curved glass has long been a signature design on Samsung phones and it looks like the company is at least considering a change. But the one thing I'm most excited for is the Note 20 Ultra's 108-megapixel camera. This is the same image sensor on the S20 Ultra with one important change: a laser sensor that enables faster autofocusing. In other words: Samsung says it has fixed the S20 Ultra's autofocusing issues on the Note 20 Ultra. I'll test that out soon enough to verify the claim, but for now, here's everything else you need to know about the Note 20 phones.

Expand to a TV with DeX: In addition to plugging your Note 20 into a laptop or monitor to turn it into a desktop-like computer experience with DeX mode, Note 20 users can wirelessly connect to a TV with Miracast support. Samsung says all of its 2019 and newer smart TVs support the wireless DeX mode.
Smarter Windows integration: Samsung's growing partnership with Microsoft is yielding even tighter synergy between its devices and Windows 10. Samsung says Windows 10 will let you run multiple Note 20 apps simultaneously later this year and has better drag-and-drop support between devices.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: If you're a gamer, you'll be able to stream over 100 Xbox games directly to the Note 20 phones with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. This feature doesn't go live until September 15.
Ultra-wideband: Like the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, the Note 20 phones have an ultra-wideband chip inside. Samsung says UWB will allow people to share files to another UWB-supported device by pointing them at each other. UWB can also be used to unlock smart locks (for homes or cars).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You won't be able to use Sony's DualShock 4 or other third-party PS4 gamepads to play PlayStation 5 games, Sony confirmed in a blog post today. Those older gamepads will still work with "supported PS4 games" running on the PS5, Sony said, and PS5 software will work with "specialty peripherals" designed for the PS4 -- including "officially licensed racing wheels, arcade sticks, and flight sticks." Those caveats highlight the fact that there's no technical limitation or communication protocol mismatch stopping the upcoming hardware from communicating with legacy controllers.

But Sony says it "believe[s] that PS5 games should take advantage of the new capabilities and features we're bringing to the platform, including the features of DualSense wireless controller." Those features include what Sony is calling "haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects" and a built-in microphone (last month, Geoff Keighley hosted what is, thus far, the only public hands-on impressions of these new controller features). The DualSense compatibility decision casts Sony in contrast to Microsoft, which is promising that "your Xbox One gaming accessories come into the future with you, too" with the coming Xbox Series X. While that promise doesn't extend to the defunct Kinect camera, it does include specialty pads like the Xbox Elite Controller and Xbox Adaptive Controller. "We believe that your investments in gaming should move with you into the next generation," Microsoft wrote in a blog post last month. PlayStation Move controllers -- first released in 2010 for use with the PS3—will continue to work with PlayStation VR games on the PS5, Sony said. The PS4's existing PlayStation Camera accessory will also work on the PS5, though it will require an adaptor that Sony says it will be providing to users for free.

Yesterday, the FCC approved Amazon's plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation of 3,236 internet-beaming satellites. We have now learned that Amazon will invest $10 billion into the space-based internet delivery system. From a report: The U.S. tech giant said on Thursday it is moving forward with its Project Kuiper, one of several systems planned to bring internet to customers without land-based connections. Project Kuiper aims to deliver satellite-based broadband services in the United States, and eventually around the world, and may offer connectively for wireless carriers and 5G networks. Amazon offer no timetable for the project but said it would begin deployment of its 3,236 satellites after the Federal Communications Commission approved the project.

"We have heard so many stories lately about people who are unable to do their job or complete schoolwork because they don't have reliable internet at home," said Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp. "There are still too many places where broadband access is unreliable or where it doesn't exist at all. Kuiper will change that. Our $10 billion investment will create jobs and infrastructure around the United States that will help us close this gap."

IEEE Spectrum reports: There's still plenty that can disrupt radio communications... Rather than waiting for a human on Earth to tell the radio how to adapt its systems — during which the commands may have already become outdated — a radio with a neural network can do it on the fly. Such a device is called a cognitive radio. Its neural network autonomously senses the changes in its environment, adjusts its settings accordingly — and then, most important of all, learns from the experience... Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Penn State University, in cooperation with NASA, recently tested the first cognitive radios designed to operate in space and keep missions in contact with Earth. In our tests, even the most basic cognitive radios maintained a clear signal between the International Space Station (ISS) and the ground. We believe that with further research, more advanced, more capable cognitive radios can play an integral part in successful deep-space missions in the future, where there will be no margin for error...

Our own effort to create a proof-of-concept cognitive radio for space communications was possible only because of the state-of-the-art Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) test bed on the ISS. NASA's Glenn Research Center created the SCaN test bed specifically to study the use of software-defined radios in space. The test bed was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and installed on the main lattice frame of the space station in July 2012... Ours would be the first-ever cognitive radio experiments conducted in space...

During the tests, the cognitive radio clearly showed that it could learn how to maintain a communications link. The radio autonomously selected settings to avoid losing contact, and the link remained stable even as the radio adjusted itself...

Overall, the success of our tests on the SCaN test bed demonstrated that cognitive radios could be used for deep-space missions.

Britain announced on Tuesday that it would ban equipment from the Chinese technology giant Huawei from the country's high-speed wireless network, a victory for the Trump administration and a reversal of an earlier decision that underscores how technology has taken center stage in the deepening divide between Western powers and China. From a report: In January Britain said that Huawei equipment could be used in its new 5G network on a limited basis. But since then Prime Minister Boris Johnson has faced growing political pressure domestically to take a harder line against Beijing, and in May the United States imposed new restrictions to disrupt Huawei's access to important components. Britain's about-face signals a new willingness among Western countries to confront China, a determination that has grown firmer since Beijing last month adopted a sweeping new law to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, the semiautonomous city that was a British colony until 1997. On Tuesday, Robert O'Brien, President Trump's national security adviser, was in Paris for meetings about China with counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Huawei's critics say its close ties to the Chinese government mean Beijing could use the equipment for espionage or to disrupt telecommunications -- a point the company strongly disputes.

Arguing that Huawei created too much risk for such a critical, multibillion-dollar project, the government said Tuesday that it would bar the purchase of new Huawei equipment for 5G networks after December, and that existing gear already installed would need to be removed from the networks by 2027. "As facts have changed, so has our approach," Oliver Dowden, the government minister in charge of telecommunications, told the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon. "This has not been an easy decision, but it is the right one for the U.K.'s telecoms networks, for our national security and our economy, both now and indeed in the long run." The dispute over Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, represents an early front in a new tech Cold War, with ramifications for internet freedom and surveillance, as well as emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics.