Connectivity, Communications & Cloud News - Page 2

The USB-IF has announced the very latest (and super-fast) USB4 Version 2.0 standard, which is a major update to the USB standard that unleashes a huge 80Gbps of performance over USB-C connectivity.

USB-IF (the USB Implementer's Forum) announced the news today, doubling the maximum aggregate bandwidth of USB4 from 40Gbps to a huge 80Gbps, which will drive future-gen displays, high-performance storage and docks, and everything in between. The USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery (USB PD) specifications have also been updated, now unleashed to up to 80Gbps of performance.

The branding will be changing, with USB 80Gbps solutions featuring a new packaging logo that makes it easier for consumers -- unlike the HDMI standard, which can be confusing AF -- with USB 80Gbps products being fully backwards compatible with all previous versions of USB.

Consumers continue to purchase connected products, and 38% of households now have at least one smart home device, according to a consumer survey from Parks Associates. That number is a small 2% bump year-over-year, with other analysts specifically interested in how smart home security and home energy can be enhanced using Internet-connected devices.

Almost 30 percent of consumers have purchased a smart home device in the past year, while 44 percent of US households plan to purchase at least one smart home device in the next year. It shouldn't be a surprise that even more consumers are thinking about purchasing a connected device, with even more devices being added to the marketplace. In addition, mobile support to control these devices also has continually improved, and should continue to do so in the future.

As noted by Chris White, research director at Parks Associates: "There is so much to talk about. All channels that develop and deliver smart home products have seen new demand, with rising consumer expectations and new opportunities to deliver an integrated connected experience in the home. We are excited to bring industry leaders together to talk about the advancements in the connected home."

Royal Caribbean has announced that it is installing SpaceX Starlink internet services to its fleet of ships, where it is the first in the cruise industry to have SpaceX's high-speed, low-latency connections for guests on their ships.

The company will be adding Starlink terminals to its ships immediately, where it will be leveraging the insights the company obtained from its trial on board the Freedom of the Seas which "received tremendous positive feedback from guests and crew". The Royal Caribbean Group expects that the installation of Starlink SpaceX hardware will be completed by the end of Q1 2023: or March 31, 2023.

Anyone who has been on a cruise ship will know that internet access is usually absolutely garbage, and expensive. SpaceX Starlink internet connectivity out at sea, with great low latency and connection speeds... well, that would definitely make the cruise experience better. I've been on a couple of cruises myself and would've loved the access to something like Starlink out at sea.

Jared Mauch is a senior network architect based in Michigan, who after having crappy internet and being told by Comcast it would cost $50,000+ to extend their fiber service to his house, built his own ISP.

Yes, you read that right: the mad man built his own ISP thanks to $2.6 million in funding from the US government and their Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program. Mauch continued to work at his day job while building his own ISP, where he was a senior network architect at Akamai, while building his own ISP: Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC, which was home to around 70 customers and will be expanding to around 600 customers in the near future thanks to those recovery funds.

The US government's slice of recovery funds to Washtenaw County was $71 million for infrastructure projects, with the county dedicating a part of those funds for broadband internet. The county has completed a broadband study before the pandemic, where it surveyed unserved locations -- places that didn't have internet connections -- according to Mauch. Once the funds were flowing, the county then issued a request for proposals (RFP) that asked contractors to start connecting fiber to houses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey".

Intel is working on a beefed-up NUC system, with codename "Serpent Canyon" officially teased. Check it out:

The new Intel NUC 12 "Serpent Canyon" packs up to a 14-core Intel Core i7-12700H processor and Intel's new in-house Arc A770M discrete GPU. The CPU and its 14 cores and 20 threads will spool up to 4.7GHz, also featuring 24MB of L3 cache.

GPU wise, Intel has upgraded from NVIDIA and its GeForce RTX 2060 with 12GB of GDDR6 memory, over to the Arc A770M GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 memory (the full ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe-Cores). We don't know how much TDP the A770M GPU inside of the new Intel "Serpent Canyon" NUC has, but it should fall between 120W and 150W.

SpaceX continues to push satellite internet technology, with their latest Starlink satellites rocking newer laser communication instead of radio links.

The company has been launching its lastest generation satellites into lower Earth orbit since September 2021, but they will soon go active and we'll see laser-based SpaceX Starlink satellite internet connectivity. The new inter-optical connectivity aka lasers will be used to serve users in the polar regions, where SpaceX filed an application with the FCC's International Bureau with the Committee approving the temporary use of Starlink satellites at latitudes higher than 53 degrees.

Elon explained in a tweet: "Starlink inter-satellite laser links should be operational by end of year. This will dramatically reduce global latency. Light travels ~40% faster in vacuum/air than in fiber optic cables & satellite path length is shorter (cables follow coastlines)".

Google has tripled a previous world record it set for calculating digits of pi only three years ago.

Google Cloud was used to calculate 31.4 trillion digits of pi in 2019, a world record later broken in 2021 by the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons, which calculated another 31.4 trillion digits. On June 9th, 2022, Google has now announced that it has reclaimed the record, using Google Cloud once again to calculate 100 trillion digits of pi.

Google Cloud's compute service, Compute Engine, has gotten faster in the years since it first crunched a record number of digits of pi, thanks to recent upgrades such as the "Compute Engine N2 machine family, 100 Gbps egress bandwidth, Google Virtual NIC, and balanced Persistent Disks."

Earlier this year rumors started swirling that Google was working on a "less expensive" version of their Chromecast video streaming dongle. It would make sense for Google to offer a device for the market segment that does not need a device that supports more than a 1080p resolution as the current model supports 4K HDR.

Recently it has been revealed that Google has submitted a device, G454V, for review to the FCC. In the filing, it is described as a "wireless device", which in the past Google has used the same description for products like the Nest Audio, Chromecast Voice Remote, and Daydream View Controller.

From the filing, the device supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The biggest reveal of what this device could possibly be comes from its description in the test configuration, which describes it as a wireless streaming device. Additionally, the unit is being tested with a remote control device being described in the FCC testing documentation.

The future of display connectivity cables is constantly changing, with DisplayPort 2.0 monitors and graphics cards debuting later this year, HDMI 2.1a is also being introduced.

HDMI 2.1a was recently announced by the HDMI Licensing Administrator, designed to give active cables more power directly from the source device... all without needing additional power cables. This means that cables that are longer than 5M won't have as many issues, especially when driving the full 40Gbps or higher 48Gbps through HDMI 2.1 cables.

The big difference with the new HDMI 2.1a specification: the active cables can only be attached in one direction -- with one end of the cable specifically labeled to attach to the HDMI Source, while the other side will be connected ot the HDMI Sink device. If you hook the cable up in reverse, well, it won't actually work.

The results of the data transmission experiment were presented at the International Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2022 on May 19th, 2022.

Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) managed to transmit 1.02 petabits of data per second using multi-core fiber (MCF) with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 millimeters. The NICT broke the one petabit per second data transmission rate first in December 2020 but did so with a 15-mode optical fiber.

Such a transmission system requires complex MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) digital signal processing to make sense of the signals and limits its practical applications. The latest transmission system uses 4-core MCF and can transmit 1.02 petabit per second over 51.7 kilometers (32.1 miles), compared to the 610 terabits per second previously achieved in a similar fiber.