Tag Archives: Telecom

In Nigeria, Why Isn’t Broadband Everywhere?

Ibadan, Nigeria, Bolaji Adeniyi holds court in a tie-dyed T-shirt. “In Nigeria we see farms as father’s work,” he says. Adeniyi’s father taught him to farm with a hoe and a machete, which he calls a cutlass. These days, he says, farming in Nigeria can look quite different, depending on whether the farmer has access to the Internet or not.

Not far away, farmers are using drones to map their plots and calculate their fertilizer inputs. Elsewhere, farmers can swipe through security camera footage of their fields on their mobile phones. That saves them from having to patrol the farm’s perimeter and potentially dangerous confrontations with thieves. To be able to do those things, Adeniyi notes, the farmers need broadband access, at least some of the time. “Reliable broadband in Atan would attract international cocoa dealers and enable access to agricultural extension agents, which would aid farmers,” he says.

Adeniyi has a degree in sociology and in addition to growing cocoa trees, works as a criminologist and statistician. When he’s in Ibadan, a city of 4 million that’s southeast of Atan, he uses a laptop and has good enough Internet. But at his farm in Atan, he carries a candy-bar mobile phone and must trek to one of a few spots around the settlement if he wants better odds of getting a signal. “At times,” Adeniyi says, “it’s like wind bringing the signal.”

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Can Qubits Teleport Through Today’s Internet Lines?

 By LUCAS LAURSEN and MARGO ANDERSON

For decades, researchers have tried to squeeze quantum signals alongside classical signals in fiber optic cables. Quantum bits, however, are based on delicate quantum states of individual particles, which can be disrupted by thermal noise and other factors. 

Last month, Northwestern University engineers sent a pair of entangled photons more than 30 kilometers through a fiber that was also carrying a 400 gigabits-per-second classical signal. The entangled states then enabled a quantum data transfer process called teleportation. Quantum teleportation involves transmitting the quantum state of one particle onto another particle at a distant location, effectively allowing the quantum information (a.k.a. the quantum bits or qubits) to be “teleported” across space. 

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Broadcasters Explore a New Option for TV: 5G

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-power television 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 Sinclair Broadcasting 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.

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CubeSat Operators Launch an IoT Space Race

A rocket carrying CubeSats launched into Earth orbit two years ago, on 22 March 2021. Two of those CubeSats represented competing approaches to bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to space. One, operated by Lacuna Space, uses a protocol called LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power protocol owned by Semtech. The other, owned by Sateliot, uses the narrowband IoT protocol, following in the footsteps of OQ Technology, which launched a similar IoT satellite demonstration in 2019. And separately, in late 2022, the cellular industry standard-setter 3GPP incorporated satellite-based 5G into standard cellular service with its release 17.

In other words, there is now an IoT space race.

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