You’ve heard the cautionary tales about dialing 911 on your cell phone. A call about missing children in Illinois gets routed to Canada. A stroke victim in New York is only located after a grueling eight-hour search. Locating 911 calls in 2014 is a byzantine process that involves generating a fake phone number—but a Next Generation 911 system that integrates text and video is in the (somewhat) near future, if we can only can get our collective shit together.
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While you weren’t looking, the internet got super fast. I’m not talking Google Fiber fast. I’m talking Star Trek fast. Today, it’s not just possible to download a movie in seconds. New technology makes it easy to download dozens of movies in fractions of a second. Fast is almost too slow a word to describe such speed.
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A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC’s net neutrality rules that would’ve made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework.
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It can get a little bit annoying when people ramble on about how Facebook and Google are taking over the world. They’re just websites! But when those websites start to buy up other things, say, the very cables that connect the people of the world—well that’s actually pretty alarming.
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Last year, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) told us there were five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide at the close of 2010, and now it’s reporting that at the end of 2011, that figure hit a staggering six billion.
Interestingly, the number of global mobile broadband subscriptions now outnumbers fixed ones by two to one, and mobile internet services showed the biggest growth rates in 2011: 40% worldwide and 78% in developing markets. The ITU attributes the latter figure to the relatively high price of fixed access in these countries, and the increasing availability of mobile alternatives. The CTIA also commented on mobile broadband use, reporting that from July 2011 to June this year, Americans consumed 104 percent more data — no doubt due, in part, to people taking advantage of expanding 4G coverage. As usual, we’ve given you the cheat sheet, so if you’d like the full reports and have got a thing for statistics, there’s plenty more in the source links below.
[Image credit: Chris Jordan]
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Wireless, Internet, Mobile
International Telecommunication Union: worldwide mobile subscriptions hit six billion in 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ars Technica | 
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Imaging has been defined by glass lenses for centuries, and even fiber optics haven’t entirely escaped the material’s clutch. Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences might have just found a way to buck those old (and not-so-old) traditions. A new 60-nanometer thick silicon lens, layered with legions of gold nanoantennas, can catch and refocus light without the distortion or other artifacts that come with having to use the thick, curved pieces of glass we’re used to — it’s so accurate that it nearly challenges the laws of diffraction. The lens isn’t trapped to bending one slice of the light spectrum, either. It can range from near-infrared to terahertz ranges, suiting it both to photography and to shuttling data. We don’t know what obstacles might be in the way to production, which leads us to think that we won’t be finding a gold-and-silicon lens attached to a camera or inside a network connection anytime soon. If the technology holds up under scrutiny, though, it could ultimtately spare us from the big, complicated optics we often need to get just the right shot.
Harvard makes distortion-free lens from gold and silicon, aims for the perfect image (or signal) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Phys.org | Harvard University | Email this | Comments
An $18 million dollar radio system purchased by the Oakland Police Department has been giving static instead of 10-30s in progress, and the interfering party has now been collared — AT&T. Local officials and the FCC told the mobile network that its towers were blocking police communication, particularly when patrol cars were within a quarter-mile of one. However, some local pundits have said the problem is of the PD’s own making, claiming it invested in an inferior system and didn’t check carefully enough for interference before making the buy. As a result, AT&T has temporarily shut down 2G frequencies around the city — giving the telecom giant an unplanned sneak preview of the upcoming phase-out.
Filed under: Cellphones
AT&T suspends 2G in Oakland after cell towers step on police frequencies originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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