Rob Pegoraro

The long-touted fifth generation (5G) of wireless communications is not magic. We’re sorry if unending hype over the world-changing possibilities of 5G has led you to expect otherwise.

On Nov 20, AT&T announced a partnership with the Washington Post to weave 5G technology into the paper’s reporting operations. "Teams at both companies will experiment with new formats and see what immersive journalism can do better as the world is increasingly connected to 5G," AT&T said.  “The Post plans to experiment with reporters using millimeter wave 5G+ technology to transmit their stories, photos and videos faster and more reliably," the newspaper said.

AT&T, the latest to retire old mostly-unlimited plans, did so only 20 months after the June 2018 introduction of its previous offers. The new ones – announced days before the Federal Trade Commission fined AT&T $60 million for not disclosing speed limits on plans sold five years ago as unlimited – require factoring in the same three variables as the other nationwide carriers’ unlimited-ish deals.

OneWeb is talking a big game in satellite-delivered internet access—almost the size of this planet, to be more precise. OneWeb plans to surpass existing satellite-broadband firms by flying below them and in vastly larger numbers. Instead of rocketing a few large satellites all the way to geostationary Earth orbit (GEO)—22,236 miles up, at which point the satellite’s orbital period keeps it locked above one point on the equator—the company will launch hundreds of satellites in much lower orbits.

A Q&A with Vint Cerf. 

First question, 5G as a broadband alternative for homes and businesses. You sounded a little down on that.

It’s only because I’m worried about 6 gigahertz versus 28 gigahertz. The studies that have been done from the DoD show the 28 gigahertz is very costly, still requires a great deal of fiber interconnect, and might put us in a poor competitive position with regard to serving the rest of the world.

If your cable operator invites you to dump its TV service and switch to online streaming, its internet rates may hide a surprise that will be painful to you and profitable to your internet provider. Data caps limiting how much you can download per month are an unpleasant reality at too many providers, but small cable services can be significantly less generous with them. Those same companies also have the hardest time keeping programming costs in check and increasingly lose money on video.

The Federal Communications Commission's broadband map, which invites you to plug in street addresses to see which companies sell service there and at what speeds, is a failure. It’s built on old and fuzzy data filed by internet providers that sometimes don’t even know where they offer service. And this stunted cartography of connectivity doesn’t just sandbag house hunters researching their biggest expense; it also holds back government efforts to cover broadband gaps -- for instance, the 5G-broadband agenda the Trump administration outlined April 12 that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said will incl

Days after revelations of sweeping security vulnerabilities at Facebook and Google, former CIA director John Brennan offered no confidence that we’ve discovered all of yesterday’s bad news about social-network security and can move on to preventing tomorrow’s. “I don’t think we’ve turned a corner yet, from the standpoint of remediation or prevention,” he said.

If the government approves Sprint and T-Mobile’s bid to merge, customers of lower cost pre-paid plans — say from Boost and MetroPCS — could face changes. Both Sprint and T-Mobile also sell prepaid services at lower costs and under different brand names: Sprint has Boost and Virgin Mobile USA, while T-Mobile offers MetroPCS. The two also wholesale their networks to such third-party resellers as Consumer Cellular, Republic Wireless and Ting; AT&T and in particular, Verizon, are less open to the resellers.

If you're a Sprint customer and have been frustrated by network performance, you may want to cheer on the deal with T-Mobile. If you're a T-Mobile customer, it doesn't represent much of an upgrade. For both groups, this tie-up—which still has to be approved by regulators—carries the risk of higher prices and fewer deals. For simple speed, though, the merger offers a lot of potential upside for Sprint users. Consider the results found by four nationwide tests of the big four carriers—two relying on crowdsourced data, two based on scheduled drive testing.