Connectivity & Cloud - Page 5

Elon Musk has delivered on his personal promise, with a truck filled with SpaceX Starlink user terminals to Ukraine.

Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov asked Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to help the country out by sending over Starlink satellite internet access, which had been activated in the days prior, but now the user terminals have turned up.

Fedorov tweeted "Starlink - here" and thanked Elon, to which the SpaceX founder simply tweeted "You are most welcome". Now that is some impressive turnaround time for SpaceX, to have Starlink satellites above Ukraine and then user terminals out in something like a 72-hour period is mighty impressive. So too is all of this happening with rockets, explosions, and everything in between that a special convoy from SpaceX with next-gen satellite technology was able to make it through unscathed.

I think most of the world knows about the conflict in Ukraine right now, but the assistance of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk has been called upon by Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Fedorov took to Twitter, and tweeted to Musk for help, saying: "while you try to colonize Mars - Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space - Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand".

Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected internet connectivity, but with SpaceX satellites above the people of Ukraine, those with SpaceX Starlink satellite internet will have connectivity. This is one of the beauties of Starlink internet, as you just need a power point and you're good to go -- especially if you've got Musk personally helping you out as the Vice PM of Ukraine -- nothing can take that down.

I personally signed up for SpaceX Starlink satellite internet a few weeks ago and will have my connection by the end of Q1 2022 hopefully, but as I went to check the SpaceX website I noticed something new... Starlink Premium. A quick Google search and yeah, it was just unveiled a couple of hours ago.

SpaceX's introduction of Starlink Premium offers a higher-end satellite internet service, offering faster speeds of 150Mbps through to a much faster 500Mbps -- with 20-40ms latency -- while upload speeds are bumped to 20Mbps to 40Mbps. This is compared to the 50Mbps to 250Mbps on the regular Starlink service on the download speeds, while uploads are just 10-20Mbps on the regular Starlink.

But... the regular Starlink service costs you $99 per month while Starlink Premium costs $500 per month -- 5x the cost, as well as the huge $2500 for the beefier antenna and other required hardware. You'll also need to plonk down a $500 deposit for Starlink Premium.

If you live somewhere where dinosaurs roam around, you might want to disconnect your SpaceX Starlink satellite internet service... because if a dinosaur roams too close to your house and stomps on your dish, you're not covered under warranty.

SpaceX explains in its Starlink warranty: "The warranty does not cover damage due to: Lightning, electrical surges, fires, floods, hail, windstorms, earthquakes, meteors, solar storms, dinosaurs or other forces of nature". Yes, you read that right -- meteors, solar storms, DINOSAURS, and other "forces of nature". Might as well include General Zod and Thanos, I guess.

Another thing is that Starlink is already laying the groundwork for Elon Musk and SpaceX's adventures to Mars, where Starlink won't be bound by Earth laws on the Martian surface of Mars. You can read more on that below.

T-Mobile has successfully identified or blocked over 21 billion spam calls in 2021 alone, which works out to around 700 calls every second.

The US telco giant identified 1.1 billion calls as Scam Likely in January 2021 alone, while by November 2021 those numbers had reached 2.5 billion. The reason why spam calls ramped from 2020 to 2021 was because of the on-going pandemic, with an average rate of around 425 million spam calls per week these numbers are up 116% compared to 2020.

Spam calls dropped off by 80% across the weekend, as well as slowing down during the holidays. According to a recent report from Truecaller, around 23% of Americans have fallen for the spam calls and lost money as a result. There was an average of $502 lost per person, up from $351 in 2020 -- in total, we're looking at just shy of $30 billion for 2021.

We've been walking into the world of 5G for a few years now, but it's only just now -- days before 2022 begins -- that major US air carriers begin freaking out that 5G wireless services are going to wreck havoc on the travel industry.

United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby said during a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said that US telco giants AT&T and Verizon need to delay their plans to use C-Band spectrum for 5G wireless services. Kirby said during the hearing that 5G wireless services would delay, divert, or cancel around 4% of daily flights in the US -- impacting hundreds of thousands of passengers per year, every year.

Kirby said: "It would be a catastrophic failure of government. Coming Jan. 5 -- unless something changes -- we will not be able to use radio altimeters at 40-something of the largest airports in the country. It is a certainty. This is not a debate".

Seriously, we're so close to the launch of the PCIe 5.0 standard that will launch with Intel's next-gen Alder Lake platform -- and we're hearing more concrete details about the new PCIe 6.0 standard.

PCI-SIG has announced that the next-gen PCIe 6.0 standard is close to being finalized, with the new standard offering up to 128GB/sec of bandwidth -- double that of PCIe 5.0, and quadruple PCIe 4.0 and its 32GB/sec of bandwidth that we're just using now.

PCIe 6.0 has now reached the Final Draft version (version 0.9) allows members of PCI-SIG to review the new standards for not just patents, but IP. There are no changes allowed by PCI Express, so PCIe 6.0 has effectively 'gone gold'. PCIe 6.0 has some wicked speeds that it will be capable of, especially in the beast PCIe 6.0 x16 port with up to 128GB/sec of bandwidth -- double that of PCIe 5.0 x16 which is crazy.

The official USB Type-C 2.1 specifications have been published, where it is indeed true: USB Type-C 2.1 will deliver a huge 240W of power over a tiny USB-C cable.

In order to pump 240W through that small USB-C cable you're going to need a new USB-C EPR (Extended Power Range) cable, the new EPR specification bumps up the maximum voltage to 48V. This bump to 48V is what is required to push 240W of power at 5A.

USB-C Type 2.1 devices and cables will be backward compatible, and vica versa, with USB Type-C 2.0 ports. Nothing has changed with the port at all, but there are standards on the midplate being stronger, and mandates for pins for A4-A9 and B4-B9 (power, power delivery, and legacy USB 2.0 support) must not short in order to ground during connecting mating.

Alphabet has been running projects offering next-generation internet services for many years now, with its latest Project Taara blasting 700TB of data across the Congo River in a really new way.

Project Taara is a new technology that offers fiber optic cable-type speeds, without the cables -- with the Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) technology developed for Alphabet's Project Loon, in its new Project Taara. Where Project Loon used stratospheric helium balloons to blast wireless internet to everyone, Project Taara uses the wireless optical link technology to connect services across the Congo River.

Alphabet has its own moonshot lab called X where it well -- shoots for the moon -- with projects like this. FSOC is capable of pumping a 20Gbps+ link between two points if it has clear line of sight. The way it works is through using light to transmit high-speed data between two points. 20Gbps+ is on offer using just light to transmit information at incredibly fast speeds through the air, as a very narrow, invisible beam.

Elon Musk only just announced SpaceX had shipped out 100,000 Starlink terminals barely 24 hours ago, and now there are multiple states across the US and globally, that are experiencing outages.

Starlink users are reporting their satellite internet connections are down on Reddit and Twitter, with Reddit user "godch01" saying that his Starlink connection wouldn't work for 8 minutes and then it was alright. Most reports on Reddit state that services were down for around 90 minutes, with users reporting in from the US, Canada, the UK and Germany.

Another Reddit user "ID_John" who said his service went down, and then his Starlink terminal performed a software update out of nowhere and once it was finished, his Starlink service was operational. It could've been SpaceX making some tweaks as users are beta testers, which makes sense if the Starlink terminal software update being pumped out to a few users fixed their issues.

Inside of Starlink's user terminals is a quad-core CPU powered by ARM's Cortex-A53 cores, thanks to a new teardown by researchers working at Belgium's KU Leven University.

It's not the first teardown of a Starlink terminal, but this teardown is different as we have greater detail on the firmware and software inside of the SpaceX tech. Inside, SpaceX is using a processor that packs 4GB of embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) memory that loads up the firmware after bootup.

The researchers accessed the eMMC independently from the processor, finding a chip called a "secure element" that is also inside of the Apple iPhone, and part of the security infrastructure for the iPhone that has code required for secure biometric validation.

Another day, another story where the world that people believe to be so innocent, isn't.

Israeli surveillance company NSO Group has experienced a gigantic, world-changing leak. The Guardian along with 16 other media organizations have run an investigation, showing that NSO's hacking software knock as "Pegasus", crafted to be used against terrorists and criminals -- just like all that "good" "hacking software" -- has been used against the good guys.

But first... what is Pegasus? Pegasus is malware that was made by NSO Group that can infect virtually any iPhone or Android smartphone and once installed, can let the operator pull out messages, photos, emails, record and monitor calls and even secretly activate microphones on the phone.

If you're out in the middle of nowhere or stuck with really crappy internet access... then this will be music to your ears.

Elon Musk has said that Starlink's satellite-based internet will offer gamers some very, very competitive connectivity with latencies that will be under 20ms. This is enough for competitive gamers, with Musk saying that Starlink engineers and SpaceX's production and launch teams have been working around the clock to get Starlink latencies under 20ms.

Musk explains: "Glad it's working! The sheer amount of work done by SpaceX engineering, production & launch teams is amazing. Ping should improve dramatically in coming months. We're aiming for <20ms. Basically, you should be able to play competitive FPS games through Starlink".

SpaceX's ambitious Starlink internet service is accepting pre-orders right now, with users in beta testing right now -- users in Iran are getting duped by a fake Starlink website.

A fake Starlink website has been set up and is accepting pre-orders for internet service, taking payments of $249 and accepting Bitcoin which makes it easier for whoever, or the team that set up the website -- to hide the money that they've taken.

The website isn't far off the official Starlink website, with "www.starlinkiran.com" virtually identical to the official website by SpaceX. There's the same background images, translated text in Persian, and for the most part people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two sites.

SpaceX will have its ambitious Starlink satellite internet service available globally in August 2021, just over a month from now -- globally, apart from the North and South Poles.

The news comes from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who said during the recent virtual Mobile World Congress 2021 that Starlink is "operational now in about 12 countries, and more are being added every month". Musk added: "We are on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months".

Elon has to of course comment on the simultaneous active users on Starlink exceeding the "strategically important" threshold of 69,420 on June 25, 2021. In some follow up tweets, Musk added that all 72 orbital planes activate in August, "plus many other improvements" that will be "enabling global coverage, except for polar regions, which will take another 6 months".

The world of travel was decapitated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a frequent traveler myself (Australia to the US at least 4-5 times a year...) it was in-flight Wi-Fi that needed the biggest upgrade to make traveling those ungodly amount of hours a better experience.

SpaceX's Starlink is wanting to make that better, with the satellite internet network giant in talks with "several" airlines to have their satellites blast super-fast internet onto planes flying through the sky.

SpaceX vice president Jonathan Hofeller explained at a panel during the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit: "We're in talks with several of the airlines. We have our own aviation product in development ... we've already done some demonstrations to date and [are] looking to get that product finalized to be put on aircraft in the very near future".

Intel has just unveiled its very first 5G modem with the new Intel 5G Solution 5000, a new 5G modem through its partnership with MediaTek and Fibocom.

The company announced the news during its all-virtual Computex 2021 keynote, with the new modem will offer up nearly 5x the speeds of a high-speed Gigabit LTE connection, with Intel teasing up to 4.7Gbps download speeds and up to 1.25Gbps upload speeds. If you can't get 5G where you are at the time, the Intel 5G Solution 5000-powered phone that you are using will fall back to LTE Cat 19.

Intel's new 5G modem will work with Windows, Chrome, and Linux systems so it will find Intel (5G) Inside of millions of designs over the coming years.

There are some major changes coming to USB-C and they are very, very welcomed -- the USB Implementers Forum is an industry group that developed the technology, and they've unveiled the USB-C version 2.1 update that supports up to an insane 240W charging over USB-C.

The new 240W charging capacity is called Extended Power Range (EPR) and it will arrive in devices in the second half of 2021, and it'll require new cables that clearly state they support up to 240W charging. The regular lower-power cables are now called Standard Power Range (SPR) and will top out at 60W while delivering an electrical current of 3 amps.

The higher-end 100W cables that you can find today are running at up to 5 amps and will fall into the new Extended Power Range (EPR) family of cables. EPR will range between 100W and 240W with USB-C, meaning you could power a large high-end 32-inch 4K monitor over USB-C or even a high-end gaming laptop or AIO computer.

SpaceX is doing some impressive things with its Starlink satellite internet service, with tests from not long ago now seeing 300Mbps+ connections even when the satellite dish was covered in ice. Now, we're seeing huge 560Mbps download speeds on Starlink in new tests in Germany.

A user on Reddit posted about his experience with Starlink and ran some speed tests through Ookla's Speed Test of course, with download speeds that were hitting 542Mbps and 560Mbps for the first and second speed test on Starlink, respectively. Upload speeds remained at 38Mbps, while the ping was somewhere between 9-13ms which is more than acceptable.

But this is where Starlink download speeds, upload speeds, and latencies are all factors that can be changed at a whim. SpaceX has limited amounts of bandwidth per Starlink satellite, so the speeds and latencies to a particular user can vary depending on different factors -- this can range from the number of satellites in orbit above you, and the ground networks transferring data between the servers on the internet.

It looks like Starlink internet connections are pretty kick ass even in some crazy environments like being covered in ice and 8 inches of snow around it -- whatever, says SpaceX -- it'll throw 300Mbps to your dish from lower Earth orbit.

A user in Colorado, USA has teased her Starlink internet connection with a speed test showing a huge 303Mbps down and 23.7Mbps up -- all while the dish was completely covered in snow. SpaceX said back in November 2021 that their Starlink terminals can operate in temperatures as low as -30C.

Not only that but SpaceX includes pre-built heaters inside of them, which when required will melt snow and ice off of them. The Starlink dish itself is flat, so it will not gather snow or water in its center -- a design tweak by SpaceX which works in extreme environments where snow/ice is an issue.