Jacob Kastrenakes

SpaceX emailed Starlink customers June 28 asking for help in its battle against Dish Network over radio frequencies for its Starlink internet-from-space effort. Some Starlink customers received an email urging them to contact the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress in order to support SpaceX in the ongoing dispute. “Today we ask for your support in ending a lobbying campaign that threatens to make Starlink unusable for you and the vast majority of our American customers,” the email reads in bold.

Many of 2020’s new phones, laptops, TVs, routers, and more will come with support for Wi-Fi 6E, a new upgrade to Wi-Fi that’s essentially like expanding your wireless connection from a two-lane road to an eight-lane highway. It’s the biggest upgrade to Wi-Fi in 20 years, and connections should be faster and a lot more reliable because of it. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry-wide group that oversees Wi-Fi, is now starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E.

Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users. The ban comes a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it came out that the data firm had acquired information on up to 87 million people through the quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife.”

T-Mobile says it’ll launch a 5G home internet service with fast speeds, easy installation, and low prices that will reach half of all US homes within five years and meaningfully shake up the woefully anti-competitive cable industry. There’s just one catch: T-Mobile says this only comes true if its Sprint merger is approved. In a blog post and Federal Communications Commission filing, T-Mobile outlines in the most detail yet what its 5G home internet service will look like.

AT&T has updated three smartphones from Samsung and LG to make them show 5G connectivity logos, even though none of them are capable of connecting to 5G networks. Now, when the Samsung Galaxy S8 Active, LG V30, or LG V40 are connected to portions of AT&T’s LTE network that have received some speed-boosting updates, they’ll show an icon that says “5G E” instead of “LTE.” That “E” in the “5G” logo is supposed to tip you off that this isn’t real 5G — just some marketing nonsense. But there’s no way of knowing that just from looking at the logo.

AT&T says its 5G network went live in parts of 12 cities Dec 18, making it the first wireless carrier to launch a mobile network based on the 5G standard. A small number of customers will be able to use the network starting on Dec 21, when AT&T will begin distributing its first 5G device: a mobile hot spot that can connect to the network’s much faster airwaves. But it’ll be a slow launch; you won’t be able to go out to a store and buy AT&T’s 5G hot spot for several more months.

In the past, Wi-Fi versions were identified by a letter or a pair of letters that referred to a wireless standard. The current version is 802.11ac, but before that, we had 802.11n, 802.11g, 802.11a, and 802.11b. It was not comprehensible, so the Wi-Fi Alliance — the group that stewards the implementation of Wi-Fi — is changing it. All of those convoluted codenames are being changed. So instead of the current Wi-Fi being called 802.11ac, it’ll be called Wi-Fi 5 (because it’s the fifth version). 

Verizon became the first major Internet service provider to launch 5G home internet service. But, is this really 5G? The answer is sort of. 

Attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia asked a federal court to reinstate network neutrality, saying the Federal Communications Commission failed to properly consider the issues when removing the policy in 2017. In a brief filed Aug 20, the attorneys general argue that the FCC’s decision “will cause [inevitable harms] to consumers, public safety, and existing regulatory schemes” and that the commission “entirely ignored many of these issues” when overturning net neutrality.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has canceled plans to appear at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the week of Jan 8, missing the show for the first time in five years and what would have been his first appearance as head of the commission.