Carl Weinschenk

AT&T has announced that five states – Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Virginia and Wyoming – are the first to opt into the FirstNet first responders’ network. FirstNet (technically, The First Responder Network Authority) aims to improve emergency communications, which often melt down during crises. It is an independent authority within the U.S. Department of Commerce. AT&T […]

One of the most promising and competitive areas of telecom is software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). The list of startups and product announcements is hard to keep up with. The idea is simple: Distributed organizations want an efficient, reliable and inexpensive way to traffic voice and data traffic between locations. To date, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) […]

Creation of ubiquitous networks featuring low power consumption without sacrificing necessary functionality is one of the biggest challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT). If it faces down this challenge, the expansive vision of the IoT has a chance of being realized. If not, the IoT could devolve to localized pockets of connectivity without the […]

The telecommunications world is accustomed to big mergers. Two interesting things could be said of one of the biggest, the integration of Time Warner and AT&T. The first is that the deal is becoming more of a political football than previous mergers and acquisitions, due to President Trump’s beef with CNN, which is owned by […]

CenturyLink is facing serious legal issues related to alleged overbilling of customers, according to FierceTelecom. A customer service and sales agent brought cases of such behavior to the attention of CEO Glen Post at a company Q&A session. She was fired shortly afterwards and filed a lawsuit. A subsequent class-action suit over the practice has […]

One group of people who will enjoy outsized benefits from emerging technology are those living in rural areas. And that only seems fair, since they have suffered with substandard broadband for so long. 5G fixed wireless is the highest profile platform to aid rural citizens. Another technique is white space, which utilizes that bandwidth that […]

NTT Communications said that it will use Microsoft’s new Azure Stack in the United States and Europe. The goal of Azure Stack is to ease management of hybrid public and private clouds. It does this by bringing public cloud capabilities into the data center. NTT Com, through its managed services business, will work with Dell […]

Last week, Qualcomm said it is filing a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against Apple for unlawful use of six patents in iPhones. The press release links to an infographic detailing the patents. Several extend battery life and increase efficiencies to various tasks; one accelerates uploads and downloads; one speeds booting and […]

Subscription rates of both wired and mobile broadband have increased for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is comprised of 35 countries. On the mobile side, the average in December 2015 was 91 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. That average increased to 99 subscriptions per 100 subscribers in December of 2016. There were […]

The good news for the virtual reality (VR) industry is that a newly released study says that the percentage of broadband homes in the United States that plan to buy a VR headset within the next year has nearly doubled since early last year. The middling news is that the percentage is still in single […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning could be boons to law enforcement personnel trying to predict and thereby avoid criminal behavior. But, according to a report at ZDNet from the Interpol World 2017 that is being held in Singapore, tricky privacy boundaries and limitations on the treatment of this data exist. The report details the […]

Last month, Top500.org posted the 49th edition of its biannual listing of top supercomputers. The top of the list is stable. The Chinese supercomputers Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe 2, at 93 petaflop and 33.9 petaflops, respectively, remain the top two machines, says Network World. There are some changes, however. The Swiss GPU-based Piz Daint doubled […]