Recently, my colleagues and I swung a half-tonne telescope onto the roof of the physics building at the University of Western Australia.
For a tense moment, my career hung from a crane hook.
The telescope is the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere and represents a new generation of space communications using lasers.
Across the Pacific, undersea cables weave between island nations, bringing them online and, in some cases, connecting them to Australia, but some governments fear this interconnectivity comes with risk.
Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have broken the internet speed record with a stunning 319 terabits per second. That’s double the previous record of 178 Tb/s set a year ago by engineers in Japan and the U.K.
Millions of homes and businesses access global networks through the cost-efficient Passive Optical Network (PON) technologies standardized by ITU. The next generation, known as “Higher Speed PON”, will provide for speeds of 50 Gbit/s per wavelength, up from the 10 Gbit/s of its predecessors.
The satellite Internet industry has taken off at great speed in the last year, as companies like SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon each work to build satellite-based networks consisting of thousands of small individual satellites. SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 of its Starlink high-speed Internet satellites to date and now has permission from the FCC to launch 12,000 satellites in the first phase of its deployment. While SpaceX has led the way, we are seeing OneWeb and Amazon follow at breakneck speed, as each of them strives to connect the unconnected parts of the world.
Improved Internet connectivity and skills have helped many countries to cope with the health and economic crisis from COVID-19. Yet the pandemic has raised the bar for the digital transition and underscores the need to close the digital divides that risk leaving some people and firms worse off than others in a post-COVID world, according to a new OECD report.
Facebook and Google are planning two new undersea internet cables to connect South East Asia to North America.
[news release] A new policy brief from ITU and the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), finds that high costs for Internet access relative to income remain one of the main barriers to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) services worldwide. Taking income differences into account, a mobile broadband subscription with at least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of data costs around four times more in developing countries than in developed ones.
California may soon begin enforcing its first-in-the-nation net neutrality law after a federal judge on Tuesday ruled against broadband providers that had sought to scuttle the state’s open-Internet safeguards.
Satellites – once the poor relation of broadband providers, considered the slowest, most expensive option and a real last resort – have become the hot favourite in the race to connect the world in places land-based internet does not reach.