Carl Weinschenk

Things tend to slow down a bit in the summer, which gives people a chance to go to the beach – or look ahead to things that might happen once autumn arrives. Two stories during the past week suggest three mega-deals that may be on the table: a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, an acquisition […]

One of the more contentious issues of the past couple of years has been devising a way for cellular providers to use unlicensed spectrum that is fair to the current users of the spectrum. The debate certainly may continue, but it will do so as cellular providers begin operations. The cellular providers long have cast […]

Unlimited data plans from Verizon and AT&T are having an impact on network performance and the competitive landscape, according to research by OpenSignal. The beneficiary is T-Mobile, which ran the table in the testing. It won in 4G download speed, 3G download speed, overall download speed, 4G latency, 3G latency and 4G availability. The firm […]

Great technical battles emerge and settle themselves as evolution dictates what must happen. At the dawn of the electric age, alternating current (championed by Nicolai Tesla) battled direct current (pushed by Thomas Alva Edison). Tesla won. A similar foundational debate emerged once it became clear that the internet was going to be huge. Should intelligence […]

Last week, Malwarebytes released the Second Annual State of Ransomware Report, which was conducted on its behalf by Osterman Research. The study looked at 1,054 companies with 1,000 or fewer employees in North America, France, the UK, Germany, Australia and Singapore. The results are sobering for small- and medium-sized (SMBs). For instance, about one in […]

One of the biggest challenges during the next few years will be providing networking capabilities to support the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to being ubiquitous, these networks must support sensors and other endpoint devices that operate on very low power. It’s a major challenge. Many companies using three distinct approaches are deeply involved. […]

Dealing with mundane topics often has beneficial results, such as increases in efficiency and cost savings, because these subjects tend to get neglected. The lifecycle of computer equipment is one such area. Part of this is taking carefully getting rid of the machines. Not doing so can lead to legal exposure. Mary Shacklett, the president […]

AT&T says it may reach 14 million customers with fiber-to-the-premises (FTP) services by 2019. Doing so would beat the promise it made to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to serve 12.5 million endpoints as part of the approval of the DirecTV acquisition. The news was delivered during the carrier’s second quarter earnings call by Chief […]

No sector has changed as much as browsers during the past 15 years. Internet Explorer was wildly dominant during the early years of the 2000s, reaching well above 90 percent, but has fallen on hard times and is fading. Andreas Gal has seen the drama unfold. He co-founded the Boot to Gecko project in 2011, which evolved […]

Edgy comments on social media are usually tedious. But not always. The billionaire nerd fight between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk concerns an exceedingly important issue. Attention should be paid. During a Google Live chat, Zuckerberg took issue with technologists who are raising red flags about the risks posed by […]

Adobe announced that it will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020, saying that open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured and obviated the need for the plug-in. Adobe pointed to this as the reason that it is gradually being retired. It is no longer needed and […]

It is a supreme irony of the modern telecommunications world that the emergence of 5G is one of the best things that has happened for the fiber ecosystem. The reason is simple: 5G will rely on bandwidth in the very high frequency multi-millimeter sector. Those signals are short range and easily disrupted by leaves, rain, […]