Connectivity & Cloud - Page 8

Qualcomm has been leading the 5G game for what feels like years now, and now we have news that Sprint has promised to launch mobile 5G services nationwide in the first half of 2019.

Sprint boss Marcelo Claure explained during their recent quarterly earnings conference call with investors: "We're working with Qualcomm and network and device manufacturers in order to launch the first truly mobile [5G] network in the United States by the first half of 2019. This development will put Sprint at the forefront of technology innovation on par with other leading carriers around the world... We believe our next-gen network will truly differentiate Sprint over the next couple of years".

US telco competitor T-Mobile has promised nationwide 5G support in 2019, finishing it in 2020, with Sprint now in the lead for the next generation of mobile connectivity.

A San Jose-based startup named Energous, has announced that it has been granted approval by the FCC for their power-at-a-distance wireless charger that uses the WattUp Mid Field transmitter.

WattUp Mid Field transmitter converts electricity to radio frequencies which then are beamed to nearby devices that support wireless charging and have a corresponding receiver. This new technology brings forth a new wave of wireless charging, as previous generations of the idea required physical contact with the wireless charging device, Energous' product can be used in a 15 feet radius from the station.

The WattUp will have the ability to be able to charge multiple devices at once, from phones to tablets, keyboards and any other piece of technology that is fitted with a corresponding charging receiver. Just like Wi-Fi, the WattUp is manufacturer-agnostic meaning that no matter what brand receiver users may have the wireless charging will still be available to use.

Intel has just increased its threat against Qualcomm in a very big way by announcing their new XMM 7660 LTE modem, something that will really push the limits of download speeds over our mobile devices.

The new XMM 7660 LTE modem from Intel is capable of reaching 1.6Gbps which is an incredible leap from the 1Gbps offered under Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 processor. Intel's new LTE modem will be one of the fastest in the world, and could be inside of the iPhone 9.

Intel will need to provide some real-world tests of the 1.6Gbps teased by its XMM 7660 LTE modem, but I think seeing 1.5GB/sec downloading onto my phone will be so scary I'd pass out. My 100Mbps fiber connection at home is already mighty fine, but 1.6Gbps from my phone? Holy hell.

With all of the issues going on in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the FCC fast-tracked 60 x Project Loon internet ballons to fly over both countries for six months.

Alphabet is behind Project Loon, with Google's parent company pushing cellular data capabilities from the skies. Project Loon would return internet connectivity to countless residents. Project Loon was recently deployed in Peru after floods affected the city, with Alphabet teaming with Peruvian network Telefonica to help get the signals from the ground and allocate them into the right spectrum and services.

An Alphabet spokesperson told Wired: "Things are a little more complicated because we're starting from scratch. Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner's network-the balloons can't do it alone".

Google have announced that everyone's favorite assistant is back, in a new slimmed-down miniature version. The Google Home Mini is everything you've came to love from the Google Home range only in a smaller, more versatile miniature smart speaker. Featuring a 360 degree speaker with 40mm drivers, the physical size of the Google Home Mini is about the size of a mini-donut at 3.86inch diameter and 1.65inch in height.

A direct competitor to Amazon's Echo Dot, both smart speakers are very similar with Google Home Mini utilizing Google Assistant. Featuring Bluetooth, touch controls for volume and a physical switch for muting voice commands, Google have provided 3 colors to suit your preference- Chalk, Charcoal and Coral and is finished in a soft-touch mesh material.

Google Home Mini grants you can control of your Chromecast streaming devices, access to Google Play Music, and YouTube. Unfortuntly, Google haven't included an audio output jack, this means you cannot use your Google Home Mini as an audio source for your home theatre setup or as media streaming center.

Microsoft has teamed with Facebook and Spanish telco giant Telxis on a new undersea communications cable that is 17,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

The companies claim that it is the "most technologically advanced subsea cable" with up to 160Tbps of data per second, beating out Google's recent "Faster" cable. The 160Tbps-capable cable spans a distance of 4000 miles from Virgina Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain.

Construction began in August 2016, with Microsoft announcing its completion on Thursday, while the super-fast cable won't be in operation until early 2018. The idea behind the cable started with Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which knocked out the connection between the US and Europe for a few days.

The race towards 5G is ramping up quickly, but Qualcomm keeps deploying new technologies and hurdles for consumers and its competitors, respectively - and while it's hard to keep up sometimes, there has never been a more exciting time for the always-connected world we live in.

Qualcomm has just announced that its new Snapdragon X50 modem is capable of not just 5G, but 4G, 3G, and even 2G. The Snapdragon X50 will work with Verizon in the US, and Korea ahead of the 5G rollouts in 2020, but Qualcomm and its partners are hoping to make this 5G reality happen sooner, rather than later.

Having 5G/4G/3G/2G all working on a single chip will be very advantageous for Qualcomm, as it means that we will see a truly global smartphone world thanks to the Snapdragon X50.

I've been spending the past few months dreaming of higher mobile speeds, with Qualcomm teaming with Australian telco, Telstra, alongside Ericsson, and Netgear on Gigabit LTE - but Qualcomm also teased 5G not so long ago.

Now, the International Telecommunications Unit (ITU) have decided on the 5G specifications: with the ITU statnig that a single 5G cell must feature 20Gbps of bandwidth, and include support for up to 1 million devices connected per kilometer (0.62 miles). The standard will also require carriers to have at least 100MHz of free spectrum, and where available: up to 1GHz.

The ITU published the first draft of its 5G radio interfaces a few days ago, but we should expect the final tech specs on 5G technology by November. But the tease of at least 20Gbps down and 10Gbps up is absolutely incredible, but you won't be getting 20Gbps to your smartphone - in reality, the 20Gbps will split its bandwidth across all of the devices it is blasting to.

Qualcomm is slowly moving its chess pieces around the 5G board, with a tease of Gigabit LTE in Sydney, Australia a couple of weeks ago - and a full detailing on 5G technology and its race to 5G leadership at Qualcomm HQ in San Diego, California.

Qualcomm has announced their first successful 5G connection "based on the New Radio (NR) work in 3GPP", something the company expects to "become the global 5G standard". The successful 5G test used Qualcomm Technologies' sub-6GHz 5G NR prototype system, something that is capable of operating at mid-band spectrum from 3.3-5.0GHz.

This huge speed allows for multiple Gbps in bandwidth, and better yet - at "significantly lower latency" than today's 4G LTE networks. 5G NR will take advantage of the wide range of spectrum bands, as it can use spectrum bands below 6GHz, something Qualcomm says is "critical for achieving ubiquitous coverage and capacity to address the large number of envisioned 5G use cases".

Qualcomm is on quite the technological roll, with a big show of Gigabit LTE in Sydney, Australia barely over a week ago - and now, the company has unveiled new Wi-Fi chips that will usher in the future of Wi-Fi technology.

Qualcomm's new IPQ8074 is a fresh system-on-chip (SoC) for routers and access points, while the new QCA6290 is for receivers - you know, your Wi-Fi device. This is the first end-to-end commercial Wi-Fi portfolio that supports the new 802.11ax standard, which is very, very exciting.

802.11ax is the next leap in Wi-Fi technology, after 802.11b debuted in 1999 - after that we saw 802.11g, 802.11n, and then what we have now - 802.11ac. 802.11ax is backwards compatible with all of your other Wi-FI devices and routers, but what's the main benefit of 802.11ax?

Verizon has just announced its new unlimited data plan, simply known as Verizon Unlimited - which will cost $80 for an individual line, or $45 per line for a four-line family plan.

The company is calling the new Verizon Unlimited pricing as "introductory", which require both paperless billing and AutoPay to be enabled. The plan will offer 22GB at full LTE speeds, but once you hit the data cap you'll have your speeds throttled, and Verizon will de-prioritize you on their network.

If you plan on using the Verizon Unlimited plan as a hotspot, you'll get 10GB at LTE speeds - and 500MB per day of roaming data in Mexico and Canada. Additionally, you can pay $10 for a 500MB LTE TravelPass that will work anywhere in the world.

Cooler Master has kicked off its Case Mod World Series 2017 event, with $40,000 worth of cash and prizes up for case modders - perfect timing with Cooler Master's 25th anniversary this year.

This is the 8th time the company has hosted its Case Mod World Series, which will take submissions of case mod designs from February 3 to May 3. There's a bonus category added this year, celebrating the 25th year that Cooler Master has been in operation. Raymen Wu, Marketing Director of Cooler Master explained: "We have created countless product innovations and design break-throughs which paved the way to the standard cases and cooling technology seen today. With this being the 25th year of our company, we wanted to pay tribute by inviting modders to participate in the biggest modding event in the community with a bonus category for $2500 in cash".

There will be regional workshops and local meet & greets in various countries throughout the world, bringing modders, enthusiasts and fans alike together under #MASTERBUILT, with t-shirts on offer. Modders can then share their designs and passion with the community, with World Series participants, PC enthusiasts and Cooler Master fans to meet one-on-one with Cooler Master, and others.

I'm literally sitting at the Sydney Airport about to fly back home to Adelaide, SA - after attending Qualcomm's impressive #GigabitLTE event where they displayed 900Mbps+ being blasted down to a Netgear-made router.

It was an incredible feat, and while Qualcomm has teased 5G just weeks ago at CES 2017 - AT&T has announced plans for deploying 5G wireless networks in two cities in the US: Austin, and Indianapolis. The new 5G-capable network will offer peak speeds of 400Mbps or better, but with technologies like carrier aggregation and more, we should see 1Gbps in "some areas" later this year.

Qualcomm invited tech media and analysts from around the globe to Sydney, Australia - which for me, was finally a tech event that didn't involve a 60-hour return trip - where they showed off the latest advancements with Gigabit LTE technology.

The event was held at Telstra's Experience Center in Sydney, involving partnerships between Qualcomm, Telstra (Australia's leading telco), Netgear, and Ericsson. The companies have been working together in separate, and combined relationships over the last 15+ years, but this latest partnership over Gigabit LTE is a giant leap for the entire mobile industry, and the world.

Qualcomm sat everyone down and showed off Netgear's new Nighthawk M1 router, exclusive to Telstra for 8 months - the world's first 4GX Gigabit LTE mobile router. Netgear's new Nighthawk M1 features up to 1Gbps LTE connectivity, is the perfect travel router as it supports Wi-Fi/Ethernet offloading - with the capability of taking up to 20 x Wi-Fi devices.

Security researcher Andrew Rollins has discovered 11 different models of Netgear routers that have been vulnerable to remote hacks, with Rollins even warning Netgear about the problem all the way back on August 25, but didn't receive a reply.

Rollins went public with the announcement after waiting 3 months, which saw Homeland Security throwing out a warning a few days ago, and now Netgear is finally in the fold, admitting that it knows about the problem. Netgear has announced the affected models, and will release patches... for some of them.

Here's the list of the affected routers:

How many devices do you have in your house that use Wi-Fi? I'm sure there's at least a few, and if you're like me and many others - you'll have over a dozen devices with Wi-Fi, so when engineers reach a breakthrough with Wi-Fi that uses 10,000x less power - it'll make you sit up and pay attention.

Engineers from the University of Washington have achieved speeds of 11Mbps on the new connection, so it's not breaking speed barriers - but they're working on getting the speeds faster, and faster. The new Wi-Fi transmissions use 10,000x less power than conventional methods, so battery life savings on smartphones and mobile devices will improve by a considerable margin in the future.

One of the engineers, Shyam Gollakota, explains: "We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all. That's basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for 10,000 times less power than the best thing that's out there".

We are in for a wild freakin' ride in 2017, with AMD kicking things off today with the announcement of something radically new: Radeon Instinct. What is Radeon Instinct? There's no easy answer to that, but it is the next big thing in cloud computing - something being touted as the machine intelligence era.

Back in the 1960s, the big thing at the time were the massive main frames that would take up entire buildings, requiring radical amounts of cooling and physical space - while not providing much power (compared to the insane amounts of data crunching power we have now).

In the 80s and 90s it shifted to client-server operations, and then in the last 15 years we've seen a massive shift towards cloud computing.

Ahead of next month's CES event in Las Vegas, the HDMI forum, which consists of the major players from consumer electronics companies, mobile devices and cable manufacturers have ratified a major update to the HDMI cable specification, dubbed version 2.0b.

In an announcement today, the HDMI forum revealed the update to the format includes the following capabilities:

While some of these features were enabled in earlier specifications by individual manufacturers, the ratification by the working group should mean improved functionality throughout the sector. Thankfully, the updates is also fully backwards compatible with the HDMI 2.0a specification, with no need to purchase new cables to unlock the new features. Expect to see more about HDMI 2.0b at next month's CES event in Las Vegas.

A variety of apps are used today to send tens on billions of messages every day. We use chat apps, like Facebook Messenger, Viber, WeChat, and WhatsApp, to communicate with our friends, family, and colleagues.

On this day, October 29th, 1969, 47 years ago, the first ever electronic message had been sent. The message was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline trough ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.

At the time, ARPANET was used for testing new network technologies, and it connected many universities and research centers. The first two nodes of the ARPANET were the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, between which the first ever message exchange took place.

After a pretty successful rollout of uber-fast internet access, Google has announced it has plans to "pause" the expansion of its Fiber rollout into 10 more cities, as well as a 9% cull in Fiber staff.

Google's current Fiber customers will not be affected, but those that were expecting the high-speed Fiber goodness to hit their neighborhood will not want to even read the end of this sentence. The confirmed rollouts in San Francisco, Irvine, Huntsville and San Antonio are all unaffected, but the planned Fiber rollout for Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Tampa and San Diego will have residents disappointed.

The reason behind Google's sudden "pause" in its Fiber rollout? Google said it needed to "stay ahead of the curve" in providing gigabit internet service, with the company recently acquiring high-speed wireless ISP, Webpass. If we end up seeing Google push into providing high-speed internet access wirelessly, it would explain why it stopped the future Fiber rollouts because physical hardware being installed all across the US is expensive compared to a new wireless system.