Chinese spy balloons used connectivity supplied by an American internet service provider, according to a new report. NBC News cites two current and one former U.S. official, who claim to have had eyes on an intelligence report asserting that the flying spy devices connected to a U.S. company for data transmission services.

If the source report is correct, it demonstrates the bravado of the spy balloon designers. As well as using U.S. technologies within the high-altitude balloons, the Chinese seem to have simply organized a data contract with a U.S. ISP for sending all the spy-in-the-sky data home.

The data transmissions were characterized as short but high-bandwidth burst transmissions. According to the intelligence assessment, data transferred between the balloon and China primarily consisted of navigation information. The most important question regarding the spy balloon story hence becomes – what else was contained in the data bursts sent to China? Sadly, we aren’t in a position to know, as yet. 

NBC says the Biden administration sought a court order for electronic surveillance of the balloons. However, we don’t know if the order was successful, never mind any of its investigative outcomes. Moreover, the American internet service provider fingered by NBC News has reportedly denied that the Chinese balloon used its network.

The spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, has claimed that the balloon(s) “unintentionally drifted into the U.S. because of the westerlies and its limited self-steering capability.” Thus, it would be telling if it could be confirmed that Chinese engineers had organized U.S. internet service. NBC News declined to reveal the American ISP to protect the identity of its sources.

Balloons previously confirmed to be designed for spying

China’s spy balloons grabbed a lot of headlines in early 2023, but investigations revealed that they had been floating above the states for months previously without precipitating any headlines.

Downed balloons were found to contain components such as a satellite-like device, solar panels for power, a propeller, and devices to collect photos, videos, and radar data. Other specialized Chinese sensors and equipment carried by the balloons led to a preliminary U.S. probe concluding that the Chinese balloons were indeed created for spying.

Our last report on these Chinese devices noted that the balloon downed near South Carolina never managed to transmit any information to China during its eight days over the U.S. Whether the lack of transmission was a fault with the hardware, software, jamming by U.S. authorities, or an ISP issue, it has not been revealed.

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of L’Aquila have achieved a groundbreaking transmission that demonstrates the possibility of transmitting up to 22.9 petabits per second (Pb/s) through a single optic cable composed of multiple fibers. This is a significant increase in transmission capacity, as the previous world record was 10.66 Pb/s.

The old record was broken last June, with 1.8 Pb/s by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Then it was broken multiple times in the following months.

The researchers achieved this breakthrough by combining the latest research technologies with Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). SDM uses multiple multicore fibers and various transmission technologies to work with over 100 spatial channels, which are then combined with multi-bandwidth WDM. The researchers merged this 38-core, three-mode cable through a multi-band compatible MIMO receiver.

Each core is capable of transmitting data between 0.3 to 0.7 Pb/s. With optimized coding, achieving speeds of up to 24.7 PB/s may be possible. This is the first time that different multiplexing techniques have been combined, resulting in a major advancement in data transmission technology.

The research findings were submitted and accepted at Glasgow's 49th European Conference on Optical Communications. Although the technology is ready to be integrated into the existing global optical connection infrastructure, it will require significant upgrades to the current telecommunication centers that use ultra-large capacity optical fibers.

To put it in plain words, this new infrastructure could handle up to three times the amount of data traffic through these cables once deployed, which is 1,000 times more than the currently deployed optic cables. It's also a question of when the new cables and infrastructure might be deployed, as many such records were broken this year, and also which one of these approaches will be deemed most feasible.

Research breakthroughs are crucial to keep up with the high rate of internet consumption worldwide. Establishing records like this with the merit of multiple institutions and researchers, along with the cooperation of several telecommunications players, is likely to encourage investment and quick deployment within the existing ecosystem.

The network routers we use to connect all our Wi-Fi and Ethernet devices to the internet (and each other) are multifunction marvels, which can make it a little strange when you throw out your router or unplug the one your ISP gave you because there’s a faster unit available. 

Fortunately, an old router can easily stand in as a Wi-Fi extender or as a simple network switch. If you have a look at the prices of good network switches, they aren’t so cheap that you’d say no-thanks to a free one, and that’s exactly what your old router can be.

What You Need

To set up your old router as either a Wi-Fi extender or a network switch, you’ll need a few things:

• Your old router (obviously)
• An Ethernet cable
• A computer with an Ethernet port

You’ll be configuring the router to do its new job by connecting it to a computer via Ethernet.

Wi-Fi Extender vs. Switch

If you haven’t decided what to turn your old router into, or don’t understand the difference, let’s take a brief moment to explain both concepts.

A Wi-Fi extender sits at the edge of your main Wi-Fi router’s good signal strength zone. It then repeats Wi-Fi data packets to and from the main router, effectively increasing the Wi-Fi footprint. This is handy if you have dead spots in your home, but one major caveat is that the repeater can only operate at half the speed of the main router, since it has to listen and send in both directions. The other problem with using an old router as an extender is that, if your old router is on a slower standard than your new one, you’ll get the slower of these. For example, if your old router is Wi-Fi 5 and your new one is Wi-Fi 6, the extender will obviously only connect devices at Wi-Fi 5 speeds.

A switch is a device that lets multiple Ethernet network devices connect to a single network cable. Unlike a router, a Switch does not assign IP addresses (each device’s unique identifier), but it does ensure that the right data packets get to the right devices. It’s a great way to expand the connectivity of a long single cable run from your router to another room.

An Important Note About Router Differences

Because there is so much variation in capabilities and software interfaces between brands and models of router, it’s impossible to offer a step-by-step guide that will work for any but a small set of closely-related routers.

Instead, we’ll provide the universal set of things that have to happen to turn your router into an extender or switch, and in some cases you’ll have to locate the right settings in your router’s menus. The names may not be exactly the same, and sometimes accomplishing something may take more steps than it does for the router we used here.

Some routers also simply don’t have the features needed to work well (or at all) as an extender or switch. Sometimes router manufacturers purposely disable features on cheaper routers in their product lines. In some cases you have the option of installing custom third-party firmware on your router, which lets it do pretty much anything, assuming its CPU and RAM are up to it. Popular examples include DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato.

How to Turn Your Router Into a Wi-Fi Repeater

To turn your router into a Wi-Fi repeater, here’s what you need to do:

1. Factory reset the old router. Usually, this is done by pressing a recessed button on the back or bottom of the router, and holding it for a few seconds. Refer to your router’s manual for the details. This will reset the default admin password for the router, which is usually printed on a sticker on the bottom of the unit.

2. Connect the router to a computer via Ethernet.

3. Log in to the router’s web interface. Check the bottom of the router for the IP address, some routers have a URL instead. Type whichever you find on the device into your browser’s address bar and press Enter.  If your old router doesn’t have a web interface (requires a phone app for setup), you may not be able to do this.

4. Look for the Wi-Fi section.

5. Look for a setting called “repeater” or “wireless extension.” On some older routers, there’s a feature known as “wireless bridge” which can also be used to extend the main router’s reach, but most of the time the security of this feature is not good enough by modern standards, and we don’t recommend it.

6. Activate repeater mode. In most cases you’ll be shown a list of nearby networks. Choose the one you want repeated and then enter its Wi-Fi password when prompted.

7. Change the Wi-Fi SSID (name) and password of the repeater. You can usually change the Wi-Fi network name and password of your router under the “wireless” section, or something similar. If you give the repeater the same SSID and password as the main router, you run the risk that some of your devices won’t automatically switch to the stronger signal, so we recommend giving it a unique name instead.

Now you should get a good Wi-Fi signal from your new repeater. An alternative to using your router as a wireless repeater, is to use it as a wireless Access Point instead. In this case you’d run an Ethernet cable from your main router to your old router, usually plugging it into the old router’s WAN/INTERNET port. Consult your router’s manual to see how it can be put into “AP Mode.”

How to Turn Your Router Into an Ethernet Switch

When using our old router as an Ethernet switch, we’ll disable a number of router features, so that the main router can do its job without interference. Here’s how:

1. Factory reset the old router. As before, reset the router back to its factory setting using the reset button on the back or bottom of the device.

2. Connect the computer to the old router using the Ethernet cable.

3. Log in to the router’s web interface.

4. Disable Wi-Fi. We won’t be using the Wi-Fi feature here, so disable Wi-Fi under the router’s “Wireless” section.

5. Change the router’s IP address. Look for a setting called “LAN IP” or similar. Here you’ll want to change the router’s IP address to one that the main router won’t assign to another device, which will create a conflict.

If your main router is set to automatically assign an IP address (as most are) you’ll need to log into the main router’s settings and look at its DHCP IP range.

This is the range of addresses that it will use to assign automatically, you can change that range by shrinking it a little, and then change the secondary router’s LAN IP to fall outside of the main router’s DHCP range. Here we’ve changed the DHCP range to and on 192.168.68.249 instead of 250, leaving 192.168.68.250 open for the secondary router. The subnet masks for both routers must be identical.

6. Disable DHCP on the secondary router. Usually found under LAN settings, likely in the same place you adjusted the LAN IP, disable the DHCP server function of the secondary router.

7. Connect the two routers. Plug the Ethernet cable into a free port on the main router. Then plug the other end into a free port on the secondary router. Some routers won’t work as a switch if you plug the cable into the WAN/Internet port, but do try it first to confirm, since otherwise you might think you have one fewer port available than you do.

Now you should have internet and network access for all the devices plugged into the old router. On some models of router you can remove the Wi-Fi antennas to have a cleaner-looking device, and since you won’t use Wi-Fi when using the old router as a network switch, they’re superfluous. If you want to use both the Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi, you should use the router in AP mode instead.

The White House on Monday announced plans to spend as much as $42 billion on making internet access universal in the country by 2030, according to a report by Reuters. This initiative is part of President Joe Biden's new economic policies, which will be a part of his 2024 re-election campaign.

"Today, 24 million people in our country do not have access to high-speed internet, either because they cannot afford the monthly cost of a plan or because they live in communities that have not yet been fully connected to fiber-optic networks," Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. "Every person in our nation, no matter where they live, should be able to access and afford high-speed internet."

The funding was made possible by the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, which was authorized by the 2021 $1 trillion infrastructure law that President Biden supported. The allocation of funds was determined based on a recently released coverage map by the Federal Communications Commission, which identified areas with limited access to broadband.

Broadband companies such as Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T have been hesitant to provide access to low-population rural communities due to the high costs involved and the limited number of potential subscribers in these regions.

The states receiving the highest funding amounts are Texas and California, the two most populous states in the country, with $3.1 billion and $1.9 billion respectively. Less populous states like Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana also ranked in the top 10 for funding, as they have large rural areas that lack internet connectivity compared to their major urban centers. The funding amounts vary, ranging from $27 million for U.S. territories like the U.S. Virgin Islands to over $3.1 billion for Texas. Each state will receive a minimum of $107 million.

During a White House address on Monday, President Biden highlighted the significance of this investment, stating that it is the largest investment ever made in high-speed internet. He emphasized that, in today's economy, internet access is as crucial as electricity and water. 

While Wi-Fi 6E routers for your home are a dime a dozen these days, that isn’t the case regarding portable routers. Today, Netgear announced the launch of its new unlocked version of the Nighthawk M6 Pro (MR6550), which brings faster internet connectivity to users on the go or for consumers that lack reliable fixed broadband service at home.

Compared to its predecessor, the M6 Pro adds Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and mmWave support for broader compatibility with 5G networks at speeds up to 8 Gbps (up from 2.5 Gbps max). The M6 Pro also features a larger 2.8-inch touchscreen (versus 2.4 inches) and ups maximum LTE speeds from 1.6 Gbps to 2 Gbps. 

The mobile hotspot has 3,600 Mbps of available bandwidth (2,900 MHz 5/6 GHz, 700 Mbps 2.4 GHz) and an integrated 2.5 GbE port (the M6 has just a 1 GbE port) on the back. You’ll also find a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 port on the back, which is used for charging and data. Another intriguing addition to the M6 Pro are two TS-9 antenna connectors. This allows you to connect external antennas to boost reception beyond what the M6 Pro’s internal antennas can provide (an ideal setup for users that need internet connectivity in more remote regions).

The M6 Pro’s internal battery can also last up to 13 hours per charge, which should be sufficient for even the most demanding users, Netgear told us via video call. I also asked how mmWave connectivity would affect battery life but was assured that endurance hit would be minimal. The M6 Pro’s Wi-Fi coverage is roughly 1,000 square feet on battery power. However, if you connect it directly to a power outlet, coverage doubles to 2,000 square feet.

You might ask why you would want to use a mobile hotspot like M6 Pro when a smartphone can perform the same task. According to Netgear, 88 percent of people purchasing a dedicated mobile hotspot use it as their primary home internet connection. Many Americans live in rural areas with non-existent or substandard broadband connectivity, so a cellular-based solution is ideal — and smartphones can’t simultaneously support up to 32 devices like the M6 Pro can. 

Netgear’s research also found that 54 percent of people use portable routers as a “primary” connection in vacation homes, and 50 percent use them inside their vehicles while traveling. 

There is one “gotcha” to the M6 Pro, and that's would be pricing. You can get an AT&T carrier-locked version of the M6 Pro for $460 or pay $12.78 per month on an installment plan. However, the unlocked version will set you back $999.99 direct from Netgear (and soon from Amazon). According to Netgear, the unlocked M6 Pro is currently only supported by AT&T and Verizon SIMs that have previously been activated or with T-Mobile BYOD plans. However, it does note that new BYOD activations for AT&T and Verizon will be "coming soon."

The Internet has been our window to the world for many decades now. But, as times change, we need to ensure that we stay safe online, and get the best performance possible from our equipment. So how does DNS (Domain Name Server) play a part in this? By moving away from our ISP-provided DNS server, we can gain extra features such as phishing protection, DDoS prevention and, in many cases, a welcome burst of speed.

In this how-to, we’ll guide you though changing your DNS server in Windows 10 or 11 and provide you with a list of alternative DNS providers to try out.

What is DNS?

A DNS (Domain Name System) server translates domain names into IP addresses. For example, when you navigate your browser to tomshardware.com, your request goes out to a DNS server which tells your computer to grab data from 199.232.194.114. There are many different DNS servers, and, by default, you’re likely using one that’s provided by your ISP. However, changing which DNS server you use is simple, provides additional services such as security and speed and many third-party DNS servers are free to use.

Alternative DNS Servers

The majority of users stick to the DNS server provided by their ISP. This may suit you just fine, but there are many alternative DNS services out there. The best approach is to try a few out, each having its pros and cons. Your need for greater online security may outweigh the need for blistering speed.

• Google’s Public DNS is perhaps the most famous. It claims to offer a faster browsing experience, improved security and provides search results with no redirection.
  
  
• Cisco’s OpenDNS is more focused on online safety. OpenDNS provides tools to offer content filtering and parental controls for the devices on your network.
  
  
• Cloudflare’s DNS features integrated DDoS protection and one-click DNSSEC to provide protection against DNS based attacks. Cloudflare claims that the service is the fastest in the world, with an average lookup speed of 11ms.
  
  
• Comodo Secure DNS provides a targeted service with an eye on your online security. It can block phishing attempts and various forms of malware.

How To Change Your DNS Server in Windows

1. Left click on the Network icon (the icon that shows your Wi-Fi bars or Ethernet icon) and select Network and Internet Settings. The screen will look slightly different on Windows 11 than Windows 10.

2. Click Change adapter options.

3. Double click on the Wi-Fi / Ethernet interface. In our example we just have an Ethernet connection, but yours may also have Wi-Fi.

4. Select Properties.

5. Double click on TCP/IPv4 line to edit its properties.

6. Set the preferred and alternative DNS server addresses and click OK to close the window. Try one of the services from the table above.

7. Click Ok and Close to close the previously opened windows. Your DNS server has been successfully changed

How To Change DNS via the Command Line

Sometimes it is necessary, or more convenient to change settings from the Command Prompt. DNS can be easily changed via the netsh (Network Shell) prompt which provides an interactive shell to make changes to wired and wireless interfaces. We’re going to use netsh to change the DNS of our Ethernet interface so that it uses Google’s Public DNS.

1. Open the command prompt as administrator. You can get there by searching for command prompt, right clicking and selecting “Run as administrator.” 

2. Use the Network Shell command, netsh to enter a prompt where the DNS can be changed.

3.  List all the interfaces present by entering the following command.

interface show interface

4. Use this command to set the primary DNS server for the interface. Press Enter to make the change. In our example we are setting the Ethernet interface to use the Google Public DNS.

interface ip set dns name="Ethernet" source="static" address="8.8.8.8"

5. Type exit and press Enter to close the netsh session. The DNS server has now been successfully updated.

Are you often frustrated by the lack of transparency regarding available broadband services in your area? Well, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has heard your complaints and is taking steps to provide consumers with a wealth of information about internet service providers (ISPs) before you take the plunge with a contract. 

This week, the FCC unveiled easy-to-understand labels called "Broadband Facts," which are similar in concept to nutrition labels found on packaged foods in U.S. grocery stores. Customers can view pertinent details about broadband services, including service pricing, overage fees, data throttling limits, etc. 

The FCC mandates that these labels be placed "in close proximity to an associated plan advertisement" to ensure maximum visibility. In addition, the full label must be on full display, and ISPs won't be able to get away with simply placing a link on its website that the customer must click to read the full details.

Other essential details arising from this new initiative include making the data available to third parties so that consumers can make more informed decisions while comparison shopping. The broadband plan labels must also be accessible from a customer's account portal when logging in online. Given that the FCC states that the labels be present at the point of sale, we'd imagine that they will be prominently displayed at brick-and-mortar locations for ISPs like Comcast, Spectrum and Verizon, for example.

Taking a closer look at the label, there are sections on the monthly rate for the plan and whether it represents special promotional pricing that will expire after a set number of months/years. There are also provisions to describe any activation fees, one-time or monthly equipment fees, the associated early termination fee (if any) and the amount of government taxes that will be applied to each monthly bill.

ISPs usually love to tout their download speeds in their advertising and then place their upload speeds in small print. They do this because cable providers often offer upload speeds that are much lower than the downloads. For example, my current cable internet plan offers 500 Mbps downloads, but upload speeds are capped at 25 Mbps. Thanks to the FCC, download and upload speeds must now be displayed along with "typical" latency on the Broadbands Facts label. In addition, true unlimited data is becoming a rarity with U.S. home broadband plans, so there's also a section that details how much data you're allotted per month (in gigabytes) and how much you'll be charged per gigabyte for going past that limit. 

"Broadband is an essential service, for everyone, everywhere. Because of this, consumers need to know what they are paying for, and how it compares with other service offerings," said FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. "For over 25 years, consumers have enjoyed the convenience of nutrition labels on food products. We're now requiring internet service providers to display broadband labels for both wireless and wired services. Consumers deserve to get accurate information about price, speed, data allowances, and other terms of service up front."

Overall, this seems like a long overdue change to help consumers make more informed decisions when comparing and selecting a new broadband service -- even if the label looks a bit cheesy. Well, that is if you even have the option to pick from more than one broadband provider in your area. Most Americans only have access to one fixed-line broadband provider, although wireless options from ISPs like Verizon and T-Mobile are also starting to expand their reach across the U.S. However, even those services have issues of their own concerning service reliability.

Consumer Reports and The Verge recently examined over 22,000 U.S. broadband bills submitted by readers. They found that most households spend between $65 to $75 per month on broadband service compared to an average of $40 in London and $31 in Paris. Frontier Communications, on average, had the lowest monthly bill at $53, while Viasat had the highest at $117.

According to a report by Vice, Redditor PoisonWaffle3 shared a new post detailing how he managed to snag one of Netflix's 10-year-old caching servers for free. Even though it is a decade old, it packs some serious hardware even by today's standards and features an impressive 262TB of storage. This post represents one of the very few times we've seen Netflix's server infrastructure up close and personal.

The Redditor says he received the Netflix server courtesy of the company he works for, an internet service provider. Apparently, the ISP has used these Netflix servers for years but is now upgrading its infrastructure with newer hardware, which is how PoisonWaffle3 managed to get this server for free.

According to Vice, this server is known as a Netflix caching server and was part of Netflix's open connect content delivery network (CDN). This system is still in use today and is designed to reduce overall bandwidth demands on the Netflix platform by giving ISPs their own Netflix caching server. This allows popular Netflix content to play directly from the ISP's servers instead of traveling from Netflix's server farms.

The server is painted in bright red and comes in the form factor of a 4U rack-mounted server chassis. An LCD for monitoring server health is on the front, along with a pair of VGA ports and a pair of USB ports. To the left is a pair of thin power supplies that are likely hot-swappable.

Specs feature a Supermicro motherboard packing a single Intel 10-core hyperthreaded Xeon E5 2650L v2 chip, 64GB of DDR3 memory and a 10 GbE card. For storage, the system utilizes six 500GB Micron SSDs and 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives. We don't know what protocol the drives are running on, but we can presume them to all be SAS drives (including the SSDs).

Even by today's standards, these core specifications aren't bad and were incredibly good back in the early 2010s when this server was first deployed. 64 GB of memory and 262TB of storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially for home use as a network attached storage (NAS).

Putting aside the beefy specifications, the unit is apparently pretty simple on the software side of things. According to Vice, Dave Temkin, Netflix's former VP of NSI says these Netflix servers are just Intel FreeBSD boxes, while some run on Linux. This makes sense, considering the servers were only designed to cache video files coming from Netflix servers and nothing more.

According to the Redditor, his Netflix caching server did need some repairs, including replacing a few noisy fans and one failed drive, but that's about it. He says the server will get a second life operating as a NAS at home.

Verizon announced on Wednesday that it had teamed up with Razer and Qualcomm for an always-connected portable game console that uses Google's Android operating system and allows to play Android games and games streamed from the cloud or a stationary game console.

The Razer Edge 5G game console leverages Qualcomm's Snapdragon G3X Gen 1 system-on-chip explicitly designed for portable gaming devices. Qualcomm introduced the SoC a little less than a year ago but still has not disclosed its specifications, so the only thing we do know for sure is that the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 Gaming Platform supports gaming at an up to 4K resolution at up to 144 frames per second, rendering in 10-bit HDR, Wi-Fi 6E, and 5G (including both sub-6GHz and 5G mmWave) connectivity. In addition, the platform allows you to attach a 4K TV or a display to the console and an XR accessory using a USB-C port.

Razer built a reference software developer kit equipped with a 6.65-inch Full HD+ OLED screen for Qualcomm, though it is unclear whether the Razer Edge 5G relies on the design aimed at game designers.

Razer has been trying to enter console gaming  (with Oyua) and portable gaming (with Razer Phone) markets for a while without significant success. Perhaps its Razer Edge 5G will always be connected and essentially rely on remote gaming platforms developed by third parties, and Android will be a more successful product.

Razer plans to announce more details about its Razer Edge 5G gaming system at its RazerCon event on October 15.

Google is teasing the dramatic expansion of its Fiber internet service over the coming months. Not only is GFiber coming to more places than ever before, it will start making multi-gig speeds widely available and accessible. How fast? In a blog post Google Fiber CEO Dinni Jain dropped a big hint – Google has been testing >20 Gbps fiber internet speeds at the home of one of its execs in Kansas.

Google Fiber currently has a simple but attractive pricing plan for customers within its service areas. People can choose a 1 Gbps service for $70, or upgrade to 2 Gbps download speeds for $100. Appealingly, both services offer 1 Gbps uploads – great for remote working and content creators. Moreover, Google provides mesh Wi-Fi networking as standard so service should be usable throughout your residence without extra equipment, and thankfully Google has no such thing as a data cap.

Going forward, Google wants to make significant steps beyond the 2 Gbps package it introduced in 2021, while rival providers in the US are already offering 2, 5, 8, even 10 Gbps products. However, GFiber says it is assuredly making gains on its stated path to 100 Gbps symmetrical internet provision.

In the above screenshot from a network analysis tool, you can see GFiber speeds at beyond 20 Gbps.  This speedy fiber service was tested at the home of Nick Saporito, the company’s Head of Commercial Strategy. The dial on the left shows the test connection achieving 20.20 Gbps throughput.

You may well be excited by the fiber speeds being tested, but other parts of your brain will likely be fearful of potential pricing, and be pessimistic about availability. GFiber’s CEO says he knows raw speed isn’t enough. A compelling fiber product must also deliver on “pricing, value, simplicity and reliability.” Jain adds that even as promised download speeds ramp up, GFiber is going to keep the pressure on accessible pricing and provision of symmetrical up/down speeds. Furthermore, the GFiber product will be enhanced so that the best speeds are available throughout your home.

Google promises the next big step in fiber speeds is “just around the corner.” So speed hungry folk in GFiber areas should keep an eye on any emailed upgrade offers, the Google Fiber blog, and of course here for any breaking news.

If you want to create a private Minecraft world that you can share with your friends online, you need a place to host that experience. You can pay a hefty $7.99 per month for Minecraft Realms, which is easy to use but doesn't have all the customization options or you can rent a Minecraft server from a paid hosting service such as Shockbyte. Or you can set up your very own Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi and have it hosted right from your living room for free. 

Note that you'll need either a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, preferably a 4 with at least 2GB of RAM. And all the traffic on the server will be going in and out via your home internet service so, if you're planning to have a ton of users on all the time, it may take up some bandwidth. But if you're just planning to play with a few friends, creating a Raspberry Pi Minecraft server is easy, cheap and fun. 

Below, we'll show you how to set up a Minecraft server on your Raspberry Pi, make sure that server starts at boot and that it allows connections from outside your local network. We'll also explain how to log into that server from Minecraft Java Edition. Note that we're using a plain, vanilla Minecraft server and Java Edition, without mods. However, once you've got the hang of these instructions, you can install server-side mods or different versions of the server.

How to Set Up a Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server

1. Set up a Raspberry Pi if you don't have one already. See our stories on how to set up a Raspberry Pi or how to set up a headless Raspberry Pi (if you want to control it remotely). 

2. Open a terminal window on the Pi or an SSH connection to the Raspberry Pi.

3. Make sure your Raspberry Pi is up to date, by running the latest update commands.

sudo apt updatesudo apt upgrade -y

4. Install JDK and git. The Java Development Kit (JDK) is the foundation for Minecraft Java Edition. Without the JDK Minecraft would not work.

sudo apt install default-jdk

5. Create a directory to store the files and enter that directory. We'll call ours mcserver.

mkdir mcservercd mcserver

6. On your PC, navigate to the Minecraft.net server download page and copy the address of the latest server jar file.

7. Enter wget at the command prompt where is the URL of the jar file you copied. For example, ours was:

wget https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/f69c284232d7c7580bd89a5a4931c3581eae1378/server.jar

8. Launch the server using the following command. This will allocate 1GB of RAM to the server and then run the downloaded .jar file.

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar server.jar

Add nogui to the end if you want to launch without an interface. You will get an error message saying that you need to agree to the EULA.

9. Open eula.txt for editing. It's easiest to use nano.

nano eula.txt

10. Change eula=false to eula=true in the file and hit CTRL + X then press Y and Enter to save and exit.

11. Launch the server again.

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar server.jar

It will take several minutes to start up as it generates a world and prepares a spawn area. You will see a percentage as it goes.

Now your server should be running and you can log into it. However, if you ran the server from an SSH window, it will close the moment that you close the window (unless you put "nohup" before the server load command). And, even if you run it from a terminal window on the Pi (or via VNC), the server is not set to restart should you need to reboot the Raspberry Pi. 

Below, we'll show you how to create a script that will start the Minecraft server every time you boot the Raspberry Pi and should also restart the Minecraft server if it crashes but the Pi itself does not.

How to Start the Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server at Boot

1. Create a new file called mcstart.sh in the same folder as the server files (in our case, mcserver). You can create and open the file with nano.

nano mcstart.sh

2. Enter the following code to your bash script.

#!/bin/bashcd ~/mcserverwhile truedo   java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar server.jar   sleep 10done

What we're doing here is changing to the directory where the server is and then running an endless loop that starts the server and then, if it ever stops, waits 10 seconds and starts it again. If the server never crashes, it will never get to the "sleep 10" part of the loop. 

If the path to your Minecraft server is something other than /mcserver on your Raspberry Pi, make sure to change that part of the script. 

3. Save and exit the file by hitting CTRL + X.

4. Set the mcstart.sh file to be executable by all users.

chmod a+x mcstart.sh

So now you can just the mcstart command from the command line, but that won't do you much good unless the system runs it automatically at boot. 

5. Open the crontab editor.

crontab -e

If this is the first time  you've opened crontab on this Raspberry Pi, you'll be asked to select an editor. Select nano if given a choice.

6. Enter @reboot and the path to mcstart.sh at the bottom of the crontab file and save it by hitting CTRL + X. In our case, the line looked like this but yours may vary based on the path to your home directory and what you named your server directory.

@reboot /home/pi/mcserver/mcstart.sh

7. Reboot your raspberry pi and see if it works.

How to Put Raspberry Minecraft Server on the Internet

If you've installed a Minecraft server on your Raspberry Pi and configured it to run every time you boot up, you and anyone on your local network can now log into it. However, unless everyone you want to play with is in your home,  you'll want to make that server available on the Internet.

1. Configure the Raspberry Pi to use a static IP address. If you don't know how to do this, see our tutorial on how to make Raspberry Pi use a static IP address. A static IP benefits you, because you want to make sure that its local IP v4 number is the same even if you reboot it.

2. Set a port forwarding rule on your router that forwards port 25565 to your Raspberry Pi Minecraft server's internal IP address. The process will differ slightly on each router. You need to get into the admin panel, look for the port forwarding menu and then create a rule. 

3. Determine your public IP v4 address. The easiest way is to navigate to whatismyipaddress.com. Googling "what is my ip address" usually works, but sometimes you just get the IP v6 address that way. 

You can now give this address out to your friends and they can use it to log into your server. However, unless you are paying your ISP extra for a fixed IP address, you can't count on this IP address staying the same. If you unplug your modem, lose power temporarily or experience anything that takes your home offline, you may have a different IP when you come back on and have to look it up again.

If you are satisfied with giving out the IP address to your friends every time they want to log on, you can stop here. Otherwise, consider the next step.

4. Use No-IP, a dynamic DNS service, to create a hostname that directs traffic straight to whatever your current home IP address is. The service has a free tier you can sign up for on noip.com The company also has Instructions for installing the relevant software on your Pi .

Logging into a Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server

1. Launch Minecraft Java edition on the computer you wish to play from.

2. Select Multiplayer.

3. Click Add Server.

5. Enter the server's hostname or IP address and give it a name (or leave it as "A Minecraft Server." That name is just for your benefit. Click Done when done. 

The server will appear on your list of servers. 

6. Click the icon for the server to enter it.

And that should get you in and playing on your local Raspberry Pi Minecraft server. 

After we published a story about my T-Mobile home Internet service dying with customer service unable to fix the problem, I got a lot of messages from readers with similar experiences. Three T-Mobile employees (two former and one current) who handled / handle home Internet support calls also reached out, claiming that the company uses canned excuses like “we’re upgrading the tower” in order to get customers off the phone and pad their stats. 

Update (9/2/2022): This article has been updated to reflect new, corroborating information from two new anonymous sources: one current and one additional former T-Mobile Home Internet employee. Both reached out to us after initial publication.

All of our T-Mobile sources asked to remain anonymous but provided proof of current or recent former employment at the company. In one former employee's most recent position, he worked in engineering, which he said is the last level of escalation for problems with the home internet service. There, he claims, he was frequently unable to solve customers’ problems but was encouraged to use an “it’s the tower” explanation so he could keep calls to under ten minutes. He said that service reps are penalized if calls run longer than 600 seconds or customers call back about the same problem within a week.

According to all of the sources we spoke to the company also penalizes support reps if a customer calls back with the same problem within a certain number of days (one former rep said 7 days and but the current employee and other former employee said 3 days). Therefore, they are incentivized to tell you something that will keep you from calling again for that time period. 

"We had a metric called IOCR/FCR - our bonus was heavily weighted around not having the customer call back for 3 days when I was there," our second former employee source said. "We were coached into a number of ways to confuse or lie to the customer to prevent them from calling back."

In my case, after spending several minutes on the phone with support doing everything from power cycling to removing and replacing the SIM card, I was put on hold while my rep said he would “do a few things” to fix the problem. He then returned and told me that my local cell tower was being upgraded and that I shouldn’t expect to have service for 48 hours, at which point I cancelled my service. Though I was on the phone for nearly 20 minutes, it still felt like the company was trying to give me an excuse, because they couldn’t actually help me.

"In regards to the particular error code you were getting [All PDN IP Connection Failure], and the lack of response from T-Mobile as to the specifics of that error, the answer is quite simple; they don't know," our first former employee source said . "I could tell you stories all day long about calls from customers with issues on their home internet service that never got solved, because no one in any of those departments, no matter how high up the chain we went, had any idea how to fix the problem."

According to our first former employee source, T-Mobile customer service reps hope that a hard reset of the 5G Gateway does the trick if a customer calls in with a problem. The company will often send replacement hardware to appease customers if that doesn't work. But as we've heard from customers on T-Mobile's forums and Reddit, even this isn't a surefire way to fix connectivity issues.

"If that doesn't fix it, they have no clue where to go from there, and you are typically out of luck at that point," he explained. "The 'tower is being upgraded' response is a canned response that is given when they have no other answer for what is happening."

The former employee said that, if the tower near me were really being upgraded, my rep would have told me right away. This is because customer support reps have multiple screens in front of them and can pull up a real-time map of the service area tied to your address. So if there were a tower outage or upgrade in process, the support rep would present that information to the customer within the first minute or two of the call.

According to our second former employee source, support reps would do what they could to find a plausible tower excuse that wasn't a complete lie. Instead, they'd zoom out on their computer maps until they found a tower that was having issues.

"If you report slow service or no service, I would query your address and zoom out on the coverage map until I could see a tower that had any work being done on it (Sometimes, we might zoom out 25-50, 100, or even 200+ miles to force another tower to populate)," our second former employee source said. "I would then tell you, 'It looks like work is being done in your area, please allow up to 72 hours for the issue to resolve' to effectively end the call, preventing you from calling back within 3 days. People who constantly called back dinged the rep's stats."

We reached out to T-Mobile for comment on our source’s accusation that the company’s support reps are under pressure to get customers off the phone (and therefore are incentivized to mislead them). The initial statement we got back didn’t really address the issue:

"We frequently make improvements to our 5G network to support services like Home Internet. On some occasions, that can cause short interruptions in our service. While extended issues are uncommon and typically last less than 12 hours, we encourage Home Internet customers to reach out to our award-winning customer care team for support in these cases."

However, after we published this article, the company sent a more direct response, saying:

"Our care model is designed to put the customer first, which means resolving issues as quickly as possible with the best information at hand. As is the standard in our industry and others, we prioritize NPS to measure our customers’ experiences with us, and we also rely on efficiency metrics to continually improve how we’re delivering the experience."

Both the current T-Mobile employee and the first former employee attributed the issues T-Mobile Home Internet customers are encountering to a lack of foresight into the demands and rigors of relying on cellular data for home internet service.

"It usually comes down to the same thing, lack of coverage. What most of us feel is that T-Mobile is in a rush to get as many customers as possible on HINT w/o considering the lack of bandwidth locally," the current employee said. "Now, they're offering HINT in places that technically had the max amount of users (per local capacity), which causes us to think those customer complaints are about to get much worse. They call it Home Internet Lite."

Our first former employee source agreed.

"The company simply did not take the time to become subject matter experts in the industry, and did not properly parse out the details of potential issues they would run into, before launching headfirst into the home internet world,” he said. “They just wanted to be part of the game, and have that extra perk to offer customers, and they wanted to be able to say they were the first to offer 'nationwide 5G Home Internet.'"

Other readers reached out to me, including Chris, who wrote about the All PDN IP Connection Failure error message I received, theorizing that the company may not have enough capacity on the newer towers that support the home Internet service.

“I was told that it has a lot to do with towers that still exist in the wild that aren't capable of handling connections for multiple reasons. There are still Sprint towers that need to be fully integrated, and older towers that just don't support enough connections to be reliable. All of this upgrading happens with little-to-no notice because they don't think it's necessary when there are towers nearby that should be a good fallback. Not so true for the home internet users!

It's worth considering that the router connects with different parameters than would a cellphone. A cellphone crawls the network seamlessly changing from "cell" to "cell" that is covered by whichever tower. The internet service requests a connection in a bit of a different way, not expecting to be on the move but indeed expecting to use more bandwidth.

When there are multiple towers nearby and not all of them are fully compatible with the home internet service, you're likely not going to get far enough to be assigned an IP address. If for some reason it connects to an older Sprint tower, or a tower that's at limit for user capacity, there will be issues. Your device will ask the PDN for access and get denied. An incompatible tower may not be configured for the requests made by your device. A perfectly good T-Mobile tower may already be at capacity and so your device sits in queue hoping for a connection. It might not try indefinitely and so it becomes necessary to power cycle it.”

I asked our T-Mobile source about this possibility, and he said it could be a factor in some customers losing connectivity suddenly.

Another reader, Stanton, reached out to tell me about his problems. He was also told about tower upgrades in-process and had no trouble with T-Mobile phone service in the same location:

"So I got T-Mobile home internet back during the pilot days. I've ran into the same errors as you. I've been through 5 to 6 gateways of theirs. They have claimed tower upgrade for over 6 months. My area is nothing but 5g and 5guc towers. My iPhone as well doesn't have issues with connectivity in these areas.

I've been waiting over 6 months for them to resolve this issue. Eventually I told them to pause my internet so I don't pay them for crap I'm not using. My issue is my location doesn't have access to fancy spectrum and such. Our best landline deals are cable which wants almost $200 a month for what T-Mobile offers or AT&T which claims the fastest they can provide is 18mbps."

Gary actually had his issues solved after T-Mobile sent him a new, upgraded 5G Gateway:

"I, too, had complete failure of my silver CYLINDRICAL gateway. They offered me a newer version (square black gateway) and my problem went away. I am surprised they did not offer it to you. Yes, they went through the whole litany of possible causes... tower upgrade, reboots, move location of gateway, etc. When they offered to replace the gateway with a newer version, I jumped on it. It has been working fine now for three months."

Interestingly, Carl contacted me to say that he signed up for T-Mobile Home Internet only to have horrible reception at his location. The company’s explanation: The service was not actually available in his area and they never should have sold it to him.

"Reading your article about your T-Mobile Gateway experience brought up my own horrible experience as a first time T-Mobile cell and home internet experience. Long story short, it never worked very well at all from the beginning. Barely had two bars. Constantly getting tech support. Was shipped three additional units to 'try' by tech support over 90 days. Problem was, I wasn't supposed to have been sold home internet. She confirmed my address and informed me that the 'service was NOT available in my area.' I shouldn't have been sold the unit to begin with."

Washdc, a commenter on my prior article, wrote:

"This could have been written by me... over 10 hours on the phone with customer service and their "tech team," three different devices, 48-hour tower outage (I live about one mile away from two towers) and absolutely no consistent coverage. I will give this inconsistency a few more days, hoping that after three weeks the system "settles down," and then crawl back to fios. Good bye to all the savings, hello to working internet. Fios must be so proud."

To be fair, not every person we heard from has had problems with T-Mobile. Anshel Sag, an analyst who tracks 5G with Moor Strategies and Insight, said that he’s not aware of problems with T-Mobile’s home Internet service and that he uses it successfully himself.

“In my experience with the service, it operated at roughly the same speed and reliability as my smartphone,” he said.

Sag said he spoke to his contacts at T-Mobile, who said that mine sounds like an isolated incident. 

As the feedback I’ve gotten shows, clearly I’m not the only one who has experienced serious problems with T-Mobile Home Internet. However, it’s impossible to know what percentage of users actually had to cancel their service due to unresolved issues. Of course, people online are quicker to point out problems with a product or service than they are when they have good experiences. Those with good experiences don't usually have a reason to speak out.

When the T-Mobile Home Internet services works, it’s fantastic. The 500+ Mbps downloads and 70+ Mbps uploads I got during my two successful weeks with the service were incredible and far superior to what my previous provider, Spectrum, was able to provide. However, the prospect of unreliable service was enough to scare me away, sending me back into the open arms of Spectrum.

Regardless, for those that have experienced extended outages, been fed untruths by T-Mobile employees, or have been sent multiple hardware replacements in vain in hopes of solving the issues, the positive potential doesn’t matter.

A good internet connection is just as important as water and power to your home. Some remote users may choose Starlink, others may prefer a 5G option. But what if you have no viable options?

Akamai network architect, Jared Mauch, was so frustrated with the mainstream ISP offerings at his rural home in Michigan that he set up his own FTTH (Fiber To The Home) ISP. It has been such a resounding success that other rural folks have joined up with Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC for their internet provider. Moreover, Mauch has now qualified for $2.6 million in government funding and will be able to reach nearly 600 further homes in the sparsely populated Washtenaw county area, reports Ars Technica.

Mauch was spurred to set up his own ISP after miserable commercial offerings of internet connectivity to his rural home. AT&T offered DSL with 1.5Mbps downloads, and Comcast wanted a $50,000 upfront payment to extend its cable network to his property. With his networking expertise, Mauch decided on a third path – to set up his own FTTH ISP.

Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC started with one customer, Mauch himself, but when word got around it grew quickly to 30, and there are currently 70 service subscribers. The fiber network currently relies on about 14 miles of fiber, but to complete the new government-funded project, Mauch will be laying a further 38 miles of fiber. 

With the new fiber in place, it is estimated that Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC will be able to cater to nearly 600 widely dispersed rural customers. Two of the most remote properties in the government contract will each eat up $30,000 of the funding cash, to run the cables and provide service. The cash comes as part of the county’s $71 million dedicated to infrastructure projects, which was allocated as part of the American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds.

Expanding the Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC network to meet with the government contract obligations isn’t going to be a challenge, according to Mauch. The work needs to be completed by the end of 2026, but Mauch says that it will be half finished before 2022 is over, with the other half complete by the end of 2023.

So, what kinds of broadband packages will new Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC customers have access to? For $55 per month, Mauch says people can get a 100Mbps symmetrical service with unlimited data. If you want 1Gbps with unlimited data you will have to scratch together $79 a month. A one-off $199 installation fee is charged to all new customers.

Access to high-speed internet at home is practically a necessity these days. That need became even more apparent during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which forced families to work and learn from home. While most children have gone back to in-person learning, many adults have remained in work-from-home mode with no plans to change. Throw in our copious consumption of streaming TV services, large downloads for operating system updates, PC and console games, apps, etc., and it's clear that having a fast and stable internet connection is a high priority for many people.

Unfortunately, for many Americans, actual choices in high-speed internet carriers for your home are often extremely limited.

Why I Decided to Drop Spectrum Internet

I’ve been a long-time Spectrum Internet customer, even when it was previously known as Time Warner Cable. But having Spectrum internet isn’t by choice; it has long been the only option I have living in rural Garner, NC, situated just southeast of Raleigh. While AT&T Fiber and Google Fiber are available within 20 miles of my address, neither services my neighborhood. Given the regional internet monopolies around the country, Spectrum is still my only choice for high-speed cable/fiber internet.

But why did I decide to give Spectrum the boot? I was sick of having to jump through hoops yearly to keep my current service at a reasonable price. I’ve been paying $69.99 for 400/20 internet, but every year Spectrum jacks the rate to $84.99. Then I have to call their customer service line and waste 45 mins of my day to get them to reduce the rate back to $69.99. Sure, it’s a once-a-year thing, but I’ve been looking for an out.

A friend, who also just so happens to be stuck with Spectrum, asked me about other ISP options when it dawned on me that T-Mobile offers Home Internet at $50/month. I asked her to see if her address was eligible for service, and it was. She decided to take T-Mobile up on their two-week free trial offer and signed up for service.

At that moment, I asked myself: Could I also potentially ditch spectrum and go with a 5G wireless service as my primary link for home internet?

What is T-Mobile Home Internet?

T-Mobile Home Internet provides internet service to your home using a 5G gateway using T-Mobile's cellular network. The 5G gateway contains a 4G/5G modem that connects to T-Mobile's cellular network and combines a Wi-Fi 6 router for linking up all your devices. T-Mobile only offers its Home Internet service in areas with excellent coverage (for obvious reasons). And even then, not all addresses are serviced, based on network capacity.

T-Mobile Home Internet costs $50 per month when you sign up for Autopay ($55/month without Autopay), including all taxes and fees. If you are an existing T-Mobile Magenta Max mobile customer, your monthly price drops to just $30/month with Autopay. The 5G gateway is provided free, so there is no monthly equipment (modem) fee to pay (as is often the case with fixed-line providers like Spectrum and Comcast), and there are no long-term contracts to sign.

The goodies don't stop there. T-Mobile currently offers home internet customers 50% off YouTube TV for a year, Paramount+ free for a year, and Philo TV for $15/month (versus the standard rate of $25/month). If that wasn't enough, new signups get an Amazon Echo Show 5 (second generation) for free.

According to the company, you can expect "typical" download speeds of between 33 Mbps to 182 Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 6 Mbps to 23 Mbps. However, as you see below, actual speeds can be much higher, rivaling legacy cable companies. The other big thing that most people would probably want to know is the current situation with data caps, given that this service works on T-Mobile's cellular network. Surprisingly, the answer is that there are no data caps. While Comcast and Spectrum have implemented data caps on their fixed-line customers in multiple U.S. markets, T-Mobile thankfully eschews the practice–at least for now.

As for overall performance, T-Mobile provides the following disclaimer:

Speeds can vary depending on location, signal strength and availability, time of day, and other factors. Our speed projections are based on our analysis of internal and third-party data.

T-Mobile says its home internet service is available to 30 million Americans.

Signing up for T-Mobile Home Internet

Getting signed up for service was relatively easy. First, I clicked this T-Mobile link to enter my phone number and see if my home address was eligible. Once eligibility was confirmed, I was able to chat with a representative who asked me a few questions and sent me several secure links to enter my name, address, billing information, and social security number (to perform a credit check for the new hardware that would be sent to me).

After about 10 minutes, the signup process was complete, and I was informed that the 5G gateway would arrive within two business days. On the second business day, the 5G gateway arrived as promised via UPS, and I was eager to test it out.

First Impressions and Setup

After removing the 5G gateway from the box, I was struck by its size. It measures 8.5 inches tall and is silver in color. It’s shaped like a cylinder, reminding me of the first-generation Amazon Echo. On the back of the device, you’ll find a power port, a power button, a reset button, a USB-C port (which worked just fine charging my smartphone), a phone jack and two Ethernet ports. Unfortunately, compared to modern wireless routers, T-Mobile’s 5G gateway is lacking in port selection. So you may want to pick up one of the best network switches we’ve tested.

You’ll find a small, circular touch display on the top of the device. You can swipe across the screen to see your current signal strength, messages from T-Mobile, the number of connected devices, and battery status. Yes, the 5G gateway has an integrated battery, and it will continue to function if the power plug is pulled (this feature should come in handy during power outages).

To set up the gateway, you must first download the T-Mobile Internet app and install it on a smartphone. I then plugged the gateway into the wall in my office on the second floor of my house and powered it up. It booted up, performed a quick software update, then confirmed signal strength of three out of five bars. The app itself is very basic, with few controls for the router. You can see network status, signal strength, connected devices, change the SSID/passcode, and adjust the frequency bands. That’s about it. There are no parental controls, advanced wireless controls, access controls, MAC filtering, or anything like that. This is just a barebones setup that should work fine for most households. Power users will likely want to look elsewhere or simply connect their existing router to the 5G gateway.

At first, I was concerned about the signal strength, as I had the gateway situated on top of a bookshelf next to my cable modem, which isn’t near a window (T-Mobile suggests placing the gateway near a window for the best signal). I then stuck it near a window in my office and was greeted with the same three bars. I next took the 5G gateway downstairs on the opposite side of the house and placed it near a window. I still obtained three bars. At that point, I decided to just put it in the original location near the cable modem and proceed with the setup. After the initial setup, signal strength has hovered between three bars and four bars.

Upon opening the T-Mobile Internet app, I was asked to scan the QR code on the bottom of the gateway to expedite setup. This prepopulated the SSID and passcode, then began communicating with the gateway and the T-Mobile network for activation. After about 30 seconds, the setup process was complete, and I was ready to go.

At any given time, we have 40+ Wi-Fi devices connected to our wireless router (a first-generation Netgear Orbi RBR50 Wi-Fi 5 mesh router with two satellites). We're talking multiple laptops, smartphones, tablets, Smart TVs, Amazon Echo speakers, and about a dozen Kasa smart light switches, light bulbs and power outlets. Given the sheer number of Wi-Fi devices in my home, I opted to piggyback my Orbi off the 5G gateway to make things simple (granted, I could have just changed the SSID and password on the 5G gateway to match my Orbi, but I didn’t want to drop coverage that my router and two satellites provide through the whole house and outdoors).

Testing Performance

I first connected just my iPhone to the 5G gateway over Wi-Fi and performed a Speedtest. To my amazement, I registered download speeds exceeding 470 Mbps, while uploads came in at nearly 72 Mbps.

For reference, my Spectrum internet connection gives me 430 Mbps to 450 Mbps and tops out at around 21 Mbps for uploads. Subsequent tests have shown the 5G gateway hitting peak download speeds of 557.37 Mbps from my MacBook Pro (connected directly to the 5G gateway) around 3 p.m., which is unheard of for home internet out here in the sticks.

For a worst-case scenario, I tested again around 9:00 p.m. ET, and the 5G gateway's speeds dropped to around 400 Mbps for downloads and 40 Mbps for uploads. That's a steep drop-off, but still, plenty of throughput for our needs.

I next performed the same tests with my Orbi router plugged in via one of the 5G gateway’s two Ethernet ports. The download and upload speeds were unaffected, so I stuck with that setup.

I’m not a big gamer, so I’m primarily concerned with having a fast and stable internet connection 24-7-365. In the days that I’ve been testing T-Mobile’s Home Internet service, it’s been flawless. I haven’t experienced any service interruptions or significant speed shortfalls. The 5G gateway has remained slightly lukewarm to the touch, which cooler than the toasty Arris Surfboard SB6183 cable modem I’ve been using for years.

The 5G hotspot can simultaneously handle multiple Smart TVs streaming, my daily conference calls, my large file downloads, and just about anything else I throw at it.

Wrap-up

I went into this test a little skeptical of using a cellular-based internet service for my home internet, but those worries never came to fruition. Signing up for T-Mobile Home Internet was easy, the setup process with the app was minimalistic with little room for error, and the actual internet service has been rock solid. Throw in the fact that I’m saving $20 per month ($240/year), and the switch has been a no-brainer for our family.

About the hardest part of this whole process will likely be the phone call that I will need to make to Spectrum’s customer retention department to tell them that I’m canceling my existing service.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed raising the minimum acceptable transfer speeds for services classed as ‘broadband’ to 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads. A minimum accepted 100/20 service level would be a significant upgrade on the 2015 minimum standard for broadband, which the FCC set at 25/3 Mbps.

According to Rosenworcel, and we think you might agree, the FCC’s 25/3 metric is very much behind the times. This became abundantly clear at the height of the pandemic, with all the internet gaming, media consumption and WFH tasks that became central to many people’s daily lives. Moreover, the FCC Chairwoman went so far as opining that the current broadband standard is harmful in some ways.

“The 25/3 metric isn’t just behind the times, it’s a harmful one because it masks the extent to which low-income neighborhoods and rural communities are being left behind and left offline,” explained Rosenworcel.

How did the telecoms bureaucrats come to decide on the 100/20 Mbps minimum standards figures? The FCC says it believes in setting “big goals,” so that everyone can have a fair shot in the online world of the 21st century. There is said to be a “range of evidence” supporting the new minimum proposed broadband speeds, including some work previously done as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The FCC proposal is a small but important step. Next up, the proposal would have to be voted on by a commission that is currently divided by two Democrat and two Republican members, with an empty seat needing to be filled. If the proposal gets through to the next stage of being implemented, then telecoms companies will have to encouraged with government funds and coerced with the threat of regulator action. The commission will be keen to check that telecoms companies provide services that offer “affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access,” and will be deployed in a reasonably timely manner.

We checked speedtest.net today, and it says that the median fixed broadband speeds across the whole of the US was 154 Mbps download, and 21.6 Mbps download using June 2022 data. This data roughly indicates that the new 100/20 broadband goal should not be an insurmountable challenge for the government and private sector to achieve. Most of the upgrading work will probably need to be done in those aforementioned low-income and rural communities. The US is ranked 8th in the world for (median) broadband speeds.

The newly proposed 100/20 Mbps standard might take a little time to get over some hurdles, but it looks like it should get the green light in due course. With the effort needed to bring broadband definitions up to date in evidence, the FCC has also prudently started rolling forward with a separate national goal of 1 Gbps / 500 Mbps to usher in the ‘Gigabit future’.

As home networks get more complicated (and packed with more wireless devices) wired networking starts to feel almost dated. Who needs a wired connection from one of the best network switches when you can get Gigabit speeds or better from one of the best gaming routers?

But a wireless connection introduces several variables. Protocol compatibility, interference, signal-obliterating wall materials, or even poorly-designed radios and antennas can slow a speedy gigabit connection to a comparative crawl. For much more on this, see our how-to choose a gaming router feature.

Conversely, a good wired connection can cut out these and other shortcomings of an over-the-air signal, while providing faster speeds and a reliable, stable connection. But with most mainstream routers only offering just four Ethernet ports - or sometimes fewer - the best network switches step in to fill the gap, giving you more ports to plug your wired devices into. Not only that, but they can also spread out some of the load on your network, freeing your router up to carry out its primary mission of getting internet service to all the wireless devices on your network that need it.

Like the Ethernet hubs that came before them, one of the best network switches can add several ports to your network, letting you plug in more devices to your network than would otherwise be possible using the router's limited number of built-in ports.

What’s more, the best network switch can filter your LAN traffic, moving prioritized packets to the front of the line to keep things like games or 4K HDR streams running smoothly. And most normal networks don’t require more than the simple solution of an unmanaged switch.

We did some hands-on testing with several different (mostly unmanaged) network switches to see which ones are the best for most people. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these network switches perform well and are solid options for each given use case.

Shopping Tips for Best Network Switches 

When looking for the best network switches, consider:

Number of Ports: You can get anywhere from four all the way up to 48 or more Ethernet ports. Some also have USB ports.

Managed or Unmanaged: If you just need to get wired internet access to a few devices, then you’ll want an unmanaged network switch, which we recommend for most users. This doesn’t mean the switch has no features -- unmanaged switches can often do plenty of fancy things, from traffic prioritizing QoS to loop detection.

Managed network switches are more secure and can monitor traffic for troubleshooting purposes or separate chunks of your network into their own virtual local area networks, or VLAN. If going this route, you’ll also want to make sure your router is compatible with VLANs -- a non-bridged setup using Amazon’s eero mesh routers, for instance, makes VLANs unusable.

Power Needs: Most won't need it, but certain devices can get power over Ethernet if your switch supports it.

Network Speed: Gigabit Ethernet is the minimum speed, but you should consider going with 2.5 GbE or higher, even if you don't need it right now, because future devices may benefit.

Best Network Switches You Can Buy Today

When it comes to 8-port network switches for the home or small office network, it’s hard to beat the TP-Link TL-SG108. It’s compact, has a fanless metal enclosure, plus dimmer and less distracting LEDs than some of its competitors (Don’t worry; there are still two per port, each informative based on color and/or blinking pattern). The TL-SG108 also features traffic-prioritizing QoS, full duplex flow control, auto-negotiating ports for choosing transfer speed up to a gigabit, and a simple, plug-and-play setup. This best network switch performed at rough parity with the other 8-port switches we tested and ran cool.

The one notable omission from this network switch is loop detection, which prevents your network from being slowed to a crawl or disabled entirely by looped network traffic. This can be a very important troubleshooting tool in a complicated network, with visual indicators on a switch that tell you which Ethernet ports to investigate for issues.

If loop detection is a requirement, we recommend either the ProSAFE Netgear GS108 or the Cisco CBS110-8T-D. However, each of those switches, at $40 and $68 respectively, is also significantly more expensive than the less-than-$20 TP-Link. And we do not feel that, for most people, loop detection justifies the extra cost.

Lastly, the TP-Link features a nice limited lifetime warranty, providing a nice peace of mind that you wouldn’t get from, say, the similarly inexpensive Netgear GS308, which only has a 2-year warranty. On the whole, even if you only need 5 extra ports, we recommend this switch for its price, feature set, and build quality to expand the wired capability of your network now and in the future.

After what seems like an eternity, network devices are finally beginning to embrace faster-than-gigabit connections. From routers to modems, computers to NAS, big data pipelines are starting to enter the mainstream. And that’s a good thing, particularly as we now use more data than ever before. It’s even possible to get a 2 Gbps connection now if you live in one of the cities where Google is now offering the service.

Of course, you needn’t have a connection that fast to get use out of one of the recent 2.5 GbE network switches. File transfers, home media servers, and high-capacity, high-bandwidth NAS setups can all stand to benefit from a high-bandwidth switch, and as they come out, we’ll try to put our hands on the latest and greatest to let you know how they fare. That brings us, today, to the TP-Link TL-SG105-M2: a super-fast unmanaged 5-port, 2.5 GbE switch that, while bigger than your average 5-port gigabit switches, should still fit into just about anyone’s setup - and budget, for that matter.

Along with its 8-port sibling - the TL-SG108-M2 - the TL-SG105-M2 is low-profile, easy to set up, and features a fanless design and metal enclosure that will keep it as quiet as it is fast. And because it’s a 2.5 GbE switch, you might not need to buy new cabling; as long as you’re already using Cat 5e cabling in your network, you’re good to take advantage of the 802.3bz network protocol, which promises 2.5 GbE or 5 GbE connections over 100 meters of cable. In testing, this bore out, with superfast file transfers that didn’t even blink when we loaded the network down with as much traffic as we could muster. The switch ran a little warm, though, topping out at about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

This switch supplants our previous choice for the best 5-port switch, the QNAP QSW 1105-5T, for a few reasons. First, the TP-Link just has a bigger pipe for data, pushing a consistent 2.34 Gbps, where the QNAP, in our testing, only barely got over 2 Gbps in real-world use. It also has a slightly more space-friendly form factor. And perhaps most importantly, where the QNAP’s warranty ends at 2 years, the TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 falls in the company’s business class of switches, giving it a generous limited lifetime warranty. Lastly, the TL-SG105-M2 sports QoS - a feature typical of most unmanaged switches that is conspicuously absent on the QSW 1105-5T.

If we had to pick a couple of things that aren’t ideal about this neat little switch, it would have to be the lack of loop detection and the fact that the power supply plugs into the side opposite the ports - of course, the latter is entirely personal preference, but it can also complicate installation in some setups. The TP-Link’s list price is $129.99 - although as of the time of this writing, you can actually get it for $109 at Amazon, which is the same price as the QNAP. The TP-Link is the choice either way, but with the current price, it’s a no-brainer.

This is a complicated recommendation. Recent news concerning a privacy breach at Ubiquiti notwithstanding, we believe the Unifi USW-Flex to be the best network switch for anyone looking to bring PoE to the edge of their network. This affordable, 5-port wonder can supply up to 15.4 watts of power to each of its four output ports. Note the use of “up to” here; once you’ve got all ports occupied, the 46-watt power budget will prevent 15.4 watts going to all four ports at once. So if you are using up all of that power at every port, the fourth port gets reduced priority and lower wattage. The PeE features also only apply if the Unifi USW-Flex is powered by a proper PoE injector. If you’re uncertain which injector to buy, Ubiquiti sells a fairly inexpensive one.

Although it’s a managed switch, the Unifi USW-Flex lacks certain key features like Spanning Tree Protocol, which helps prevent switch loops, or the ability to use SSH for extensive command-line-management (although you can SSH in for some basic functionality like firmware updates), it works well as an edge-of-network device to power things like IP cameras or sensors that you may want to have minimal wiring going to.

Additionally, the USW-Flex is built for outdoor use and comes with multiple mounting options - either magnetic or pole/wall mounts - as well as a hood that can be affixed over the Ethernet ports to help prevent moisture ingress when it rains. As a quick aside, part of this switch’s outdoor-friendly design is its recessed ports, which can be hard to remove an RJ45 connector from, as there isn’t much room for your fingers to squeeze the connector’s release clip.

In testing, we found that, when using the Flex without configuration, it worked about as well as any other in this list: Transfer speeds were solid and faster than other gigabit switches tested under load. It’s worth noting here, however, that the Ubiquiti does get quite hot, sitting easily over 100 degrees Fahrenheit at idle and getting as warm as 118.7 degrees F with every port in use -- and that’s in a cool room, with plenty of air movement. It’s rated to operate in temperatures up to 149 degrees F (at 25W output - 131F at 46W), but it would still be a good idea to keep it in a shaded area if using outside, as direct summer sun could shorten its lifespan or impact performance.

The USW-Flex comes with other caveats, too. The switch is managed via a browser-based GUI (the same general-purpose interface that is used for all other UniFi gear, which is nice if you have an all-UniFi network, but irritating and confusing if you only have this switch. And though it can function without ever touching its settings, there are some you’ll have to change to access the promised capability. For instance, the switch does not default to the 802.3bt protocol that provides for the full 46-watt power budget, so you must change the power source under settings to PoE Injector.

You’ll want to be certain that the device powering it is outputting with the 802.3bt protocol, or you will not be able to get all 46 watts. The final note is applicable to managed switches in general: If setting up and using a virtual LAN, you would do well to first ensure that your router supports VLANs - Amazon’s eero, for instance, currently does not. In spite of all of this, the convenience of bringing both Gigabit Ethernet and 802.3af PoE power from four ports to anywhere in or out of your home for a hundred bucks is quite a weighty item in the “pro” column in our opinion.

In between 8-and 16-port switches, you have some funky units like this ZyXel XGS1010-12. It’s billed on the box as a desktop switch with 8 gigabit ports and four bonus ports in the form of two 2.5 GbE and two 10 GbE SFT+ uplink ports. The latter fiber Internet customers would recognize as the data port on a fiber ONT (Optical Network Terminator -- think of it like a Fiber modem for customers without last-mile copper).

Physically, the XGS1010-12 has a solid metal enclosure, a fanless design, and an external power supply, with all the ports on one edge, while the power supply connects in the back. Each port has two LEDs for power and status, with colors to indicate the speed of connection being provided. It boasts QoS, Auto MDI/MDIX in all ports, and flow control.

The switch did well in testing, putting up numbers slightly better than the QNAP on its 2.5 Gb ports, while its gigabit ports performed very well. Under heavy traffic, we saw no performance loss, which is to be expected given its total bandwidth of 66 Gbps. The ZyXel was the second-hottest of the switches tested, peaking at 100 degrees Fahrenheit under load, which is definitely going to be warm to the touch, but not concerningly so. Just make sure the box has a bit of ventilation.

Though the ZyXel XGS1010-12 will run you $150 when bought at its MSRP, the addition of two 2.5 GbE ports and two 10 GbE SFP+ uplink ports makes this a very good deal relative to similar switches, which typically go for hundreds of dollars and lack this much versatility. If you have a high-speed NAS or need a super-fast connection between a couple of your computers, this switch lets you do that on the cheap, while still serving as a great hub for your other devices.

Lastly, it is somewhat unclear what the warranty terms are for this switch (the included documentation only refers the buyer to the website, where it’s not explicit under which warranty it falls, Standard or Limited Lifetime). But we contacted Zyxel and were able to confirm that while XGS1010-12 falls under the 2-year Standard Warranty, this particular switch is among those that have had their term extended to 5 years. That still isn’t amazing, but it’s better than what you’ll get from many cheap switches.

TP-Link is once again the best network switch choice here because of its affordability. At $50 it’s not quite as much a deal as the TL-SG108, but finding a lower-cost 16-port unmanaged switch with the kind of reliability, warranty, and proven performance offered by TP-Link would be challenging and perhaps involve some good fortune.

With the TL-SG116, you’ll get the same benefits as the 8-port version: IGMP snooping, flow control, QoS, etc. It also has the same unobtrusive LEDs, metal housing, and fanless construction, and a limited lifetime warranty. Like its 8-port sibling, however, it lacks loop detection, which may be a bigger issue when you’re the type of user looking for a 16-port switch.

The TL-SG116 performed as well as can be expected in testing, with a small drag in transfer speed under load, but otherwise maintaining at least near-gigabit speeds while testing with iperf and normal file transfers, streaming, and gaming. If you have more complicated network needs, we recommend the D-Link DGS-1100-16V2. Easy Smart Managed Gigabit desktop switch, which features an approachable GUI management interface and a well-rounded feature set for $109.99.

If you aren't already using a VPN, you should be. 

Between ad networks keen on tracking our every move, traffic-snooping Internet Service Providers, and unsecured wireless networks, the state of digital privacy has never been more dire. A VPN doesn't prevent all forms of tracking, mind you. You'll need to pair it with an ad blocker and tweak your settings on social media for that. 

But it does still make you significantly harder to track. 

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you don't really care about your digital privacy. It doesn't bother you that people can see what you're doing online. You've got nothing to hide, so why should you care about using a VPN? 

Three words: region locked content. 

If you're paying the same amount of money as everyone else for a Netflix subscription, you should have access to the same content as everyone else. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This is largely because, to be blunt, international copyright law is an unmitigated disaster. 

Every country has its own rules and regulations, and streaming services must strike a delicate balance between all of them. Frequently, this means a series of intricate contracts and agreements with content providers. As you might expect, said providers are the real beneficiaries here — and it's the end user that suffers. 

A VPN provides you with a means of getting around these region locks, much to the chagrin of both content providers and streaming platforms. Typically, this comes with a few trade-offs, like traffic slowdown and having your IP address flagged by certain sites. Ivacy suffers from neither of these issues. 

Consistently rated as the fastest VPN on the market, Ivacy is also a pioneer in Split Tunneling Technology. This innovation, exclusive to Ivacy, allows you to configure which traffic is routed through the VPN and which goes through your regular connection. Paired with Ivacy's P2P optimized secure downloading technology, this allows you to connect, download, and browse the way you want on up to ten devices.  

With over 3500 servers in more than one hundred locations, Ivacy also directly unblocks seven major Netflix regions:  

• France
• US
• Japan
• UK
• Australia
• Germany
• Canada

The best part, however, is the price. For a limited time only, Ivacy is on sale for 90% off. That means getting five years of service for just $0.99 a month. 

Get Ivacy VPN

We first got our hands on the Nreal Light augmented reality (AR) glasses in early January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. So it’s been nearly two years and the Chinese firm is now ready to bring the AR glasses to the United States. 

Nreal says that around 20 games that support its AR headset are available to download from the Google Play store for the device for those willing to give it a try. However, if gaming is not your forte, then partaking in a movie via the virtual 220-inch display (at a six-foot distance) is sure to get your attention.

The Nreal Light will be available to purchase exclusively at Verizon retail stores starting on November 30th. This is probably the best purchase option for those new to AR devices, as you can trial the Nreal Light in-store to see if this is an experience that suits your gaming or productivity workflows.

We should mention that availability is limited to just 20 Verizon retail stores across the U.S., with New York City accounting for seven of those locations. However, the AR glasses will also be available from Verizon’s online store starting on December 2nd. 

"Nreal Light's availability in the U.S. has been highlighy anticipated," said Nreal CEO and founder Chi Xu. "We couldn't be more excited to be announcing the sales of Nreal Light at Verizon retail stores as this marks a momentous milestone not only for Nreal, but also the AR industry as a whole." 

The Nreal Light is priced at $599 and is supported by the following Android smartphones:

• Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
• Samsung Galaxy S21 5G
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G
• Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G UW
• Samsung Galaxy S20 5G UW
• Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G
• OnePlus 8 5G UW

Nreal says that its AR glasses will also work with iPhones, although the company didn’t provide further guidance on that support. 

Stay tuned for our full review of the Nreal Light AR glasses, which is coming shortly.

If you’ve been following wireless networking advancements, or you’ve just been shopping for a new router lately, you may have noticed an abrupt shift. Not long ago, the marketing focus was on the still new and glorious benefits of the Wi-Fi 6 (or 802.11ax) standard. But its usurper, Wi-Fi 6E (also 802.11ax), has come to take the throne of cutting-edge Wi-Fi tech. From a technical perspective, there’s a lot to unpick between the two, including understanding just what Wi-Fi 6 is, since it’s still quite new, before we get to 6E. 

We’ll do so below, but first for the benefit of those who just want some quick-and-dirty details about Wi-Fi 6 and 6E to consider when shopping for a router, here’s the short-ish version.

TLDR

• Wi-Fi 6E Client (Un)availability: At this point, there aren’t many Wi-Fi 6 clients out there, let alone 6E devices. If you’re in need of a new router now and you want to future-proof your purchase, a 6E router may be worth considering. But if you’re satisfied with your current network setup, it may be better to wait for the market to mature over the next year or two. 

• ISP Speed and Network Needs: Do you have a fast internet plan, or the ability upgrade to one? Do you have high-bandwidth needs on your local network? Wi-Fi 6E can help with those if you have or plan to buy a Wi-Fi 6E network card like the Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (provided your motherboard or laptop has the right M.2 slot). If you have devices with 2.5 Gbps-and-above hardwired connections (say a 10 GbE-equipped NAS) it could mean wireless backups that take a fraction of the time they would on a sub-6GHz network.

• Legacy Devices: Because Wi-Fi 6E requires purpose-built Wi-Fi 6E Hardware, no legacy devices can be updated to support it, barring modular PC upgrades. This means that, if you have products that support up to Wi-Fi 6 that you like and plan to continue using for years to come, you may actually be better served buying a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router, most of which have two 5GHz bands for added bandwidth. Buying a 6E router could mean swapping out a second 5 GHz band (that’s handy now) for a 6 GHz band you won’t likely make full use of for years. 

• Security: How is your password management? Security improvements with Wi-Fi 6 and 6E put the burden on the router, rather than you, to secure connections between your devices. Important changes in authentication methodology make a strong password less important (though you should still maintain strong passwords). WPA 3 -- the security protocol that makes this possible -- is required whether your client device supports 6 or 6E.
   

• Coverage: If you’re hoping for Wi-Fi 6E speeds at the same distances as your current 5 GHz router, you may be sorely disappointed. The higher frequency of 6 GHz means it will fall off at shorter distances. In our testing, with residential walls and other factors, we really couldn’t get a 6E signal past about 50 feet. And though throughput on the 6 GHz band was mind-breakingly fast in the same room, just shifting a couple dozen feet away with 2 walls in between saw greatly-reduced speed. You’ll still get Wi-Fi 6 on the 5 GHz band, of course, and with the right router, you can still expect excellent speed. Throw in a mesh system with ethernet backhaul and you could have shockingly good performance just about everywhere in your home, but of course that’s an added expense. 

Since the emergence of consumer Wi-Fi in the late 90s/early 2000s, Wi-Fi standards have simply been referred to by their numbered designation, 802.11, with a lettered notation for each generation. This was easy enough to follow when it started with 802.11a and went to 802.11b, but not every protocol notation applied to consumer Wi-Fi, so the next consumer update was g, then n, and in 2014, ac. This quickly starts making very little sense to someone just reading tech specs on a box. So, mercifully, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) decided finally to rebrand Wi-Fi with numbers, starting with the 802.11ax standard, which is now Wi-Fi 6, and retroactively renaming the n and ac standards Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5, respectively. 

Wi-Fi 6 brings with it many improvements that accommodate the growing number of connected devices that are beginning to populate our homes: security improvements, features that allow simultaneous communication with many devices at once, and bringing stability to networks that really weren’t intended for this sort of load. 

What distinguishes Wi-Fi 6E is not necessarily a new standard, but a new band. Previous iterations of Wi-Fi operate on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, which have grown more and more congested over time. Wi-Fi 6E will take advantage of the newly-opened 6 GHz band, which is strictly limited to only 802.11ax-and-up devices. On top of that, this band brings with it an additional seven 160 MHz-wide channels (currently, there are about 4 with normal Wi-Fi) bringing a great deal of additional headroom to a network. 

Wi-Fi 5 vs Wi-Fi 6

To really understand Wi-Fi 6, it’s important to know a few key things about features present in Wi-Fi 5 that it builds upon. First, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, which was introduced by Bell Labs in 1966, has enabled more and faster transmission of data through the use of subcarriers -- data being transmitted is broken up into tiny pieces and sent in overlapping frequencies to increase throughput. OFDM has been part of the Wi-Fi 802.11 protocol since the beginning. Next, both Single User Multiple Input Multiple Output (SU-MIMO), which lets a router issue multiple commands to a single device at a time, and the later Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO), which lets a router issue commands to multiple devices at once, really came into their own in the last few years as consumers added more devices to their networks. 

In 2020, according to Statista, the average American had more than 10 connected devices in their household. That’s roughly double the 5.2 average recorded in 2014). MIMO’s modus operandi is chunks of interlocking data sent in different streams from multiple antennas with slight phase offsets that are then recombined by the receiver. The same principle -- phase-offset transmissions from multiple antennas -- is what allows routers to use beamforming to “aim” at a signal device. A Wi-Fi signal is sent in waves from each antenna, and there are regions where these waves interact with one another that are constructive, meaning they make the signal stronger. As the router receives information back from the receiver, it “tunes” its broadcast such that the waves’ strongest interactions will coincide with the point at which they collide with the receiver’s antenna. This is essentially the same concept at play in beamforming audio. However, on Wi-Fi 5/802.11ac, MU-MIMO is a one-way street, only occurring on the downlink to devices.

Enter Wi-Fi 6

Much of this changes with Wi-Fi 6. The 802.11ax standard brings several key updates that can make devices carrying out high-bandwidth tasks function more reliably and with far less latency than on Wi-Fi 5. For instance, full duplex MU-MIMO -- MU-MIMO that goes both ways -- with multiple devices communicating back to the access point (AP) allows for commands sent to multiple devices to be acknowledged simultaneously. This reduces latency across the board and ensures a more stable connection and smoother experience for the end user (that’s you). Additionally, Wi-Fi 6 doubles the number of spatial streams it can transmit via MU-MIMO, with up to 8 clients in a group possible, versus 4 with Wi-Fi 5.

In addition to improvements to MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi 6 brought along a complementary feature known as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). Like OFDM before it, OFDMA takes advantage of the principles of signal modulation to cram more data into a given channel by subdividing that channel, allowing for simultaneous transfer of information to multiple devices. That may sound a lot like MU-MIMO, but the two serve different purposes. Where MU-MIMO is great for transmitting large chunks of data on multiple streams, OFDMA is ideal for sending many signals to low-power and low-bandwidth IoT devices. So all your smart plugs and lightbulbs don’t logjam the network for Netflix or your Friday-Night Fortnite marathon. 

As a result of these improvements, the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 really become much more apparent once you begin to add more devices to your home. Individual devices don’t necessarily see a massive speed boost. Let’s say you have a gigabit connection from your ISP. You’re not going to miraculously get full speed 25 feet from your router with most devices, but the efficiency gains that come with Wi-Fi 6 will mean more of your devices will get more throughput and with less lag than what you generally experience with Wi-Fi 5. You can think of it this way: Bandwidth is a highway, which with Wi-Fi 6 has just become about seven times wider. Your data packets are the cars, which are now bigger than before, and the latency pertains to their speed, which is now faster. Those bigger, faster cars still mostly take up their own lane, freeing up many lanes for many more vehicles with many different destinations.

Testing Wi-Fi 6 

Right now, very few smart home devices (or devices in general) take advantage of this standard, so it’s difficult to test for it. Most devices are still broadcasting using Wi-Fi 5, or even Wi-Fi 4 -- but we are still able to look at throughput. In our testing we used an Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE11000, one of the first Wi-Fi 6E routers to hit the market, positioned in the middle of a home. To keep as many factors even as possible, we used this same router and the same laptop (an M1 MacBook Air which has a 2x2 MU-MIMO wireless card) in the same position, with the only change being enabling and disabling 802.11ax on the router. With this change, on the 5 GHz band, we saw minor differences over the course of many repeated tests at about 3, 25, and 100 feet: 

Note that the performance flip-flops at the longest distance tested, 100 feet. This is through a single wall, with no major obstructions apart from a low tree. Across nine separate tests from that same position, we got consistently better numbers with Wi-Fi 6 disabled. Of course, this may simply be a hardware or software quirk of this particular router, the laptop it was serving data to, or the topology of the network. 

Breakthrough Security and More 

Wi-Fi 6 also brings with it greater security, as it requires all compatible devices to take up new security protocol WPA3, which is among the most important new features of the standard. Its predecessor, WPA2, has been the standard for more than 15 years, and has been in dire need of an update. So why, you might question, should anyone be excited about that? First of all, it addresses a problem that security experts have grappled with for many years: insecure passwords. 

With WPA3, prior approaches to password security are turned on their head, with the protocol simply accepting as given that passwords would be insecure. As more and more people add more and more devices to their networks, each new device is a brick added to the barrier between users and updating insecure passwords. Assuming this all-too-common scenario, WPA3-Personal uses a protocol called Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE, which was originally used for authentication of nodes used in mesh networks) to authenticate device connections. 

What’s so important about this method of authentication is that the password for the actual network is never shared between two devices. Instead, they enter into what’s called an SAE exchange, whereby two devices verify whether each knows the same password without actually transmitting it, and once it’s been established that they both know it, a cryptographically-strong key is then shared between them for actual authentication. From this key, a session key is derived. Would-be attackers listening to your network traffic may be able to sniff out that session key, but would be unable to compromise the entire actual key which, again, is an authentication key created between those two devices,not your actual password.

Beyond improved security, users will also see improvements in battery life on some devices with Wi-Fi 6, as they’ll only activate their antennas at times pre-scheduled with the router. This feature holds the most potential for small, low-power devices like smart sensors or other smart home devices that really only need to occasionally check in with the internet. So don’t expect massive gains in battery life on your laptops and smartphones, which access the internet fairly often, but it could be a boon for smart home devices.

Wi-Fi 6E: Not just market fluff 

So with all these advancements already available on a normal Wi-Fi 6 router, and support of this standard only just beginning to propagate through mainstream consumer products, why are we suddenly seeing this shift to Wi-Fi 6E? 

The answer is basically space and timing. It’s been anticipated for some time that the FCC would open up the 6 GHz band to unlicensed use by the unwashed masses -- that’s us -- and that finally happened on July 27, 2020. Opening this band up delivers an additional 1200 MHz of bandwidth for wireless devices. That’s positively luxurious compared to the piddly, cramped 400 MHz that Wi-Fi has been allotted to date. Combined with efficiency gains of Wi-Fi 6 in general, this means 6E will yield much faster throughput, with lower latency than you can get with the normal 5 GHz band, and certainly more than 2.4 GHz. In fact, the speeds promised by a Wi-Fi 6E routers topoing 2 Gbps -- a realistic number in our testing with Asus’ GT-AXE11000, where we saw transfer speeds over the local network of more than 1.8 Gbps. We also saw lower network latency in testing. For instance, when pinging our MacBook Air from a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, we rarely saw latency over 10 ms on the 6 GHz band. But while on the 5 GHz band with the same equipment, pings fell between 10 and 20 ms throughout the test, with all other things being equal. 

With all of this space, network traffic now comes with a massive amount of headroom. So when your Wi-Fi 6E network is cluttered up with lots of devices, it should still be speedy (limited Internet bandwidth notwithstanding). And in part, this will be true because there won’t be any old devices on the 6 GHz band. You can’t get Wi-Fi 6E compatibility via firmware upgrade; products must be designed specifically to take advantage of the new tech.

Of course, there are other drawbacks to the new technology: Solid objects become a bigger issue, for example. As radio waves increase their frequency, they have a tendency to become more sensitive to interference, particularly by physical barriers, reducing their already-shorter range. This is why you may still get a signal at greater distances with a 2.4 GHz transmission than a 5 GHz one. 

Some routers compensate for this by simply boosting the signal, which is why you see gaming routers with arachnophobia-inducing antenna arrays. Unfortunately, that approach may not be as effective with Wi-Fi 6E, as transmitted data on the 6 GHz band falls under FCC regulations identical to the 5 GHz band. In other words, an access point may transmit with up to 30 dBm conducted power, or 36 dBm of equivalent isotropically-radiated power (EIRP), where a client device has more stringent requirements, at 24 dBm and 30 dBm, respectively. With the slightly higher frequency of 6 GHz, this effectively means the capped-out usable range is lower than that of devices transmitting on the 5 GHz band. 

This was also borne out in testing. While our previous test data showed quite fast speed over great distances, testing with Wi-Fi 6E showed a massive dropoff even 25 feet from the router. At that distance, the signal dropped below -60 dBm and barely extended out to about 50 feet. Beyond that, the 6E-capable device we tested with completely lost its signal and the 6GHz band of this network was no longer visible.

Keep in mind, though, that the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 we tested with was one of the first 6E models available, and our review also noted some issues with the latest firmware. So our results may not be indicative of performance months or years down the line when device makers have perfected both the software and hardware behind 6E.

Lastly, there has been a trend of tri-band routers making it to market that boast not one, but two 5 GHz-broadcasting radios, which doubles the bandwidth available on the 5 GHz band. However, although new Wi-Fi 6E routers are, by necessity, tri-band, they get there at the expense of that second 5 GHz band, which will reduce the available bandwidth for those clients not yet capable of using the 6 GHz band. 

For many people, this is likely not an issue, but for a household full of technology enthusiasts in densely-populated areas who still own many now-legacy 5 GHz devices, this could be problematic. However, down the line as users replace those devices with Wi-Fi 6E-compatible equivalents, that could actually have a dual benefit of not only faster devices on the new band, but fewer devices crowding the 5GHz band, making it faster and more reliable as well -- provided the space made isn’t backfilled with more legacy devices, of course.

None of this is not to say that that Wi-Fi 6 router you just bought will be useless. You’ll still see excellent speeds throughout your home and, at least in our testing, the functional max throughput range of the current crop of 6E routers and devices covers an area small enough that wired networking would be an easy, probably cheaper solution for most. 

However, as 6E evolves and as mesh router manufacturers take up the new tech, we will likely begin to see wireless internet that is so fast that most people will never even need to consider Ethernet at all. Frankly, given current technology, that’s already quite possible, apart from certain edge cases like competitive online gaming and banks of storage drives in 10 GbE-equipped NAS units, etc. For those for whom that isn’t important, we’ll simply have to wait a bit and watch as Wi-Fi 6 and 6E support propagates through the industry before thinking about pulling that Ethernet plug.

Nine years ago this week, my son was born and, to mark the occasion, I wrote an article, predicting 15 current technologies he would never use, because they would be obsolete by the time he would have a reason to interact with them. Now, as Isaac turns 9, it’s a good time to take a look back at my predictions and assess their accuracy. 

Why revisit an article that I wrote for a different website (laptopmag.com) nearly a decade ago? Analyzing the ambitious predictions I made at that time provides an abject lesson in how slowly technology actually changes and how soon children are exposed to grown-up gadgets. 

Looking at my listicle proves that I have no future as a futurist. Predictions like the death of windowed operating systems and the end of mice seem crazy right now, but were based on trends that were big at the time (everything going touch). Still, I got a few things right and other predictions are likely to prove true, just a few years later than I expected. 

Let’s have a look back at my predictions.

1.  No More Wired Home Internet 

In 2012, I predicted that, within a few years, ISPs would stop running fiber optic cables to customer’s homes and deliver home broadband via cellular. At the time, we’d seen some weak attempts at wireless home Internet, including some WiMAX plans from Clear (remember them?) and it seemed like the end of wires was just around the corner.

Fast forward 9 years and we’re just now starting to see the start of a movement toward home 5G. T-Mobile just launched its Home Internet service and Verizon 5G Home is available in 28 cities. Wired continues to be, by far, the dominant way to deliver reliable Internet to your home or office.

However, there’s reason to believe that fixed 5G Internet will be the dominant form of home and small business connectivity by the time Isaac enters college. 

“I do believe that in the long term it will happen,” Anshel Sag, a senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told me. “The reason why is because the fixed costs of upgrading traditional copper and fiber infrastructure for individual users simply does not scale to meet the demand of all connected devices.”

Sag said that 5G is still in its infancy and that it will take three to four years before carriers have the bandwidth and availability that they need to compete with wired home Internet and another three to four years after that for consumers to start making the shift en masse. The key, he noted, is adding C-Band and more capacity in mid-band and millimeter wave. 

Once fixed 5G Internet goes mainstream, it will provide more competition and faster speeds to everyone from home users in rural areas to small businesses who are tired of their landlords deciding what carrier gets to wire the buildings. However, Sag says, you will still need a router as customers will have one large, high-performance receiver that sits near a window (or even outside) rather than giving every device in the home its own 5G connection.

Prediction Verdict: TBD. It looks like my son will remember using wired home Internet as a child, like I remember using rotary phones.  

2.  No Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders

In 2012, I predicted that point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders were so dead that my son would never use them. This has turned out to be correct. While he’s seen my mother, who is slow to give up on old tech, using her ancient Panasonic point-and-shoot, he’s never used a dedicated camera himself. 

Even nine years ago, it was easy to see that, outside of high-quality DSLR and mirrorless cameras, standalone cameras were over. According to NPD VP of Industry Analysis Stephen Baker, who studies consumer tech markets for a living, the market for point and shoots has shrunk by 90 percent since 2013.

Prediction Verdict: Right

3.  He Won’t Live with Landline Phones

This is kind of a gimme. When my wife was pregnant with Isaac, we canceled our home phone and went cellphone exclusive and, even in 2012, we were late to the game. So I predicted that my son would never use a landline phone and I also made it happen.

That being said, VoIP landline phones are still a part of many peoples’ lives. Cable and fiber optic providers continue to offer these services and many people, including my mom, still have them. When I was working in an office (pre-covid), we still had desk phones with individual numbers, but there are good reasons why a business would want to do that (ex: keeping work and home numbers separate).

Will my son grow up to have a home phone? No way. Could he work in an office that has business lines? Quite possibly.

Prediction Verdict: Right

4.  His Computers Will All Boot Super Fast 

In 2012, I wrote that, by the time my son uses computers, “new operating systems will be able to install updates and patches without requiring a reboot. However, if for some reason, you do need to restart the computer, boots will take only a couple of seconds”

I got this wrong (so far) because I overestimated how quickly operating systems and solid-state storage would improve and underestimated how young my son would be when he started using PCs. Isaac has been using PCs for several years now and all of them boot in around 30 seconds. That’s pretty fast, but it’s a far cry from “two seconds.”

Windows update hasn’t gotten any less annoying in the last 9 years and, if anything, it has gotten worse, with ever more required updates and even occasional errors. However, if you really want, you can get Windows 10 to boot pretty quickly as we managed to start it under 5 seconds after disabling a whole bunch of services. The one saving grace here is that, like most of us, Isaac puts his laptop to sleep and rarely reboots.

Prediction Verdict: Wrong 

5.  He’ll Never Use a Windowed Operating System

I predicted that, by the time Isaac was ready to use a computer, desktop GUIs would no longer have windows that you drag around and resize. Instead, I posited, touch-friendly UIs would dominate, not only on mobile devices, but even on computers. I got this wrong and I’m glad that I did.

Back in 2012, tablets were everywhere and Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, favored touch input over traditional mouse and keyboard use, eschewing the Start Menu for a screen full of finger-friendly tiles. Microsoft also pushed users and developers toward a new class of “modern apps,” which had large fonts and icons and were meant to run at either full screen or side by side, not in draggable windows. 

Though I hated Windows 8, I thought it was a harbinger of a world where every desktop OS, even macOS and Linux would be windowless. Thankfully, users rejected the Windows 8 UI in droves and everyone in the industry realized that what works on a mobile device isn’t ideal for a PC. 

Isaac has been using windowed operating systems since he was maybe five or six, so they seem very natural to him. His first one wasn’t Windows, but Kano OS, a flavor of Linux running on the Raspberry Pi. 

Prediction: Wrong 

6.  He Won’t Use a Computer with a Mechanical Hard Drive 

In my original article, I wrote “by the time my son gets his first new laptop, you won't be able to buy one without an SSD.”  As a hardware enthusiast, I was an early adopter of SSDs so I was using them in my PCs before Isaac was born in 2012. 

So every PC he’s used has had solid-state storage of some kind. The Raspberry Pis we spend so much time doing projects with boot off of microSD cards. The only hard drives he’s used were in older game consoles: an Xbox One and a PS3. 

He hasn’t technically gotten “his first new laptop” yet, because his daily driver is a hand-me-down, my old ThinkPad T440s, which has two SSDs. However, even if he bought one today, he’d most likely be getting one with an SSD as even sub-$300 systems now come standard with solid-state storage. If he was buying or building a desktop or configuring a gaming laptop, he could still get one with a hard drive inside for bulk storage, but SSDs are so cheap now that they’ve become standard. 

Prediction Verdict: Right 

7.  He Won’t Go to the Movies

In 2012, I predicted that movie theaters would die soon, but I didn’t say exactly how soon it would be. Isaac has gone to a couple of movies in the theatre, but as the past year has shown, theatres are on their way out and he may not be going to the movies at all as an adult.

In my original article, I said that a confluence of factors would kill movie theatres: the improving quality of home theaters, the eventual death of the 90-day theatrical window and the cost and hassle of the movie-going experience. I wrongly thought that 3D TV sets would play a role by making the theatre 3D experience moot, but they turned out to be a fad. 

However, ticket sales have been declining steadily since 2012, though in 2019, people still took 1.2 billion trips to the movies worldwide. The pandemic threw sales off a cliff in 2021, with just 223 million tickets sold, but even as life starts returning to normal, the box office will not. 

A number of major studios dumped the 90-day theatrical window in 2020 and 2021 and consumers saw how much more convenient it is to just stay home. Plus, if there’s any risk of getting exposed to diseases, many people will make the calculation that it’s just not worth the hassle. Theaters are even more dead than before. I’ll miss them, sort of.

Prediction Verdict: TBD, but likely to happen in a few more years.

8.  He Won’t Use a Mouse

In one of my worst predictions, I opined that my son would never use a mouse, because touch interfaces would replace point and click ones by the time he was ready to use a computer. This wasn’t wishful thinking on my part, because I prefer using a keyboard -- the clicker the better -- and mouse for productivity. 

Again, I thought Windows 8 and the rise of tablets was indicative of an anti-mouse trend. I also thought my son wouldn’t be using a computer until he was much older, but he’s been working with Linux-based Raspberry Pis and later Windows PCs, both with mice, since he was five. 

In the larger world, mice have remained popular too. According to Baker, sales in 2020 were 13 percent higher than in 2013, though he noted that, in the years between those dates, sales were basically flat. 

Prediction Verdict: Laughably wrong 

9.  He Won’t Use 3D Glasses, Because 3D Will Be Glasses-Free 

Around the time my son was born, it seemed like home 3D entertainment was the next big thing. The market was filled with 3D TVs, though people understandably hated using the expensive and bulky glasses that you had to wear for them. 

At the time, I had also seen a number of promising glasses-free 3D technologies in the years before my son was born. In 2011, Toshiba introduced the Qosmio F755, a 3D notebook with a webcam that used eye tracking technology to output 3D, without glasses. And two smartphones, the HTC Evo 3D and the LG Thrill also had glasses-free 3D. It seemed like only a matter of time before glasses-free 3D was everywhere and worked for multiple viewers at the same time.

Based on these trends, in my 2012 article, I predicted that “by the time my son is 10, large-screened devices like TVs will be able to offer a compelling glasses-free 3D experience to many viewers at the same time.”

My son won’t turn 10 until next year, but I can already call this one incorrect. The market for 3D TV and 3D phones, with or without glasses, has been dead for years. Lifewire’s Robert Silva, who wrote a post-mortem for 3D TV, notes that companies stopped making these sets all the way back in 2016. In analyzing their failure, Silva cites more than half a dozen factors, including competing standards, expensive glasses, poor image quality and no evolution to 4K. On the other hand, my prediction got one thing right: my son isn’t using 3D glasses.

Prediction Verdict: Wrong

10.  He Won’t Use a Remote Control 

Remote controls are an old and often frustrating technology. Most of them use infrared to connect your home entertainment system so, if there’s anything blocking the line of sight, they don’t work. And, despite the promise of universal remotes, we always end up with piles  of different remotes that go missing. 

So, in my article, I predicted that “by the time my son enters grade school,” remote controls would be replaced by either smartphone apps or gesture / voice commands. On the bright side, you can replace almost any remote with a smartphone app, depending on your TV, cable box or streaming box. You can also use voice assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant to control your home theater. 

However, devices still come with dedicated pack-in remotes and most people still use them, because they are just so convenient. My son still uses the regular remote, though in theory, he could avoid it.

Prediction Verdict: Wrong 

11.  There Won’t Be Desktop PCs

The worst prediction I made in 2012 was that PC vendors would stop producing “most” desktop computers within six years. Laptops were getting a lot faster in the years before then and, in the last 9 years, the performance and price gap between desktop and mobile PCs has continued to narrow. 

In fact, if you’re looking to buy a prebuilt, non-gaming budget PC, there’s not much benefit to getting a desktop. For example, today at Best Buy, $399 gets you either type of system with a Core i3 / Ryzen 3, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Sure, a desktop CPU is faster than the equivalent mobile one, but for non-techie consumers, the laptop seems like a better option because it’s portable and has a screen built right in. 

But, for those of us who truly care about performance or want the pride that comes from building your own computer, there’s still nothing like a desktop. According to Baker, prebuilt desktops accounted for 20 percent of consumer PC sales in 2013, but dropped to just 13 percent in 2020, so the numbers are down a bit. 

However, the number of people building their own desktops is on the rise. According to Baker, people bought 1.7 million empty PC cases in 2020, up from around 1 million in recent years. As for my son, he helped me build a desktop last summer.

Prediction Verdict: Wrong

12.  He Won’t Dial Phone Numbers

I predicted that, by the time my son is in high school, he’ll be contacting friends using online messaging or video chat of some kind and never even share phone numbers. But why wait? At the age of 9, he has no idea what anyone’s phone number is and he’s never dialed one, but he still gets and receives calls from friends and family on Facebook messenger.

Given how slowly standards like this change, I don’t think that the idea of having a unique phone number for each person / SIM card is going away by the time he’s in high school. However, I firmly believe that he probably won’t be communicating via standard phone with his friends at all. For the foreseeable future, though, we’ll still need old-fashioned phone connections to call businesses.

Prediction Verdict: Mostly Right

13.  He Won’t Watch TV in Primetime

In 2012, I posited that the growing popularity of streaming services, cord-cutting and time-shifting would lead to the end of “Prime Time” television, that magic period between 8 and 11 pm where all the hottest TV programs air. 

Fast forward 9 years and these trends have accelerated. For many of us, the real prime time is whenever Disney+ posts this week’s episode of Falcon and Winter Soldier or Amazon drops the next episode of the Expanse (in both cases, usually 3 am ET). However, traditional broadcast networks like ABC, NBC and CBS still release their best content during Prime Time and, given the way ratings drive commercial revenue for them, they are unlikely to change anytime soon, even though viewers are changing their habits and watching these same programs at different times via the web.

As for my son, he has never sat down to watch a Prime Time show, unless it just happened to be on and he caught it by accident. My guess is that he will never in his life say something like “I can’t go anywhere at 9 pm on Friday, because the X-Files is on,” which is what I would say back in the 1990s.

Prediction Verdict: Right 

14.  He’ll Never Use a Fax Machine 

I predicted that my son would never use a fax machine and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he hasn’t proven me wrong in his first 9 years. Some businesses and financial transactions still use faxes, because of issues accepting digital signatures. However, given that we can now scan and email documents or, in a worst case scenario, use fax software, there is zero need for a fax machine. I can’t remember the last time I sent or received a fax.

Baker said NPD no longer tracks fax machines so can’t even tell us how poorly they are selling. However, the market is full of printer / scanner/ fax combination devices so it’s always possible that someone is using those to actually send faxes.

Prediction Verdict: Right 

15. Optical Discs Will Be Gone  

In my article, I said that “it may take until my son turns 10 for the major entertainment companies to stop publishing in DVD and Blu-ray format, but make no mistake, discs aren’t long for this world.” He’s 9 now, but I’m pretty sure we won’t see the end of Blu-ray by next year so this prediction was premature.

In my son’s life, he’s used optical discs many times in PS3 and XBox game consoles. He’s also seen our collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, but noted that we almost never watch them and, in fact, we disconnected our Blu-ray player. So, now that we no longer play XBox or PS3, we are in effect a disc-free household at present.

However, there’s good reason to believe that optical discs and physical media in general will survive for quite a bit longer and that good reason is “when you own the disc, you actually own the content.” In the past several years, savvy consumers, especially movie buffs, have seen many instances where an online service either lost the rights to content or went out of business. The terms of service at many online movie and game services even say that they can’t be held liable if the content you bought suddenly goes offline forever. And there’s no good way to sell or trade-in a game or movie you own digitally. 

So where does that leave us? Some people will continue to buy movies that they want to keep on Blu-ray and, because of the trading of used games, even new consoles have optical drives at least as an option. However, the convenience of streaming means that those sales will get smaller and smaller over time.

Prediction Verdict: Wrong

Bottom Line

I have several takeaways from the exercise of making and evaluating these predictions. First and most importantly, the “higher tech thing” isn’t always the best thing for usability, even if companies want to push consumers toward it. 

At the time my son was born, it seemed like the leading platform vendors, especially Microsoft, were trying to kill the keyboard / mouse and windowed OS UI concept that had existed since the 1980s and replace it with touch-only interfaces. I hated this trend (I still miss having a keyboarded phone), but I thought it was inevitable. However, users pushed back, Windows 8 was an abject failure and today traditional PCs with windowed GUIs continue to hold their place alongside mobile devices with touch.

Second, It takes a really long time for well-established technologies to completely “die,” even if as with fax, everyone agrees that they are lame and need to go. But more often the reason that technologies hang around is that there are still good reasons for them. Optical discs are much less convenient than streaming, but they let you actually “own” whatever content you bought.

Finally, never underestimate the speed at which a child learns. I didn’t get my first PC until I was 13 and didn’t do my first build until 19 so I assumed my son wouldn’t be using “grown up” technology for a long time. Instead, he got his first tablet at age 1, was using Raspberry Pis by 5 and programming in text-based languages and using the command line by 7 and helping me build a PC at 8.

Mythic Beasts, a private ISP hosting platform, announced the addition of the Raspberry Pi 4 to its Raspberry Pi Cloud service this week. Users can now choose to use a Raspberry Pi 4 model to host their server needs, a considerable upgrade to the previously offered Raspberry Pi 3.

Mythic Beasts pegs its Pi hosting service as a great way to access Pi hardware and Raspberry Pi OS "backed by network storage" and pay for it monthly, quarterly, annually or on demand. 

Raspberry Pi Cloud relies heavily on network boot order. This helps ensures hardware reliability. But when the Pi 4 came out, it didn't have any network boot support. Thanks to a new firmware upgrade with full PXE boot support, the Pi 4 is officially on the table for Pi Cloud. 

As the latest Pi, the Raspberry Pi 4 offers much more performance than predecessors. Mythic Beasts is offering up to 4GB of RAM (it doesn't offer the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4). The network card also operates at full gigabit speed. This should increase bandwidth and significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to access files.

The Raspberry Pi Cloud service is ideal for web-based server needs, like web hosting and even low resource gaming demands, such as a Minecraft server. Pi Wheels, a project to pre-compile Python installation candidates for many packages, uses Pi Cloud and has beta tested it with Pi 4, Mythic Beasts' announcement said. 

If you're interested in hosting a server on the Raspberry Pi Cloud, pricing for the Pi 4 server starts at  £7.25 per month. 

For those who'd like to run their own Pi-based web server, visit our instructions on how to set up a Raspberry Pi web server. 

Lenovo is ready to ship its 5G laptop, the Lenovo Flex 5G. It will be the first to market on June 18, for $1,399.99.

In the US, the Flex 5G will be available through Verizon with an option for a 24-month payment plan. The system will be sold through the carrier or Lenovo’s website and include a 1-year personal subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal.

In some other markets, the device will be branded the Lenovo Yoga 5G (which is what it was called when we saw it back at CES). It will be available through EE in the UK, Sunrise in Switzerland and CMCC in China, as well as on Lenovo.com in certain markets. The company says there will be more pricing options and 5G data plans listed by these carriers in the coming months.

The Flex 5G is a thin 2-in-1 running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx 5G CPU, along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS storage. It has a 14-inch, 1920 x 1080 touch screen. As for 5G, Lenovo is supporting both mmWave and Sub-6 GHz in a patented 5G antenna system, which Lenovo says is the smallest 5G module in the industry.

Additionally, Lenovo is making big promises on battery life: up to 24 hours with the 60 Whr battery. Lenovo tested that offline with video playback.

Perhaps one of the biggest struggles for the Flex 5G and other laptops supporting 5G networks is the sparse rollout so far. While some major cities are seeing coverage, even that’s spotty.

The folks over at broadbandnow.com have completed their research for the impact of the Coronavirus on web activity and found that of the top 200 cities in the U.S., 88 (44%) are suffering from reduced download speeds due to increased web activity.

For the testing, the firm measured broadband speeds over the week of March 15 - March 21, comparing the figures to the speeds 10 weeks earlier before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The three worst offenders are Austin TX, with a 44% hit, Oxnard CA, at 42%, and Winston Salem NC with a 41% decrease in download speeds. 

New York City is witnessing a 24 percent drop in download speeds.

What is Causing the Dips?

With the majority of folks stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for web data has increased exponentially over the last two weeks. Many people are working from home, taking classes from home, or unable to go to work and quarantined at home. The result is that home broadband connections are seeing a severe uptake in demand to meet users' needs, with the networks under high strain to keep up.

Meanwhile, Netflix and other content providers are cutting image quality during peak hours in order to ensure that data connections don't end up congested, allowing those that work from home to continue to do their jobs as effectively as possible -- after all, they're a big factor that's keeping the economy above water.

Various ISPs around the U.S. have lifted data caps temporarily, and are expanding free access for low-income customers where possible. The first of these was AT&T, who set an example for the industry to follow.

Verizon, shocking absolutely no one, said on March 17 that Americans played 75% more video games week-over-week as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The company said it saw a 75% increase in traffic on its network this week. Individual categories saw different surges: gaming rose 75%, VPN usage rose 34%, web traffic grew 20% and video streaming rose 12%. Social media (surprisingly) stayed flat.

We already suspected that people were playing more games after being advised to stay home from work (and damn near every other aspect of their lives) because Steam set a new record of 20.3 million concurrent users on March 15.

Verizon's report confirmed that people are playing more online games. It's possible that most of those Steam users were actually using their PCs for something else, but we doubt that Verizon included non-active users in a report on increased data usage.

Verizon CTO Kyle Malady said in the report:

“We’re in an unprecedented situation. We continually evaluate peak data usage times and build our networks to stay ahead of that demand. While it is not clear yet how having millions of additional people working from home will impact usage patterns, we remain ready to address changes in demand, if needed.”

This increase wasn't restricted to the U.S. The Financial Times reported yesterday that European Union officials asked Netflix to throttle some of its traffic in an effort to prevent broadband providers from being overwhelmed by increased usage.

The EU has warned that broadband connections are being strained, as millions are working from home or seeking entertainment digitally whilst practicing social distancing to fight coronavirus as reported by Financial Times. today. 

One of the first steps the EU is taking to manage the situation is requesting Netflix to reduce its data traffic, along with YouTube and other streaming services. Entertainment is clearly in high demand currently, but simply limiting image quality could reduce broadband traffic significantly.

These steps are meant to ensure that those working from home can continue to rely on their internet connections. Although EU net-neutrality regulations prevent throttling, it's been reported that exceptions may needed during this global pandemic to prioritize work-from-home traffic over entertainment traffic. This is also a logical conclusion -- the economy is already suffering enough, and those working from home are key to minimizing the damage.

The increase in traffic is a clear consequence of recommendations to socially distance yourself from others to help stop the spread of COVID-19, as people flock to remote communication services, such as FaceTime and Skype. for recharging their social battery. Children taking classes from home and increased game downloads, game streaming and content streaming aren't helping either.

Nevertheless, internet and content providers are adamant that the situation is under control, claiming that they have adequate headroom in their networks to deal with such traffic surges. 

Netflix explained that it already stores content closer to its customers, reducing long-distance internet traffic, which also eases the burden. German Internet Exchange Operator DE-CIX witnessed record traffic through its networks to date, though the figures still fall well within its headroom margins.

For the time being, the EU broadband situation appears to be under control. But note that not all countries in the EU have strict stay-at-home policies yet, so internet traffic in the region is expected to rise before it falls. 

In light of the Coronavirus spreading throughout the U.S., AT&T has decided to lift broadband data caps for home internet users in the U.S, as reported by Vice. This is to ensure that those stuck at home due to closed workplaces, closed schools, or quarantines don't end up racking huge charges on additional internet usage that they otherwise wouldn't have dealt with. 

Meanwhile, a group of U.S. Senators is demanding that the other home broadband providers throughout the U.S. do the same, as part of a 'whole-of-society response.'

"No one should be penalized or suffer financial duress for following guidance from the CDC, their employer, local public health officials, or school leaders." reads the letter. "Unfortunately, many Americans are subject to restrictive data caps for their home broadband service -- caps that could be particularly onerous given the more intensive broadband usage of households practicing social distancing measures and the economic uncertainty for which too many people without paid sick leave are already bracing."

AT&T's broadband caps range from 150 GB to 1 TB for those not on an unlimited plan, and extra data costs $10 per added 50 GB, with a maximum of between $100 and $200 added charges per month.

“Many of our AT&T Internet customers already have unlimited home internet access, and we are waiving internet data overage for the remaining customers,” an AT&T spokesperson told Vice. 

This is a rather selfless move from the company, though very fair. Many businesses are suffering heavily from the Coronavirus outbreak, but due to people's dependence on certain products and services, companies such as AT&T can easily profit from the crisis be they inclined to do so. 

A few months back we thought the Coronavirus damage would remain limited to China. There, the local economy came to a standstill, with various factories closing and local demand plummeting. It is now clear that this same pattern is happening elsewhere in the world too, with Europe being hit as well as the U.S. 

With factories, schools, shops, cafes, and workplaces closed, lots of sectors are suffering immense financial damage from the 2019-nCov outbreak. As no single organization can be held responsible for the outbreak, and insurance doesn't cover nearly all of the damage wrought, everyone should do their part to ensure minimal economic damage. As such, we're seeing trends like these, where companies try their best to give back to the public. Examples are AT&T lifting broadband caps, MSI extending warranties by two months and the world's most powerful supercomputer being put to work on finding a cure. If you're willing to deal with a small added electricity cost, you can even donate your computer's leftover resources to help find a cure.

Of course, the best thing you can do to help is to ensure proper hygiene, and, if you suspect that you may have contracted the Coronavirus, stay home and do not come in contact with other people.

Meanwhile, we look forward to more companies offering up their methods of sharing the burden, especially those that are otherwise financially unaffected by the outbreak.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019 on Thursday. The bill, which now heads to Donald Trump for approval, would establish a $1 billion fund to help rural telecommunications networks remove and replace Huawei and ZTE equipment.

U.S. federal agencies have been banned from purchasing Huawei and ZTE equipment through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019. The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act would prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from supporting the purchase of that equipment by service providers.

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The bill's passage comes shortly after the FCC adopted a rule preventing telecoms from using the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes the expansion of broadband availability throughout the country, to purchase equipment from "companies posing a national security threat" (read: Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies).

Yesterday, the FCC announced that it "began collecting information from telecommunications carriers on the use of Huawei and ZTE equipment and services in their networks." Universal Service Fund recipients have until April 22 to share this information with the FCC via a dedicated web portal.

The FCC said it wants to know "whether carriers own or are using equipment or services from Huawei or ZTE; the type of such equipment or services; the costs associated with purchasing and/or installing such equipment and services; and the costs associated with removing and replacing such equipment and services."

Huawei gave The Hill the following statement in response to the bill's passage:

"Unfortunately, the legislation that was just passed is considerably underfunded, would take longer than anticipated and could put at risk some of our customers, who serve the most underserved areas. This legislation will simply reduce the ability of broadband providers to provide the most secure network equipment and in turn hurt local consumers and businesses."

We wouldn't be surprised if Huawei contests this decision--it's sued the U.S. government multiple times over the last few years. A District Court judge recently said the company couldn't sue over the federal government's equipment ban, however, because the rule merely affects how the government spends its money.

This bill--as well as the FCC's rule--are similar in concept. U.S. telecoms providers are technically allowed to use Huawei and ZTE equipment; they simply can't use funds from the Universal Service Fund to do so. We'll see how the companies respond if or when President Trump signs the bill into law.

Huawei today announced that it's filed multiple patent infringement lawsuits against Verizon, which it accused of violating 12 of its U.S. patents, after failing to reach a settlement despite negotiating for what Huawei called "a significant period of time."

The lawsuit follows June 2019 reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times indicating that Huawei believed Verizon had violated several of its patents. Huawei was reportedly seeking $1 billion in licensing fees to resolve the dispute.

Huawei said that it "provided a detailed list of patents and factual evidence of Verizon’s use of Huawei patents" during the companies' negotiations. They couldn't reach an agreement, though, which is why the dispute is now heading to court.

Here's what Huawei said about the potential cost of this alleged patent infringement:

"Huawei re-invests 10% to 15% of its revenue in R&D each year. The company has spent more than $70 billion U.S. dollars on R&D in the past decade, which has resulted in more than 80,000 patents worldwide – including over 10,000 patents in the United States alone. These innovations are not just the cornerstone of Huawei's own success; they are also widely used by companies around the world, delivering value both in the United States and elsewhere."

The company also said that it's earned $1.4 billion in patent licensing fees since 2015 and also paid out over $6 billion to license other companies' technologies in that timeframe. Some 80% of that was said to have gone to U.S. companies.

Huawei filed the lawsuits in the United States District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas and said in its announcement it's "seeking compensation for Verizon's use of patented technology" for ongoing royalty payments and an unspecified amount of compensation. 

Verizon also released a statement today:

"Huawei’s lawsuit filed overnight, in the very early morning, is nothing more than a PR stunt. This lawsuit is a sneak attack on our company and the entire tech ecosystem. Huawei’s real target is not Verizon; it is any country or company that defies it. The action lacks merit, and we look forward to vigorously defending ourselves."

UK-based broadband comparison website Cable.co.uk has published its annual global broadband pricing information and put the U.S. in the 119th spot in terms of pricing for consumer Internet access, as spotted by TechSpot. Last year, the U.S. didn't fare much better and ranked 104th.

That's not to say that prices for broadband in the U.S. are going up. Rather, the year-on-year cost has dropped by $17.69 for the average subscription. But that hasn't done much to help the position in the global rankings, since prices for broadband have been falling all over the world. 

The cable comparison site noted that global broadband speeds increased by 20.65% on average between 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, the average price of a broadband package decreased by 19.975% between the end of 2018 and beginning of 2020, it said. 

Despite the almost abysmal rankings for pricing on the global scale, the U.S. fares quite well when it comes to broadband speeds. In 2017, the average connection in the U.S. had a speed of 20 Mbps. In 2018 that figure rose to 25.86 Mbps, and in 2019 it jumped to 32.89 Mbps. Consequently, the U.S. is in 15th place when it comes to average broadband speed connections.

Leading the connection speed charts is Taiwan with an average connection speed of 85.02 Mbps, and Yemen takes last place at a meager 0.38 Mbps.

Back to prices. The most expensive country is Eritrea, where the average cost of fixed-line broadband is  a painful $2,666.24 per month. Yemen followed closely at $2,466.67, and the third most expensive location was Mauritania with an average cost of $694.63. Note that in many parts of the world, large portions of the population don't use broadband, and less developed countries often rely on mobile data connections rather than fixed-line connections for Internet access. 

If you want the cheapest fixed-line Internet access, you'll have to move to Syria, where the average broadband connection costs just $6.60 a month.

Many kids learn to count before they even reach kindergarten. Yet, it seems that skill is quickly forgotten, because the FCC voted yesterday to force Internet service providers (ISPs) to more accurately count the number of people to whom they offer broadband Internet access. That knowledge should make it easier to figure out how many Americans truly have broadband Internet access in a time when connectivity is more important than ever.

The FCC previously allowed ISPs to report their broadband Internet coverage using the same large "blocks" as the U.S. Census Bureau (there are millions, and each can have up to 3,000 people). That's already questionable, but it gets worse. ISPs could say they covered an entire block even if they only provided broadband access to a single home, for example, and could also say they covered any blocks to which they could theoretically offer service "without an extraordinary commitment of resources."

We've played board games with stricter rules on how things should be counted. If the FCC needed a warning that its perception of U.S. broadband Internet access was skewed, the fact that having a fair Settlers of Catan game requires more rigor than reporting ISP coverage should've been it, right? But it's only making these changes a decade after Congress told it to adopt the National Broadband Plan to ensure high-speed Internet access.

The FCC said in yesterday's announcement that it "initiated a new process for collecting fixed broadband data to better pinpoint where broadband service is lacking," and because "there is a compelling and immediate need to develop more granular broadband deployment data to meet this goal," it's creating the Digital Opportunity Data Collection. (With the "collection" in this case being the noun, not the verb, despite it literally collecting things.)

The Digital Opportunity Data Collection will "collect geospatial broadband coverage maps from fixed broadband Internet service providers of areas where they make fixed service available" to "facilitate development of granular, high-quality fixed broadband deployment maps, which should improve the FCC’s ability to target support for broadband expansion through the agency’s Universal Service Fund programs." Basically: it's going to count correctly.

The FCC said it will also make it easier to report inaccuracies with coverage areas reported by ISPs. That's supposed to be enabled by a new "crowd-sourcing portal that will gather input from consumers as well as from state, local and Tribal governments." The commission is mulling other changes, too, such as similar updates to how wireless Internet providers report their own coverage areas. Better counting isn't just for broadband connections.

But there are a few concerns with the FCC's new counting methods. Ars Technica reported that FCC commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks were concerned about several aspects of the new plan. Rosenworcel noted that ISPs won't be required to report the price of broadband Internet access, which again means they could say they cover an area even if nobody who lives there can actually afford high-speed Internet.

Starks also wondered if the FCC plans to verify the data reported by ISPs or if it will merely take it on blind faith. (Because if there's one thing companies love, it's...being completely honest and transparent with regulators...ahem.) There were also concerns about having the Universal Service Administrative Company non-profit organization collect this data even though it hasn't done anything similar since it was established in 1996.

Still, this appears to at least be a step toward progress, especially considering this comes from the same FCC leadership that dismantled net neutrality protections amid massive opposition. Let's just hope ISPs have enough fingers and toes between them to relearn counting in time to provide accurate data for these new maps rather than 'accidentally' overestimating the number of people they can serve.

Amazon wants the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to give it the go-ahead to launch 3,236 satellites that would be used to establish a globe-spanning internet network. Seeking Alpha reported that Amazon expects "to offer service to tens of millions of underserved customers around the world" via the network, which the company is developing under the code-name Project Kuiper.

News of Project Kuiper broke in April, when Amazon uncharacteristically confirmed its work on the project to GeekWire. The company often declines to comment on reports concerning its plans; it seems the development of thousands of internet-providing satellites is the exception. The company had yet to seek FCC approval for the project, though, which is what Seeking Alpha reported today.

So what does this plan to offer space internet with a weird name actually involve? Amazon explained in April:

“Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. We look forward to partnering on this initiative with companies that share this common vision.”

Expanding Internet access has become something of an obsession among tech companies. Google offers fiber Internet services as well as its own cellular network, Facebook scrapped plans to offer internet access via drones in June 2018, and Amazon isn't the only company hoping to use low Earth orbit satellites to allow previously unconnected people to finally join the rest of the world online. It's a bit of a trend.

Project Kuiper could potentially bring Amazon closer to Blue Origin, the space exploration company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, should they collaborate on the satellite network. Even if the companies don't, connecting more people to the Internet could be a boon for Amazon. The company wouldn't necessarily have to convince those people to buy things from its marketplace, either, thanks to the variety of digital services it offers.

Huawei is going down swinging. Despite facing intense scrutiny as the result of its blacklisting by the U.S. in May, the company is reportedly accusing Verizon of infringing on 238 of its patents, with the hope of forcing the wireless carrier into a costly licensing agreement. And "costly" is an understatement: An unidentified source told The New York Times that Huawei could seek up to $1 billion in licensing fees.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Huawei first made these accusations in February. That was before its addition to the Entity List, which led many tech companies to cease business with it, but after the U.S. made it abundantly clear that it was suspicious of the company by having Canada arrest its chief financial officer. (And amid rumors that it would be banned entirely from U.S. wireless networks.)

It's hard not to read these reports without thinking Huawei may be desperate. The company has largely denied the impact losing U.S. suppliers would have on its business, and seemed ready to fight the U.S. for its right to do business in the country, but there could be a few cracks in that facade. It recently delayed the development of new laptops, for example. Now it's tangling with Verizon.

Verizon previously had an indirect relationship with Huawei; its vendors were the ones buying equipment from the Chinese company. Now, in addition to figuring out its own culpability, the company has to navigate the political ramifications of dealing with Huawei. Part of the reason why trade talks broke down between the U.S. and China (at least according to reports) is the latter's stance on intellectual property theft.

The U.S. feared that Chinese businesses would have an unfair advantage over their U.S. rivals by stealing trade secrets. Those fears come right back to Huawei, too, because the U.S. Department of Justice accused the company of bribing T-Mobile employees in exchange for sharing intellectual property. We live in the Information Age, which means these accusations carry more weight than ever.

Huawei's accusations turn those fears right back around on Verizon. A billion-dollar licensing agreement would have to be carefully considered in any circumstance; now it's also at the heart of a trade war between the U.S. and China. We've cursed Verizon's cellular coverage as much as anyone else, but even we don't begrudge its lawyers the situations they're in.

Russia's attempts to censor and surveil its citizens by cracking down on Internet services is extending into the VPN realm. Russian news agency Interfax recently reported that Roskomnadzor, the country's media and communications regulator, plans to block access to nine VPN services "within a month" for failing to comply with its demands.

Roskomnadzor reportedly told 10 popular VPN providers in March that it would block them from Russia unless they started to follow local regulations. That would require the services to prevent their users from accessing the Russian government's list of banned websites, effectively removing one of the easiest ways to bypass the country's internet censorship. Only one of the providers--Kaspersky Secure Connection--agreed to the regulator's demands.

The other providers contacted by Roskomnadzor include popular services like OpenVPN, NordVPN, four others with VPN in their names, IPVanish, TorGuard and Hide My Ass. Most were explicit in their refusal to comply with the regulator's demands, assuring their users that they weren't interested in perpetuating the Russian government's censorship. TorGuard wiped its servers in Moscow and St. Petersburg to reassure its users.

We don't yet know how successful Roskomnadzor will be in blocking access to these services. Most aren't located in Russia, which limits its ability to force the companies to do anything. But that doesn't mean it won't try, as it proved in April 2018, when it banned millions of IP addresses to stop banned services from using "domain fronting" to evade its censors, (which helped lead Google and Amazon to ban domain fronting on their platforms).

Russia has made it clear that it doesn't plan to ease the pressure on tech companies that limit its ability to control what its citizens access online. It asked Apple to block Telegram from the App Store in June 2018, for example, and recently pressured Facebook to store information on Russian users inside the country. Regulators were also believed to be working with Google to remove links to banned websites and services from its search results.

Soon Kaspersky Secure Connection may be the only major VPN service Russians can legally use. That's probably not a good look for the Moscow-headquartered cybersecurity firm, which moved from Russia to Switzerland to ease international concerns about its connections to the Kremlin. Nine of its counterparts refused to compromise their commitment to fighting censorship. What does Kaspersky being the outlier imply about the vendor and how it views its customers?

Vodafone Has "Gigafast" Broadband Package Adverts Pulled After Virgin Media Calls Them Misleading

The UK ISP Vodafone has had it’s “Gigafast” Broadband adverts banned after Virgin Media challenged them within the courts earlier this year. The issue arose after Virgin Media accused Vodafone of misrepresenting its broadband packages to consumers, as Vodafone’s website, clearly stated that you could achieve an average speed of 900 Mbps, not exactly 1 Gbps. This falls in line with new British legislation launched in May of 2018, stating that internet service providers must only advertise download speeds that are available to at least 50-percent of their account holders during the prime time hours between 8 and 10 pm.

The Advertising Standards Authority, (a consumer watchdog within the UK), stated that most customers would assume the prefix giga to be a “hyperbolic description of speed”, with many being confused or even tricked into believing that their downloads speeds would exceed or be at that fabled 1 Gbps download speed. The watchdog did take into account that those speeds could be possible outside of those peak times, however it pulled Vodafone up on one other point within its advertising campaign, “enjoy Vodafone Gigafast Broadband speeds for as little as £23 a month”. Problem being that to get that top Gigafast package, you’d need to be forking over £48 a month at a minimum, with the £23 package offering 1/10th the speed of its top rated package.

Vodafone reached out to the BBC and stated that the company “had made improvements to our website several months before the ASA ruling to ensure that the cost and speed of each package is as clear as possible”.

There’s definitely an irony to all of this, as those who are typically going to be looking at these packages should be well aware of how networking works, and when you’re most likely to achieve those speeds. An almost assumed knowledge if you will. Nevertheless calling the package Gigafast may have been a poor decision. Openreach (the company behind the fibre infrastructure within the UK), states that this fibre to the property technology is actually called Ultrafast, circumventing that Giga description, and bizarrely the company also has a “Gfast” technology in place currently as well, which can drive up to 330 Mbps download speeds across fibre to the cabinet, and copper to the house properties too (although again only in select areas). If you’re curious what you can get, and you’re not on Virgin cable check out Openreach’s Ultrafast Broadband Checker

Last week, Microsoft said that the Windows 10 DNS issue experienced by many users was resolved. However, a week later, users continue to claim that they still can't access the update service for their operating system. Microsoft has acknowledged that the DNS issue may still be affecting some users until the DNS changes have been propagated to all affected DNS servers.

Windows 10 DNS Issue

Last week, many Windows 10 users that tried to update their operating system were prompted with the error message: "We couldn't connect to the update service. We'll try again later, or you can check now. If it still doesn't work, make sure you're connected to the Internet."

Some users discovered that they could bypass the issue by changing their DNS server addresses in Windows from automatic to specific third-party DNS servers, such as those from OpenNIC, Cloudflare or Google.

Microsoft said that the Windows Update service was impacted by a data corruption issue with an external DNS provider. The company didn’t give anymore details other than that and it did not name the DNS provider that may be at fault. However, the issue seems to have impacted multiple internet service providers (ISPs) around the world, including ISPs from the U.S., UK and Japan. 

Windows 10 DNS Issue Continues

Microsoft also claimed that the issue was resolved the same day it was first reported (January 29); although, it didn't explain how exactly. But a week later, some users continue to report, on places like Reddit, issues with accessing the Windows 10 update system.

In its statement this morning, Microsoft acknowledged that some users may continue to experience problems when trying to access the Windows update service until the fix that was pushed last week has propagated to all the malfunctioning DNS servers. However, until the DNS issue is completely fixed for everyone, you may want to use a third-party DNS server

Enthusiasts know one bad part can render an entire system inoperable. That apparently holds true for Internet service providers like CenturyLink, too, because a single malfunctioning network card reportedly disrupted much of its infrastructure from December 27-29. This disruption resulted in service problems for the company's residential customers, business users, and parts of the 911 emergency system.

Many noticed problems with CenturyLink's services on December 27. But the real danger was confirmed on December 28 when Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai said that he planned to investigate the outage after it "affected 911 service for numerous consumers across the country."

Catapult Systems senior lead consultant Nathan Ziehnert then revealed the outage's cause: "After a 50 hour outage at 15 data centers across the US — impacting cloud, DSL, and 911 services — CenturyLink says the outage is fixed and was caused by a single network card sending bad packets (they’ve since applied bad packet filtering)." That's right--people couldn't call 911 because of some bad packets.

CenturyLink acknowledged the disruption on Twitter but has yet to share any information about the incident on its consumer-facing site, investor relations page, or MediaRoom. We reached out to the company for more details and received the following response:

"The network event experienced by CenturyLink Thursday has been resolved (as of early Saturday morning). Services for business and residential customers affected by the event have been restored. CenturyLink knows how important connectivity is to our customers, so we view any disruption as a serious matter and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that resulted. We now return to normal business operations, and customers who have a service issue should contact CenturyLink’s repair department.

We are still conducting formal post incident investigations and analysis of the Dec. 27 outage, which is why we haven't sent a final root cause communication to our customers. Our goal is to not only identify the source of the outage, but also any contributing factors. We are committed to operational excellence and take any service interruption seriously, which is why we worked around the clock until we restored service to our customers."

The situation would be comical if it weren't so dire. Who hasn't had to troubleshoot a problem caused by one small thing? That happens pretty much every time we change our TV setup. But this isn't like not being able to watch "Die Hard" on Christmas because grandpa can't work a DVD player; people couldn't call 911 when they needed emergency services the most because of a nationwide ISP's failure.

Northeastern University research has confirmed what many already suspected: cellular internet service providers (ISPs) are throttling streaming video services. The full research has yet to be released--it's set to arrive sometime in 2019--but the university's news outlet published a report this week showing that "nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling" on services like Netflix and YouTube with no immediately apparent reason.

The data was collected from millions of people across 161 countries who downloaded the Wehe app. That utility makes it easier to determine if a cellular network provider is limiting the amount of bandwidth available to specific apps while allowing others to use as much as they require. In many cases, services like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon were limited to speeds between 0.7 and 4Mbps even when networks appeared uncongested.

Each cell provider throttles various services differently. Verizon doesn't seem to care about limiting NBCSports or Skype, for example, but it does impose limits on more popular video services. Most of the studied providers limited YouTube and throttled Netflix, but slightly less, while roughly half targeted Amazon, and only a handful limited bandwidth for NBCSports and Skype. It seems like more popular services are targeted more often.

Don't think Northeastern's findings only affect mobile users. Many people in the U.S. rely on cellular data for internet access. This is especially true in rural areas where ADSL, fiber and cable broadband is unavailable. Just look at the FCC's map of broadband availability to see the number of available providers dwindle in less-populated areas, or note Pew's finding that 20 percent of Americans can only access the internet via their smartphone.

Satellite internet provider HughesNetworkSystems also appeared in Northeastern's findings. Of the services included in this report, the company only throttled Netflix, but it limited the service to 0.7Mbps. People in rural areas turn to (expensive) satellite providers when they get sick of dial-up internet or when cellular network providers aren't an option. HughesNetworkSystems' participation in this throttling shows cell networks aren't the only problem.

That means a significant portion of U.S. internet users must deal with the effects of these networks' throttling of streaming video services whenever they go online. Fears of similar things happening to wired broadband have also increased following the FCC's repeal of net neutrality protections. If these companies are willing to arbitrarily limit download speeds on their wireless networks, why wouldn't they do the same for those on wired ones?

Many people have reported that their ISPs are doing just that. It's reached the point where Netflix, Google and other service providers have started to offer easy-to-use tools that make it easier to prove ISPs aren't delivering their promised speeds for specific websites (more on that and what you can do about it can be found in this  article from our sister site, Tom's Guide). Northeastern's report is more evidence that net neutrality is fading fast.

Late last week, the State of New York's Public Service Commission kicked Charter Communications, which runs the internet service provider (ISP) Spectrum, out of the state. It's unprecedented, but its reasoning is sound. But if you're a Spectrum subscriber (like me) you're also a little worried.

The commission's reasoning is that Charter didn't meet promises it made about its 2016 merger with Time Warner Cable, which made it the country's second biggest cable company. Charter had agreed to increase speeds and expand its broadband offerings to 145,000 homes and businesses in rural areas of the state. According to the commission, it didn't meet those agreements, and now Spectrum has got to go. (Charter says that it reached 86,000 new homes and businesses, which is nice, but far from the promised goal.)

Charter has 60 days to file a plan with the state to find a new provider for its subscribers and must continue service without disruptions. And with Charter sure to appeal, this will likely go to court for a long time. If you have Spectrum, it's probably not going anywhere immediately.

But...what if it does?

That's the unanswered question. By all rights, New York is doing the appropriate thing here. It is exercising its power against a giant corporation that made promises to better internet access and speeds for citizens but didn't follow through. But for many New Yorkers, Spectrum is the only option. In theory, another provider will step up and buy the network--perhaps Comcast, RCN, or Optimum. Who knows? Maybe Charter will create a shell company and sell Spectrum to itself somehow. And with all of the appeals, this will probably takes years, not months, to resolve in court.

But this highlights a big issue in New York and across the United States: a lack of choice in ISPs. If something goes wrong, and if there is a disruption in service, thousands of people will be left without internet. If customers don't like their new ISP, there really isn't anywhere else to go.

And perhaps I'm one of the rare people in New York to say it, but Spectrum has been working out OK for me. Sure, they raise my rates for no other reason than they can, but the alternative in my building, Verizon Fios, would require me to purchase their proprietary router.

In my last apartment, though, it was Spectrum or bust. My only other option would have been DSL, which, for a person who makes a living on the internet and streams an unhealthy amount of Netflix, is just unusable. Charter and Spectrum didn't deliver, but if you're one of the thousands of subscribers in New York without anywhere else to go, a question is in the back of your mind: what happens to my internet access next?

So yes, let them go. But for New York (and every other state), it's not enough to just get rid of the ISPs that don't meet their goals. You need to get more ISPs in to drive down prices and foster healthy competition. While it may take a few years for this to get through the courts, a lot of us don't know what will happen to our broadband next.

According to a Washington Post report, the Trump administration has been in contact with Google, Facebook, Internet service providers (ISPs), such as AT&T and Comcast, as well as consumer groups to discuss a proposal for new online privacy rules.

The White House is reportedly aiming to create a “balance” between Internet users' privacy needs and U.S. companies' "prosperity."

White House's Blueprint for Congress

The U.S. president is not responsible for creating new laws, but the Washington Post said that the Trump Administration wants to create a “blueprint” that Congress can follow when writing the new privacy law.

According to the Washington Post, technology and telecom companies may see this as an opportunity to pass a federal privacy law that isn’t as strict and pro-consumer as some states have started to consider. California already implemented new privacy rules in June, and companies may fear that other states could follow in its footsteps.

Tech companies, such as Facebook, also know that Congress isn’t much on their side following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Many members of Congress have already made that clear in hearings with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looking to prevent such scandals from happening in the future. In those hearings, Zuckerberg himself admitted that some regulation may be needed.

However, despite all of these endorsements for a privacy law, a draft of the White House proposal seems to suggest that the new law would prevent states from passing their own additional privacy rules. It would also remove some liabilities from companies that mishandle user data.

U.S. Privacy Groups Are Cautiously Optimistic

The President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Mark Rotenberg, said that limiting states from passing their own privacy rules could be a “non-starter for consumer organizations.”

Back when the Obama administration wrote its own draft for stronger privacy rules at the federal level, technology and advertising companies, such as Google and Facebook, were successful in killing that initiative through lobbying efforts.

However, consumer rights groups now believe that after Cambridge Analytica and other privacy scandals, it should be easier to convince Congress of the need to pass stronger privacy legislation.

EU's Influence

The U.S. privacy groups also believe that the European Union (EU) has shown the way for how to write privacy legislation with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect earlier this year.

In the U.S., Senator Ed Markey has already introduced legislation that’s somewhat similar called the CONSENT Act. However, the bill only applies to “edge providers,” such as Google and Facebook, and not ISPs.

Another issue that may prompt Congress to adopt stronger privacy laws this time around is that either the EU Parliament or its top court (whichever gets to it first) may soon invalidate the U.S.-EU data transferring agreement. 

Under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, companies that transfer EU citizens’ data outside of the union must offer “essentially equivalent protection.” The EU and Japan signed a trade deal this month in which Japan agreed to honor that requirement when dealing with EU citizens’ data. That’s still not the case in the U.S., especially as government agencies keep getting new powers and more access to American companies’ data.

Verizon Communications subsidiary Oath, which oversees the AOL and Yahoo brands as well as the company's other digital content interests, announced that it would shutter the Yahoo Messenger service in just over a month. That's right: Yahoo Messenger just received a July 17 execution date.

In recent years, Verizon Communications has made a couple significant moves in the internet media space. It acquired AOL in June 2015, and in June 2017, it took over Yahoo! Inc's primary assets. Along with purchase of Yahoo, Verizon created Oath Inc to oversee both of the brands it had just bought.

For the first few months, Oath let AOL and Yahoo operate as they did before, but in October 2017 the company announced that it would close AOL’s long-running AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service. Oath discontinued AIM on December 15, 2017, and now it’s gearing up to do the same with Yahoo’s competing Yahoo Messenger app.

Oath acknowledged that Yahoo Messenger has many loyal fans, but the company wants to move away from antiquated messaging platforms and “focus on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.”

Yahoo already offers a replacement messaging application called Yahoo Squirrel. The app is still in beta, and it requires an invite to gain access (you can request an invite at squirrel.yahoo.com). It’s unclear when Squirrel will be available to everyone, but Yahoo wants to transition Yahoo Messenger users to Yahoo Squirrel in due time, and with Yahoo Messenger closing soon, we estimate Squirrel should leave closed beta sooner rather than later.

After July 17, the Yahoo Messenger app will cease to function. Oath said that your chat history would remain accessible for six months, but the desktop app would serve no other function during that timeframe. The change will have no effect on your Yahoo ID for other Yahoo services, such as Yahoo Mail.

U.S. Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act of 2018, which is supposed to improve transparency, strengthen consumers’ recourse options in case of a data breach, and ensure that companies are compliant with privacy policies that protect consumers.

This new bill follows another Senate bill introduced recently by Senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the CONSENT Act.

Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act of 2018

After the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Congress seems to be moving towards increasing consumers’ privacy protections in the United States. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will also go into effect in May, so Congress may feel that it needs to keep up.

More specifically, the new bill aims to improve the following things in American privacy rights legislation:

Requires terms of service agreements to be in plain language,Ensures users have the ability to see what information about them has already been collected and shared,Provides users greater access to and control over their data,Gives consumers the right to opt out and keep their information private by disabling data tracking and collection,Mandates that users be notified of a privacy violation within 72 hours,Offers remedies for users when a privacy violation occurs,Requires that online platforms have a privacy program in place.

Senator Klobuchar said:

Every day companies profit off of the data they’re collecting from Americans, yet leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information, online behavior, and private messages are being used.Consumers should have the right to control their personal data and that means allowing them to opt out of having their data collected and tracked and alerting them within 72 hours when a privacy violation occurs and their personal information may be compromised. The digital space can’t keep operating like the Wild West at the expense of our privacy.

Explicit Consent Not Required

Many of the provisions in the bill already seem in line with the GDPR. However, there is one far more important provision that seems to be missing from it: requiring companies to ask for explicit consent (users would have to opt-in, rather than opt-out) before collecting their data.

As such, although the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act of 2018 borrows some good ideas from the GDPR, it doesn’t come close in terms of the control it gives consumers over their data and how that information is collected.

'CONSENT Act' Is Still Better For Consumers

The CONSENT Act is not perfect. As we discussed earlier, it seems to go out of its way to ensure that the new bill only affects “edge providers” or online services rather than ISPs, too.

However, Markey’s bill comes with many of the same transparency and data breach disclosure provisions that the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act has, while also requiring online companies to ask for consent before collecting user data. Additionally, the companies are also required to notify users about all types of data collection and data sharing with third-parties.

Perhaps the two bills can be combined, as long as the CONSENT Act remains intact. Otherwise, the CONSENT Act is the bill you should want to call your Senator to vote, if you care about stronger privacy rights.

Ideally, both of them would target the ISPs, or better yet anyone that deals with consumers’ data, which is the approach the EU GDPR took. U.S. consumers may gain new protections against social media and other online companies, but if their ISPs are free to share and sell data collected from all of their paying customers, then that wouldn’t be as large of a win as it could be.

The U.S. government recently put pressure on telecommunications companies to stop buying Huawei networking equipment and consumer electronics products. ZTE, another Chinese company, now seems to be next in the line of fire of both the UK and U.S. governments.

UK Warns ISPs Against Using ZTE Hardware

Unlike Huawei, ZTE is a state-owned company, which seems to raise more questions even for the UK government, which hasn’t banned Huawei hardware yet. The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) believes that the potential national security risks are too significant to be ignored, and that it would be better if UK telcos stopped buying ZTE hardware to avoid future security problems that wouldn’t be easily mitigated.

Dr Ian Levy, Technical Director of the NCSC said:

It is entirely appropriate and part of NCSC’s duty to highlight potential risks to the UK’s national security and provide advice based on our technical expertise.NCSC assess that the national security risks arising from the use of ZTE equipment or services within the context of the existing UK telecommunications infrastructure cannot be mitigated.

ZTE Banned From Exporting American Technology

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has blocked ZTE from exporting technology from U.S. companies.

In March 2017, ZTE settled after the U.S. government discovered that it was shipping U.S. technology to sanctioned countries such as North Korea and Iran. ZTE agreed to pay $1.19 billion and to a suspended denial of export privileges for seven years, which could be activated if ZTE’s violations continued.

The Department of Commerce has now learned that ZTE made false statements to the U.S. government during the 2016 settlement negotiations as well as the 2017 probationary period.

Secretary Ross said:

ZTE misled the Department of Commerce. Instead of reprimanding ZTE staff and senior management, ZTE rewarded them. This egregious behavior cannot be ignored.

The order against ZTE also means American companies can no longer sell any type of technology to ZTE to minimize the chances that ZTE would once again export that technology elsewhere.

A Bill To Ban Huawei, ZTE Hardware Is Coming

Texas Representative Mike Conaway introduced a bill this January to ban Huawei and ZTE from selling hardware to the federal government.

In a statement, Conaway said:

Chinese commercial technology is a vehicle for the Chinese government to spy on United States federal agencies, posing a severe national security threat.Allowing Huawei, ZTE, and other related entities access to U.S. government communications would be inviting Chinese surveillance into all aspects of our lives.

The American intelligence agencies have also warned against consumers buying Huawei and ZTE devices. U.S. versions of ZTE phones were found to have a backdoor in 2012.

Cloudflare, a well known internet performance and security company, announced its own privacy-focused, fast, and secure Domain Name System (DNS) resolver with the easy to remember address of 1.1.1.1.

What Is A DNS Resolver

A DNS resolver is a server that stores a central database of website names and links them to their respective IP addresses. Without DNS servers, we’d only be able to connect to websites using the IP address of the websites’ servers. Therefore, DNS resolvers make using the web much easier for humans.

However, DNS resolvers have much power, too, in the sense that they could either censor certain websites or they could track what websites users visit. For instance, the Turkish government is known for ordering its ISPs to stop resolving the domain names of particular websites or services. Then, for the vast majority of internet users in Turkey, those sites will be as good as censored.

However, some Turkish users realized how the censorship was being done, and started using other DNS resolvers to visit the censored websites. They even promoted Google’s own DNS resolver, hosted at 8.8.8.8, because of how easy it was to remember.

A “Privacy-First” DNS Resolver

Cloudflare is now launching its competing DNS server, hosted at 1.1.1.1, but according to the company, the service is implemented and operated based on “privacy-first” principles.

Cloudflare said that most DNS servers by default not secure, not encrypted, and they certainly aren’t too privacy-focused. As we’ve seen recently, ISPs have started tracking users’ browsing habits, similarly to Google and Facebook, because all the data goes through their cables. Encrypted data transferred over HTTPS is protected, but if you use the default DNS resolver provided by your ISP, then the ISP will be able to see the requests you make to specific websites.

Cloudflare claimed that its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver supports encrypted DNS and DNS over HTTPS, and that its data logs are deleted after 24 hours. No user data or IP address is stored.

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, said:

We think it’s creepy that user data is sold to advertisers and used to target consumers without their knowledge or consent. Frankly, we don’t want to know what people do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve designed 1.1.1.1 to ensure that we, along with ISPs around the world, can’t.

Cloudflare also claimed that the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver is already one of the fastest on the internet. The company plans to eventually lower the latency between any user requesting a website in their browser and its DNS servers to under 10 miliseconds.

APNIC is a non-profit organization that helps Cloudflare operate this service for the Asia-Pacific region. It also provided Clouflare with the easy to remember 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 IP addresses. Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC, said:

At APNIC Labs, we’re aware that the DNS is not always private, fast, or secure, and we’re always looking for ways to improve how it works. We’re working with Cloudflare to refine this basic Internet function so that users have a much more private and faster experience.

How To Set-Up Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver

If you’ve ever changed your DNS servers on your computer before, then you also know how to set-up Cloudflare’s DNS resolver, because it’s no different. If you’ve never done that, then you all you need to do is look up the network settings on your PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android device, find the DNS server setting, and add the 1.1.1.1 address in there.

For the alternate server, Clouflare also provides the 1.0.0.1 address, in case there’s any downtime for the primary one. Cloudflare also chose two IPv6 addresses that only use numbers, again for the sake of simplicity: 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001.

The company provides more information on how to set-up its DNS servers at https://1.1.1.1/.

Cloudflare also assured us that the launch of this service is no April Fools prank. The reason for why it chose to launch the service today, on a Sunday, on 4/1/2018 is that the data contains 4/1, which can be read as four 1’s, just like its DNS server address: 1.1.1.1.