TV broadcasters may have a new way to reach the cordless generation: 5G. In July, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a six-month experimental license to a low-powertelevision network in Massachusetts to transmit video and other data one-way following the 5G protocol over a portion of the ultra high frequency (UHF) band via television towers.
If television broadcasters can meet some of consumers’ voracious demand for Internet video streaming using TV hardware and spectrum, it will free up some network bandwidth in spectrum previously used for two-way cellular signals and create new business opportunities. The FCC granted the SinclairBroadcasting Group a similar license in 2021, and Czech telecom CRA began broadcasting to mobile phones earlier this year as well.
Low-power television networks—which already target audiences that major broadcasters don’t—may be able to figure out how to make 5G work.
I recorded the Madrid end of an interview for Gastropod. The interview, with Stefanie Malan-Müller, is woven into the Gut Feeling episode: https://gastropod.com/gut-feeling
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
When Marie and her partner failed to conceive a baby for almost a decade, they ran into a wall. “We did a [gamete] donation procedure in France that didn’t work,” she says. At the same time they had to face another problem: the wait lists for assisted reproduction were two years long. “And when it doesn’t work, you have to wait another two years,” Marie points out. The delays made them fear the worst: ageing past the limit of 45 years old that France imposes on women for accessing ART. “If you can financially handle it, you’ll go to another European country which has the same assisted reproduction procedures, but faster,” she explains.
