Year: 2018

By Simon Romero, Dec. 31, 2018 | Original New YorkTimes article here.

A Waymo autonomous vehicle in Chandler, Ariz., where the driverless cars have been attacked by residents on several occasions. Credit: Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times

CHANDLER, Ariz. — The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google.

He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot.

The slashing was one of nearly two dozen attacks on driverless vehicles over the past two years in Chandler, a city near Phoenix where Waymo started testing its vans in 2017. In ways large and small, the city has had an early look at public misgivings over the rise of artificial intelligence, with city officials hearing complaints about everything from safety to possible job losses.

Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Continue reading “Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars”

Adapted from a Ryan Barwick article from Mar 2, 2018 | Original Center for Public Integrity article here.

Cities Ask The US Government for Assurance of No Adverse Health Effects from Radio-Frequency Microwave Radiation exposures as close as 10 to 20 feet feet from homes — with no answers in sight.

Introduction

In town halls and city council chambers across the country, local officials are facing the wrath of residents knowledgeable of the obvious, significant harms to their health & safety, privacy and property values from the next wave of wireless communications planned for many communities. Even US Senators and Representatives wrote a letter to the FCC demanding that the FCC address its negligence:

"It is critical for the FCC to act on its March 7, 2013 Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Inquiry to ensure all individuals and especially those living in close proximity to the hundreds of thousands of small cell facilities to be deployed, are protected from radio-frequency radiation exposures.

Federal Communications Commission, "Reassessment of Fedeial Communications Commission Radio-frequency Exposure Limits and Policies; Proposed Changes in the Cornmission’s Rules Regarding Human Exposure to Radio-frequency Electromagnetic Fields," 28 FCC Rcd 3498 (4), https:/docs.fcc.gov/public/attachmentVFCC-13- 39A-I.pdf"

Residents know that the new extreme-density 4G and 5G technology scheme — which will require hundreds of thousands of so-called "small-cell" antennas placed throughout neighborhoods — could cause adverse health effects because the antennas, located sometimes just a couple dozen feet from houses, will bathe their communities in round-the-clock forced exposures RF Microwave Radiation exposures. Currently, there is no opt out and no way to turn these antennas off at night so the residents can sleep well in their own beds.

Local governments don’t have the legal authority to block the placement, construction and modification of Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (WTFs) based on environmental health effects of RF Microwave Radiation exposures, but that does not absolve local governments from regulating the maximum power output or hours of operations of Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (WTFs) because local governments have the authority and the duty to regulate the operations of WTFs to protect the health and safety of its residents.

Continue reading “Residents Need Clarity About Safety of RF Microwave Radiation Exposures From Small Cells”

By Doug Dawson | Original Pots and Pans articles here.

Link to Part 1 — the Residential Broadband Scheme

Sept 4, 2018 — Ronan Dunne, an EVP and President of Verizon Wireless recently made Verizon’s case for aggressively pursuing 5G. This last article in the series looks at Verizon’s claim that they are going to use 5G to offer residential broadband. The company has tested the technology over the last year and announced plans to soon introduce the technology into a number of cities.

I’ve been reading everything I can about Verizon and I think I finally figured out what they are up to. They have been saying that within a few years that they will make fixed wireless 5G broadband service available to millions of homes. One of the first cities they will be building is Sacramento. It’s clear that in order to offer fast speeds that each 5G transmitter will have to be fed by fiber. To cover all neighborhoods in Sacramento would require building a lot of new fiber. Building new fiber is both expensive and time-consuming. It’s still a head-scratcher for how this might work in neighborhoods without poles where other utilities are underground.

Continue reading “The Case for Verizon 5G”

By Jacob Kastrenakes, Dec 21, 2018 | Original The Verge article here.

AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year — not because they’re using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G.

According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading “5G E” on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting — but still definitively 4G — technologies. The “E,” displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to “5G Evolution,” the carrier’s term for networks that aren’t quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.

If this sounds sadly familiar, it’s because AT&T pulled this exact same stunt during the transition to LTE. The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners — even Apple! — to show a “4G” logo when on that kind of connection.

Continue reading “AT&T Will Put a Fake 5G Logo on 4G LTE phones”

. . . with a ridiculously overpowered hotspot: a Snapdragon 855 in a mobile hotspot!

​By Ron Amadeo , Dec 20, 2018 | Original ARS Technica article here.

The era of 5G mobile networks is quickly approaching, and while there isn’t any smartphone out yet sporting the new network connectivity, AT&T says that "select" early adopters will soon be able to jump on AT&T’s mobile 5G mmWave service with a mobile hotspot. AT&T’s 5G service kicks in on December 21 in some cities, which AT&T says makes it "the first and only company in the US to offer a mobile 5G device over a commercial, standards-based mobile 5G network."

The hotspot hardware is a "Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot," which Netgear is calling the "first standards-based mobile 5G device in the world." Netgear’s 5G hotspot comes in at a pricey $499 and sounds ridiculously overbuilt. Despite being a mobile router/modem that has very little to do computationally, the Nighthawk is packing one of the newest, fastest SoC’s on Earth, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC.

This is something we’re expecting to see inside all the high-end Android smartphones of 2019, so packing it into a modem that won’t run any apps or games seems a little extreme. As a "5G" mmWave device, the Nighthawk 5G comes with Qualcomm’s X50 mmWave modem, and, since this modem was developed alongside the Snapdragon 855, it seems like, if you want a mmWave modem right now, you also need Qualcomm’s highest-end SoC. That leads to this very overpowered hotspot, which makes it significantly bigger than the more mature 4G hardware that Qualcomm has been refining for years. We don’t have any official specs or size measurements, but the Nighthawk 5G hotspot definitely looks huge — it’s a big, bulky black box with a tiny screen in the center. The touchscreen gives you access to a basic OS for things like setting up Wi-Fi, viewing data limits, and reading messages.

As for the network, AT&T is annoyingly muddying the waters with its 5G branding.

1. It’s going to start calling its existing 4G LTE network "5G E" where the "E" stands for "evolution."
2. Its real 5G network, the mmWave one, will be called "5G+," referencing the higher frequency of a mmWave network.

Continue reading “AT&T 5G Goes Live This Week”

It’ll cost $500 for the 5G-capabe modem/router and then $70 a month, data-capped at 15GB per month. Oh, Boy . . . .

Adapted from an article by Stephen Shankland, Dec 18, 2018 | Original CNET article here.

If you live in one of a dozen US cities, you can tap into AT&T’s 5G network this week, but why would you, really?

The carrier, participating in some contrived "Race to 5G" with Verizon and other network operators to move to the next-gen wireless technology, is turning on its network on Tue Dec 18. Until 5G phones arrive in the first half of 2019, however, it’ll only be useful with Netgear’s $500 Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot, a portable device that creates its own Wi-Fi network so you can link phones, laptops and tablets via W-Fi to the 5G signals beaming to and from to the Netgear Nighthawk modem/router.

AT&T’s 5G network will work in parts of (key emphasis is "parts of") . . .

1. Atlanta, GA
2. Charlotte, NC
3. Dallas, TX
4. Houston, TX
5. Indianapolis, IN
6. Jacksonville, FL
7. Louisville, KY
8. Oklahoma City, OK
9. New Orleans, LA
10. Raleigh, MC
11. San Antonio, TX
12. Waco, TX

Continue reading “AT&T’s 5G Network is Live in Some Cities and at a High Price”

Manhole antenna solution offers glimpse into 5G strategies for signal propagation

By Dexter Johnson, Dec 18, 2018 | Original IEEE Spectrum article here.

The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.

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S4WT Comment: Really? Then why does Verizon claim that their 28 GHz and 39 GHz 5G radio signals go 2,000 to 3,000 feet, even through foliage? Who is not telling the truth?

Verizon: Millimeter Waves Go 3,000 Feet

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To overcome this issue, the strategy has been a combination of small cells with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas to increase coverage. Small cell deployment will be so extensive that the Small Cell Forum predicts 5G small cell will overtake 4G small cells by 2024. The Forum predicts that total installed base of 5G or multimode small cells will reach 13.1 million by 2025, constituting more than one-third of the total small cells in use.

Continue reading “Manhole Covers Can Serve as 4G and 5G Antennas”

. . . Claiming, With Zero Evidence, That Community Broadband Is An Ominous Threat To Free Speech

by Karl Bode, Dec 17, 2018 | Original Tech Dirt article here.

. . . from the Misdirection Department . . .

So back in October, we noted how FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly attended an event where he falsely claimed that towns and cities that decide to build their own broadband networks (usually due to market failure) were somehow engaged in an "ominous" assault on free speech. The only "evidence" O’Rielly provided was that community ISPs include language in their terms of service preventing users from being hateful shits online, the same exact language you’ll find in the terms-of-service from any number of private ISPs, from Comcast to AT&T.

There’s absolutely no evidence that any of the 750 towns and cities that have tinkered with this idea ever trampled anybody’s free speech rights.

Yet after being criticized by several press outlets (including this one), O’Rielly apparently decided his best bet would be to . . . double down on his false claims.

In a new blog post over at the FCC website, O’Rielly again tries to insist that community broadband is a giant threat to free speech, but this time he attempts to vastly expand his argument in a bid to make it sound more logical. The tap dancing around his lack of evidence in his original claim is particularly amusing:

Bizarrely, my critics further responded that I had failed to provide historical “evidence” of First Amendment mischief by muni networks. Perhaps they were confused about how a constitutional violation works. A state action or law can violate the First Amendment as applied or on its face. In the case of the latter, the law or act is always unconstitutional, and in the case of the former, it is only unconstitutional to the extent of a particular application. My argument was not based on as-applied historical instances of censorship, but on facial grounds. That is, certain terms in the muni broadband codes I cited facially violate the First Amendment.

That’s a misdirection and a dodge, though putting evidence in quotes is a nice touch.

Continue reading “FCC Commissioner O’Rielly Keeps On Going”

by Bruce Kushnick, Dec 17, 2018 | Original Medium article here

PART 1: SUMMARY: HOW FAR HAVE WE FALLEN?

PART 2: DRAINING THE TOXIC SWAMP (coming . . .)

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Some of the most hated companies in America are the ISPs, wireless and cable companies, which include AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter (Spectrum). However, in 2018, America also has the distinction of having the most expensive, excessive wireless gigabyte prices in the world. In fact, with the made-up fees and surcharges (that are revenues to the companies or taxes on the companies that are passed through to you) the price of almost all communications services in America continues to rise, even though the FCC claims that there is competition.

Continue reading “American Telecom is Mired in a Toxic Swamp”