Carl Weinschenk

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from the realm of science fiction to a part of everyday corporate life. AI is still a poorly understood field. It’s inherently complex and has been romanticized by the media. That’s partly by design: Staging matches against chess and Go champions raises awareness and, perhaps, money (especially if the AI […]

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is a hot area, and for good reason, according to analyst Zeus Kerravala, who creates a context that makes the SD-WAN platform’s rise to prominence understandable. Even decades ago, he writes, corporate IT departments recognized that traditional WANs were “inflexible, inexpensive, and overly expensive.” At that point, no other option was available. […]

There are various timing disconnects in telecommunications. The most obvious is that marketers usually are way ahead of engineers and developers. For instance, they describe a 5G future in which a smartphone is massively more powerful than it is today. That day will come, but first 5G will be put to work in the far […]

On Friday, a blog at Check Point Software Technologies’ website said that its engineers had found severe infections on 36 Android devices belonging to two unnamed telecommunication and multinational companies. The post pointed out that this is not unusual, but that the striking element is that the infections came preinstalled on the devices. Investigations found […]

The sense for about a year has been that the adoption path to 5G, which initially called for the new standard to arrive in 2020, is accelerating. That quickening pace was made official by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the body charged with creating the new standard. At a meeting this week in Dubrovnik, […]

It pays to have fast broadband service. And though those speeds seem to be increasing overall, progress is not uniform. There is also a question about whether people can trust what their providers are telling them. The overall increase is noted by Akamai Technologies in its report highlighting the worldwide speeds during the fourth quarter […]

The incredible potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the possibility that it will connect everything: From containers in the bowels of ships in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to factory floors in Detroit, to exercise software in Pasadena. Of course, these things won’t all be connected to each other. They will, however, […]

DOCSIS 3.1, the cable industry’s entry in the “can you top this” rivalry with the telephone and wireless/cellular industries, has moved into the field en masse. The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification is the industry’s long-term initiative aimed at incrementally increasing data carriage capabilities over its coaxial cables. Version 3.1’s core promise is to […]

The art and science of 3D printing are progressing rapidly. The news from this sector is always exciting and even a bit stunning. The San Francisco firm Apis Cors and Russian developer PIK has printed a 38 square meter house in 24 hours, according to ZDNet, in a project costing about $10,000. The printer sequentially […]

Cue the sinister music and close-ups on people in various states of horror: The machines indeed may be able to take over. In this scenario, however, the rise of the machines will be abetted by hackers. IOActive this week released a paper that points to “numerous vulnerabilities found in multiple home, business, and industry robots.” […]

The changes everyone expected to come at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are here. In one sign of the new times, chairman Ajit Pai said this week that no oversight from the FCC was necessary in the AT&T-Time Warner merger. The Hill reports that the FCC will step back because no licenses will be exchanged […]

Machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence (ML, DL and AI) are related technologies that are changing the face of how many industries manage themselves and make decisions. Clearly, they are very important and complex processes that are evolving very quickly. It is important to understand the differences between them. Unfortunately, you almost need to […]