Communications

On the rooftop of an MIT Lincoln Laboratory building sits a 38-foot-wide dome-shaped radio antenna enclosure, or radome. Inside the climate-controlled environment, shielded from the New England weather, a steel structure supports a 20,000-pound, 20-foot diameter satellite communications (SATCOM) antenna. The antenna—called the Multi-Band Test Terminal (MBTT)—can rotate 15 degrees... Read more

Privacy advocates are demanding standards for mobile service providers' handling of sensitive customer information, especially location data, after a Federal Communications Commission inquiry into the top 15 carriers revealed a huge variation within the industry's data retention and consumer privacy protocols.... Read more

NIST released an interagency report on Advanced Communication Technologies Standards that provides a guide to the standards priorities and activities of Federal agencies with interests in communications technologies.... Read more

The future of satellite communications is almost upon us. SpaceX has signed a deal with T-Mobile to provide the carrier's customers with text services from its Starlink satellites anywhere in the U.S. starting next year.... Read more

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's the nation's fastest community-wide internet service, and it's making its way to a Tennessee city and convention center.... Read more

Royal Caribbean Group is bringing Starlink internet to its ships. The cruise line operator said it will implement the satellite internet service from Elon Musk's SpaceX on all Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises vessels, as well as any of those brands' new ships. The company had previously... Read more

For millions of people who participate in activities such as snorkeling and scuba diving each year, hand signals are the only option for communicating safety and directional information underwater. While recreational divers may employ around 20 signals, professional divers' vocabulary can exceed 200 signals on topics ranging from oxygen level,... Read more

Elon Musk's SpaceX and T-Mobile are teaming up in an attempt to connect mobile devices through a network of satellites, providing coverage to even the most isolated places.... Read more

An agreement signed yesterday looks to extend the use of ESA space technology along European roads. The Agency's Navigation Directorate has finalized a Memorandum of Intent with ERTICO, the organization for the European Road Transport Telematics Implementation Coordination, a public-private partnership focused on the development, promotion and connection of intelligent... Read more

A Sydney Harbor Tunnel explosion showcases the work of UNSW researchers using wireless signals and artificial intelligence to more accurately identify dangerous fire situations.... Read more

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have adapted their atom-based radio receiver to detect and display live color television and video games.... Read more

Satellite operator Eutelsat has sold six of its eight beams—used for data and mobile communications—to organizations including governments and other users. It is expected that the entire satellite capacity will be sold in the coming months.... Read more

Google is again sending a message to Apple: Fix the text messaging issues between Android devices and iPhones.... Read more

Colorado's soaring mountains and its sparsely populated rural areas make it difficult to provide high-speed broadband and wireless services consistently across wide swaths of the state.... Read more

The federal government is pledging $401 million in grants and loans to expand the reach and improve the speed of internet for rural residents, tribes and businesses in remote parts of 11 states from Alaska to Arkansas.... Read more

A research team led by Professor Song Min Kim of the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering developed a system that can support concurrent communications for tens of millions of IoT devices using backscattering millimeter-level waves (mmWave).... Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has enormously boosted the popularity of video communication—but sometimes poor transmission quality, dropouts, and connection failures during meetings or conference calls tax the participants' patience. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed a method for transmitting video conferences over very... Read more

French satellite operator Eutelsat said on Monday it was in talks with British counterpart OneWeb for a tie-up to create a "global champion" in broadband internet, rivaling US services like Elon Musk's Starlink.... Read more

If radars wore pants, a lot of them would still be sporting bell-bottoms.... Read more

The pace of change in telecommunications is increasing every year.... Read more

The big winner in a 2020 federal auction to build more broadband in rural America was a relatively small company started by a Minnesota entrepreneur. Since then, not much has gone right for the firm or the people waiting for better internet.... Read more

Dallas-based telecommunications giant AT&T is partnering with fast food chain McDonald's U.S. to bring high-speed business fiber internet to 750 restaurants.... Read more

The federal industry minister said Sunday he is summoning telecom executives following an outage at Rogers Communications Inc. that disrupted mobile and Internet services across Canada, hampering several crucial services.... Read more

A widespread network outage from Rogers Communications Inc. left many Canadian customers without mobile and internet service Friday and caused problems for police, courthouses, passport offices and other facilities.... Read more

High-frequency wireless communication systems such as 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) and beyond are of particular interest to consumers as they can deliver data with extremely high speed and provide an upgraded experience to existing wireless communication systems. Despite the many advantages of mmWave communication, there are several basic challenges associated... Read more

Many users of Japan's No. 2 mobile carrier KDDI Corp. were still having trouble making calls Monday after a massive outage throughout the weekend that affected nearly 40 million people, disrupting deliveries, weather reports and other services across the country.... Read more

For decades, satellites have helped meteorologists forecast weather, offer cable, television, and radio providers a way to relay signals to their customers, and provide scientists with a tool to gather data for various types of research. Enormous, high-cost, stationary antennas have long been the instrument used to capture these signals,... Read more

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellites are being increasingly used for environmental monitoring of the earth, as well as for logistic purposes, such as the navigation of maritime vessels. The data transmitted from the satellite terminals to the receivers on Earth, known as "downlink," is steadily increasing and, as a result,... Read more

More Californians are gaining access to broadband internet, but Black and Latino households still lag behind their white counterparts, according to an analysis of the latest available American Community Survey data.... Read more

When someone calls 911, seconds matter. That's why the first question a 911 dispatcher asks is, "What is the address of the emergency?"... Read more

Within minutes of losing cellphone and internet service, residents in a remote swath of Arizona were quick to come up with theories about why.... Read more

Federal regulators say Verizon and AT&T will delay part of their 5G rollout near airports to give airlines more time to ensure that equipment on their planes is safe from interference from the wireless signals, but the airline industry is not happy about the deal.... Read more

The Federal Aviation Authority said Friday that mobile operators AT&T and Verizon have reached an agreement with airlines for the gradual deployment of additional 5G antennas around US airports.... Read more

Connected and fully automated vehicles are set to revolutionize transportation as we know it. Thanks to 5G-enabled vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, which makes it possible for vehicles to communicate with one another and their surroundings, we can look forward to a future with safer roads and more efficient traffic. However, there... Read more

5G networks are becoming more prevalent worldwide. Many consumer devices that support 5G are already benefiting from increased speeds and lower latency. However, some frequency bands allocated for 5G are not effectively utilized owing to technological limitations. These frequency bands include the New Radio (NR) 39 GHz band, but actually... Read more

The potential of millimeter-wave wireless power transfer as a solution for the Internet of Things has finally been harnessed by researchers from Tokyo Tech, who have created a device for simultaneous transmission of power and 5G signal. This transceiver for 5G network signal is fully wirelessly powered and has high... Read more

A research team of the ETRI has revealed a technology which can remotely control one factory simultaneously from home and abroad using 5G technology developed through international joint research and an intercontinental wired network.... Read more

A space-enabled system to help clear congested skies while reducing carbon emissions is going global, following a deal signed today between satellite communications provider Inmarsat and ESA.... Read more

Satellites equipped with remote sensing technology execute many critical national security missions, from detecting explosions to tracking sea ice, but until now it could take a team years to move from a concept to a deployable space system.... Read more

More than half a billion dollars in federal funding will be sent to four U.S. states to expand broadband access as part of a sweeping national effort to bring affordable service to rural and low-income Americans, the U.S. Treasury Department announced Tuesday.... Read more

Birmingham scientists have revealed a new beam-steering antenna that increases the efficiency of data transmission for 'beyond 5G'—and opens up a range of frequencies for mobile communications that are inaccessible to currently used technologies.... Read more

Illinois' planned expansion of broadband internet access will create thousands of jobs, boost workers' wages and help bridge rural-urban and racial divides in online access, researchers with the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found in a recent... Read more

Researchers from the Network Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) report the world's first demonstration of more than 1 petabit per second in a multi-core fiber (MCF) with a standard diameter of 0.125 mm.... Read more

The world's first mission to remove several small telecommunications satellites from orbit once they reach the end of their operational service is about to start building and testing its prototype spacecraft.... Read more

Researchers in Delft have succeeded in teleporting quantum information across a rudimentary network. This first of its kind is an important step towards a future quantum internet. This breakthrough was made possible by a greatly improved quantum memory and enhanced quality of the quantum links between the three nodes of... Read more

NASA's Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) mission, carrying the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, will debut on May 25 as part of SpaceX's Transporter-5 rideshare launch. TBIRD will showcase the high-data-rate capabilities of laser communications from a CubeSat in low-Earth orbit. At 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), TBIRD will downlink... Read more

Smart devices are supposed to make our everyday lives easier. At the same time, however, they are a gateway for passive eavesdropping. To prevent possible surveillance of the movement profile within one's home, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security... Read more

A team of researchers with the National Physical Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh, Google and Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica developed a way to use existing undersea fiber cables to detect seismic events. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their test project involving a... Read more

Crafty hackers can make a tool to eavesdrop on some 6G wireless signals in as little as five minutes using office paper, an inkjet printer, a metallic foil transfer and a laminator.... Read more

The Biden administration is taking the first steps to release $45 billion to ensure that every U.S. resident has access to high-speed internet by roughly 2028, inviting governors and other leaders on Friday to start the application process.... Read more