1. Monthly archive
  2. February 2017

February 2017

Project Loon’s latest breakthrough to reduce costs for telcos

Instead of sailing balloons around the world to deliver internet access, engineers at Alphabet's Project Loon will send small teams of balloons to form a cluster over specific regions where people need internet access—a discovery that will help reduce the costs of operating a Loon-powered network. In a post on its Google+ page, the Loon team explained that when they started a pilot test in 2013, they thought they’d need a continuous stream of balloons around the world such that, as one balloon drifted away, another would be ready to take its place. Their main task would be to manage the balloons’ paths during their round-the-world journeys just enough to get them to drift over their internet test locations in roughly equal intervals—so as one balloon moved out of range, another would move in its place.

Google Fiber makes expansion plans for $60 wireless gigabit service

Google Fiber's new wireless Internet division is apparently ready to expand. The company's Webpass subsidiary says in a job listing that it is "searching for a General Manager to launch our Seattle market." The new GM will be "directly responsible for the growth of our local telecom network and revenue" and will oversee construction and installation schedules. Webpass, which offers up to 1Gbps upload and download speeds for $60 a month and without data caps, was purchased by Google Fiber in October 2016 and already sells wireless home Internet service in Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco. (Advertised speeds are anywhere from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, depending on location.) The plan would bring Google’s wireless option to Seattle’s dense urban center where creating a new physical fiber network can be expensive and impractical.

Smartphones Have an Unexpected New Rival

Recently, an Indian government official announced that iPhones will start rolling off an assembly line in Bangalore by the end of April, targeted at local customers. It's a big moment for Apple, which is counting on India's emerging middle class to make up for slowing sales in other markets.

But don't bet on the iPhone conquering India, or any other emerging market, just yet. That's because smartphones of all kinds are facing stiff competition from an unlikely new challenger: feature phones. With simple handsets and small screens intended mostly for calls and text messages -- similar to the Nokia or Motorola you probably owned years ago -- a new generation of feature phones is suddenly looking like a threat to Apple and its rivals.

FCC Lets Class A Low Powers Kick Tires on ATSC 3.0

The Federal Communications Commission is allowing a test of the new ATSC 3.0 transmission standard in the Portland (OR) area. The grant, which was reported by the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition, is for six months on four channels (16, 20, 35, 38) and was requested by WatchTV's class A low-power outlets KORS-CD, KOXI-CD, KKEI-CD, and KORK-CD. Also backing the test, according to WatchTV, is a "manufacturer of broadcast transmitters for the U.S. market."

What Facebook Owes to Journalism

[Commentary] Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto about community, released last week on Facebook, wisely analyzed the state of journalism: He decried sensationalism, and declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.” Giving people a voice, he said, “is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it.” He even noted that “reading local news is directly correlated with local civic engagement.” Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.

[Steven Waldman, the founder of LifePosts.com, was the prime author of the Federal Communications Report “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.”]

How Mark Zuckerberg could really fix journalism

[Commentary] What independent journalism needs more than ever from Silicon Valley is a significant transfer of wealth. Publishers agree with this notion, although the loudest proponents are often those who would benefit the most from it. It is not necessarily enough just to re-energize existing institutions (although the involvement of Jeff Bezos and his money at The Washington Post has been, from a civic and journalistic point of view, wholly beneficial). Mark Zuckerberg has a taste for grand gestures and “moon shots,” in Valley parlance.Now, he has a chance to make a generational intervention which will dramatically improve the health of America’s journalism.

Remaking independent journalism requires funding that is independent of individuals or corporations, has a longtime horizon built into it, and offers complete independence and as much stability as possible.

[Emily Bell is Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.]

How Peter Thiel's Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World

Donald Trump has inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Thiel represents a perfect nexus of government clout with the kind of corporate swagger Trump loves. The Intercept can now reveal that Palantir has worked for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners, and was in fact co-created with American spies.

© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.