#fixedWireless

2025-10-27

Weekly output: NASA reopens lunar-lander contract, Verizon adds “Lite” home-5G plan

I got out of bed earlier than usual today to go cheer for people who had woken much earlier to go run 26.2 miles, because I see supporting people running the Marine Corps Marathon as a civic duty. Saturday saw me taking on another civic duty: poll-worker training for the 15-plus-hour day I have coming up Nov. 4.

Patreon readers got a bonus post from me this week: an explanation of why it pays for freelancers to know which topics don’t have full-time coverage by a staff writer at a client.

10/21/2025: NASA Reopens Lunar Lander Contract, and Elon Musk Is Big Mad, PCMag

I wasn’t sure that NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy saying that the space agency would seek new bids to build a lunar lander for the first U.S. moon landing since 1972 would amount to a PCMag story. And then Elon went on a rage-tweeting spree about that…

10/23/2025: Verizon Adds Cheaper, Data-Capped ‘Lite’ Wireless Home Broadband Option, PCMag

Verizon is a few years behind T-Mobile in selling a data-capped version of its home fixed-wireless service in areas with limited capacity, but its data cap is much more forgiving than T-Mobile’s.

#ArtemisIII #ElonMuskX #fixedWireless #FWA #HLS #home5G #moonLanding #SeanDuffy #Starship #Verizon5GHome

2025-10-20

Weekly output: Next Big Things in Tech (x3), Starship, T-Satellite, prepaid home wireless broadband

A months-in-the-work project finally reached the publication stage this week, which felt good–if not as good as invoicing for this project. Another high point of this week: spending a chunk of Saturday afternoon at the No Kings demonstration in D.C. and seeing how strong the protest-sign game remains in my city.

10/14/2025: The 5 next big things in space and telecom for 2025, Fast Company

Once again, my work on Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech list (NBTT for short) started with judging entries in the converging industries of space and telecom.

10/14/2025: The 4 next big things in robotics and automation for 2025, Fast Company

This is another category I’ve judged before, but most of the companies I considered this year were new to my work at Fast Co.

10/14/2025: These 4 innovations help solve critical issues for North America, Fast Company

This was a new addition to my NBTT work, and deciding what made companies worthy of this honor in this geographically-defined category got tricky at times.

10/14/2025: Starship’s Version 2 Flies for the Last Time, Splashes Down in One Piece, PCMag

I wrote this recap of Starship’s 11th flight test Monday night and then revised the piece slightly Tuesday morning–hours before SpaceX released video of Starship’s upper stage looking more than a little cooked as it lowered itself into the Indian Ocean.

10/16/2025: Who’s on T-Satellite? T-Mobile Dominates, But Verizon Customers Say No Thanks, PCMag

One surprise of this study from Ookla was how many AT&T subscribers chose to pay $10 a month extra to T-Mobile for Starlink satellite roaming; another was how rarely wireless users now find themselves without a terrestrial signal.

10/17/2025: T-Mobile, Verizon Now Selling 5G Home Internet Service Via Their Prepaid Brands, PCMag

Telecom-industry analyst Jeff Moore e-mailed me about the impending launch of resold Verizon fixed-wireless-access broadband by its Tracfone subsidiary, then T-Mobile’s Mint Mobile subsidiary started reselling its parent firm’s FWA. Moore then gave me some useful insight about the state of prepaid home wireless broadband.

#911inform #AES #EascraBiotech #fixedWireless #Heven #home5G #ImpulseSpace #MintMobile #MobileX #Ookla #OWLIntegrations #PilaEnergy #ProRataAi #ServeRobotics #SpaceXStarship #Starlink #Starship #TMobileStarlink #TSatellite #TracFone #USMobile #Vantor #Varda

2025-10-13

Weekly output: NextGen Acela, Evernote V11, Verizon CEOs, RGB LED, screen time, Cranky Dorkfest, Verizon buys Starry, AT&T standalone 5G, TiVo DVRs

This week will have me crossing a state off my states-visited list for the first time since 2009–Wisconsin, where Oshkosh Corp. is hosting a press day to show off its government and industrial vehicles, including the U.S. Postal Service’s new and behind-schedule duckface trucks. I don’t have a good explanation for why I had not set foot in that state sooner and can only apologize to America’s Dairyland for the extended oversight.

10/6/2025: Amtrak’s new Acela trains can’t keep up with high-speed rail, Fast Company

After taking the new trains to and from New York at the end of August, I had ambitions of writing this story much faster than I did–sort of like how Amtrak had ambitions of getting the new train into service much sooner than it did. But getting the level of detail that I wanted about the railroad’s plans to upgrade the power infrastructure along the Northeast Corridor took more time than I expected.

(I included the full text of Amtrak’s detailed explanation of its plans to improve the catenary along the NEC in the commentary-enhanced version of this post that I published early on Patreon.)

10/6/2025: Major Evernote Update Taps AI for Search and Transcription, But Not Writing, PCMag

I had about an hour Friday to quiz Evernote product lead Federico Simionato about Bending Spoons’ plans for the note-taking app that it bought in 2023, and which I’ve used since 2010–so of course I took notes in my Mac’s copy of Evernote while using the Android app to record our conversation for subsequent AI transcription.

10/6/2025: Verizon Hot-Swaps Current CEO for Ex-PayPal Boss, PCMag

I don’t usually cover C-suite departures and arrivals, but I had some free time. And Verizon’s new chief executive Dan Schulman has a sufficiently interesting backstory–see the New York Times’ interview of him in 2008–that I told my editors I could pick up this item.

10/7/2025: RGB LED Is Getting Its Time in the Spotlight. Will TV Shoppers Tune In?, PCMag

I started writing this post at IFA–the first version had a Berlin dateline. But then I got sufficiently sidetracked and got in enough reporting after that tech trade show for the piece to evolve from an event recap to a broader assessment of a tech development.

10/8/2025: It’s Not Just You: Parents Everywhere Struggle to Set Screen-Time Boundaries, PCMag

Pew’s data about the level of technology use respondents to its survey allowed among kids 12 years old or younger made me feel slightly better about my own attempts at digital parenting.

10/8/2025: What happens when online plane enthusiasts meet up IRL?, Fast Company

This recap of Cranky Dorkfest 2025 was easily the most fun that I’ve had with a story since the last time I went to Florida to see a space launch.

10/8/2025: Verizon to Buy Wireless Broadband Pioneer Starry, Fold It Into Its Home Internet Service, PCMag

Writing this sent me back a ways–both to writing about Starry in its early days, including a December 2017 feature for Yahoo Finance, but also to covering Starry founder Chet Kanojia’s previous venture, the local-TV-streaming service Aereo that the Supreme Court put out of business in a dubious 2014 opinion.

10/9/2025: AT&T Switches on Standalone 5G Nationwide, Unlocking Future Network Slice Services, PCMag

This post also covers Verizon’s advances in standalone 5G, about which that carrier has been quieter than AT&T and T-Mobile.

10/9/2025: Time’s Up for a Timeshifting Trailblazer: TiVo Discontinues Its Standalone DVRs, PCMag

I would have written this much faster if I didn’t get sucked down a rabbit hole of old TiVo posts and reviews, followed by my checking my own TiVo purchase history.

#Acela #Amtrak #ATT5G #avgeek #BendingSpoons #CrankyDorkfest #DanSchulman #digitalParenting #Evernote #fixedWireless #fixedWirelessBroadband #highSpeedRail #IFA #LAX #NEC #NextGenAcela #NortheastCorridor #PewResearchCenter #RGBLED #screenTime #Sony #standalone5G #StarryInternet #Verizon5G #VerizonCEO

2025-06-09

Weekly output: Zipline drones, fixed wireless broadband, AI transformations, Dashlane, AI fairness, FCC resignations, AI resiliency, National Capital Radio & Television MuseumM

My third week in a row of business travel had me in Santa Clara, Calif., from Tuesday through Friday–at a venue I’d last set foot in at the Demo conference in 2013.

6/3/2025: Inside Zipline’s high-tech drone factory where delivery innovation takes flight, Fast Company

My decision to book an early-afternon flight from SFO to National at the end of my Google I/O trip last month paid off when I used that time to visit the drone-delivery startup Zipline’s factory in South San Francisco. I followed up that visit by quizzing an executive from the firm a week later.

6/3/2025: Fiber Is Fast, But 5G Home Internet Is More Appealing for One Reason, PCMag

I didn’t want to write up this J.D. Power customer-satisfaction survey without getting some answers about the weirdly-high scores for old, slow digital-subscriber-line services.

6/4/2025: Transforming Industries with AI & Big Data—Success Stories from the Frontlines, TechEx North America

The first of three panels I did at this conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center (with the organizers covering my lodging and reimbursing my airfare) reunited me with a fellow panelist from 2021: Lufthansa Industry Solutions’ Stanislaw Schmal, who was on a panel I did at my first post-pandemic conference trip in September of 2021. It was a treat to have Stan on stage again, and he and my other panelists–Oracle’s Shasank Chavan, Ford Credit’s Manav Khatri, Airbnb’s Dror Engel, and Deepgram’s Kris Efland–made my panel-moderation work easy.

6/5/2025: This Password Manager Now Lets You Create an Account Without a Password, PCMag

Dashlane gave me an embargoed copy of their announcement of their new option to let people create accounts secured only by USB security keys, but that left me a little fuzzy about how exactly this would differ from that password-manager service’s existing support for passwordless authentication–and my editor was fine with holding the post until I could get those details cleared up.

6/5/2025: AI Fairness and Bias Mitigation—Advanced Approaches, TechEx North America

My second panel had me quizzing JPMorgan Chase’s Naresh Dulam, Aon’s Aras “Russ” Memisyazici, and PwC’s Ilana Golbin Blumenfeld about how to avoid having AI systems amplify human biases.

6/5/2025: Who’s Running the FCC? Surprise Resignation Reduces the Agency to a Duo, PCMag

I’ve been writing about the Federal Communications Commission for well over two decades, probably closer to three, and I can’t remember a commissioner announcing a resignation on a Wednesday effective on Friday of the same week. Also unprecedented: having this five-member commission reduced to two people.

6/5/2025: Building Resilient AI Infrastructure, TechEx North America

My last panel at TechEx was a late addition when another moderator dropped out; when an event paying your travel asks for you to pitch in, it’s a good idea to be a team player. My teammates on this panel: Ford Motor Company’s Robert Gray, Oracle’s Iman Zadeh, Red Hat’s Mark Kurtz and InfoVia’s Mike Magalsky.

6/6/2025: Spotify Takes Flight on United Airlines: Here’s What You Get, PCMag

When I got to try this on my flight from San Jose to Houston Friday, I realized that United’s implementation of Spotify did not include the ability to listen to the airline’s longtime theme song, “Rhapsody in Blue”–which made the lede I’d written incorrect. Instead of just rewriting that, I opted to take notes on the experience over that three-plus hour flight and rewrite the entire post.

6/7/2025: This Little Museum Outside DC Offers a Deep Dive Into Retro Radio and TV Tech, PCMag

My friend and longtime CES fellow traveler Gary Arlen suggested that I visit the National Capital Radio & Television Museum in Bowie, Md., where he’s a docent, and I took him up on that advice in February. Then I didn’t write the post until March, after which my client needed a little longer to get the story edited and published.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #conference #Dashlane #droneDelivery #DSL #FCC #FIDO2 #fixedWireless #JDPower #NationalCapitalRadioTelevisionMuseum #passwordManager #SantaClara #Spotify #techHistory #TechExNorthAmerica #UA #UnitedAirlines #vacuumTubes #vintage #Zipline

Nick Spacek :CApride:nickspacek@mstdn.ca
2025-04-19

Anyone out there using Xplore 5G for their internet and also know the admin/operator credentials for the CPE? I was hoping to check my signal strength and maybe adjust the device orientation. I still have the credentials stowed away for Xplornet's devices from years back but I haven't been able to guess the new ones.

Out of date: technicallyrural.ca/2020/05/30

#Xplore #FixedWireless #5G

2024-06-10

I had an unusually space-centric news week, which led me to think anew about when I could next get on a plane to Florida (or Texas) to see a large rocket launch in person instead of on a screen.

6/4/2024: Sorry, Cable: Fiber and 5G Home Internet Win the ISP Popularity Contest, PCMag

A year after the American Customer Satisfaction Index documented a dramatic gap in subscriber approval of fiber broadband compared to cable, a new ACSI survey found that people using fixed-wireless Internet also voiced more contentment with their connectivity than cable users.

6/5/2024: Boeing’s Starliner Finally Launches With Astronauts Onboard, PCMag

This post would have been shorter if Starliner’s first crewed launch had happened last month as originally scheduled, but each delay gave me an excuse to write a little more background about this launch, NASA’s commercial crew program and the history of Atlas rockets.

6/6/2024: T-Mobile’s Home Internet Backup Plan Kicks in When Your Broadband Goes Out, PCMag

After I filed my recap of T-Mobile’s announcement–which also covered a new Opensignal report about the rise of fixed wireless–I read Jon Brodkin’s report at Ars Technica and realized he’d unearthed an important issue with the carrier’s pitch. So I sent in an update to my editor from my phone while on line to get my first in a series of small plates at the NOAA Sustainable Seafood Celebration.

6/6/2024: On Fourth Launch, SpaceX’s Starship Sticks the Landing, PCMag

I wrote a second post about a pioneering rocket launch this week. I’m still amazed that Starship’s second stage made it all the way to the Indian Ocean after I watched one of its fins start to disintegrate from reentry heating live on camera.

6/8/2024: Ep 100 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple WWDC 24 guesses, fixed wireless access and broadband trends, Mark Vena

With our usual podcast companion John Quain out on a work trip, the Houston Chronicle’s Dwight Silverman joined us in his place.

6/9/2024: Why the US Falls Short on Easy, Cheap Cross-Border Money Transfers, PCMag

I started gathering string for this story back in February when I traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania to moderate a panel at a financial-technology conference there and get an introduction to the country’s fintech sector (with local hosts covering most of my travel expenses). Then I had to quiz an industry analyst, after which watching a panel at Web Summit Rio gave me another angle to look into.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/06/09/weekly-output-broadband-satisfaction-starliner-starship-t-mobile-fixed-wireless-mark-vena-podcast-international-money-transfers/

#ACSI #Bitcoin #Boeing #broadband #BTC #cryptocurrency #CST100 #DwightSilverman #fixedWireless #FWA #KYC #PayPal #SpaceX #SpaceXStarship #Starliner #Starship #SWIFT #TMobileHomeBackup #TransferGo #Wise

2024-04-29

This week featured vastly less travel than last week, but it also afforded me the rare experience of hearing an executive-branch appointee burst into song. And at the end of it, I carved out some time to write a post for Patreon readers about how certain PR pitches come with either a request or a stipulation that I cover the subject for a particular outlet.

4/23/2024: T-Mobile Adds New Fixed Wireless Plans: One for Home, One for the Road, PCMag

Of all of T-Mobile’s announcements Tuesday, the unlimited-data version of its new Away fixed-wireless plan was easily the most interesting.

4/23/2024: FTC Votes to Ban Non-Compete Clauses, PCMag

I wrote an update to the post I’d filed more than a year earlier when the Federal Trade Commission had started this rule-making process, explaining the particulars of the new FTC rule and noting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s plans to sue to overturn this ban.

4/25/2024: Feds Try Breaking Out Into Song to Get People to Take Ransomware Seriously, PCMag

I spent Wednesday at a conference in Washington hosted by the Institute for Security and Technology, then wrote this recap Thursday that led off with Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly singing a bit from an upcoming remake of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just A Bill.”

4/27/2024: Ep 99 SmartTechCheck Podcast – TikTok, smartphones and children, FCC broadband labels mandate, Mark Vena

I joined my tech-analyst friend’s podcast to discuss the new law requiring TikTok owner ByteDance to sell that social platform, the FCC’s broadband-labels regulation, how harmful smartphones might be to kids, and other tech topics.

Updated 5/5/2024 to add a link to the Patreon post.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/28/weekly-output-t-mobile-adds-fixed-wireless-plans-ftc-bans-non-compete-clauses-ransomware-prevention-mark-vena-podcast/

#cybersecurity #fixedWireless #FTCNonCompeteBan #informationSecurity #infosec #JenEasterly #MarkVena #nonCompeteClauses #ransomware #SchoolhouseRock #TMobile #TMobileHome5G #TMobileHomeInternet

Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblogsomebitslinks@tech.lgbt
2024-04-24

TreeLink.us: A new local WISP in Nevada City. A bit pricy per gigabyte but could be a good option
treelink.us/
#fixedwireless #grassvalley #nevadacity #internet #wisp #isp #+

2024-03-11

AUSTIN–This week started with stories datelined from a city some 4,000 miles east of D.C. and ends with pieces datelined from a city about 1,300 miles southwest of home.

3/4/2024: SpaceX rivals pitch their phone-to-satellite alternatives, Light Reading

I wrote most of this piece recapping an MWC panel featuring multiple non-SpaceX satellite-to-phone services–including my Falls Church neighbors Lynk Global–on the flight home to D.C., then somehow pieced together enough scraps of jet-lagged consciousness to finish and file it Thursday night.

3/5/2024: FWA cheer spreads across the world, Light Reading

My MWC coverage wrapped up with my writing and filing this post about fixed-wireless access Friday afternoon. One thing that continues to be great about this event: how it exposes me to multiple non-U.S. perspectives on wireless-service situations we have here.

3/6/2024: Biden’s Broadband Chief Sounds Alarm on Expiring Affordable-Internet Subsidy, PCMag

This post was going to recap a few different panels at ACA Connects Summit, hosted by a D.C. trade group for smaller Internet providers, and then a publicist for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration asked if I’d like to sit down with NTIA administrator Alan Davidson for a quick conversation after his panel.

3/9/2024: 5G Home Internet Soars in 2023, As Cable and Phone-Based Broadband Slump, PCMag

I wrote up the latest subscriber stats gathered by Leichtman Research Group, showing the continued conquests of fixed-wireless services. Contrary to a prediction I’d offered in a post about a previous LRG broadband update, T-Mobile did not end 2023 as the fifth-biggest ISP because the privately-held cable provider Cox still has a few more hundred thousand subscribers, in LRG’s estimate.

3/9/2024: Actors Union Rep Warns Game Studios Over AI: Odds of Strike Are 50-50, PCMag

I put this panel–featuring my fellow Georgetown grad Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, now SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator–on my SXSW schedule early on because of its intersection of technology, policy and culture.

3/10/2024: Printer Bashing and Staplers: ‘Office Space’ Cast Files a TPS Report at SXSW, PCMag

I quote from Office Space almost as often as any other movie I’ve seen–and that includes the original Star Wars trilogy and Dr. Strangelove–so there was no way I wasn’t going to see this panel. Even if I then had to watch it on SXSW’s YouTube stream because the room in the Austin Convention Center hit capacity while I was still on line to get in.

3/10/2024: Cybersecurity as a Cornerstone of Brand Trust, Grit Daily House

I moderated this panel–featuring Zach Eikenberry, CEO of Hook Security, Jess Garza, owner of Texas Performance Pyschology, and Andy Bennett, CTO, Apollo Information Systems–at an offsite venue for my fellow conference person Jordan French’s startup-industry publication.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/11/weekly-output-satellite-to-phone-services-fixed-wireless-access-broadband-buildout-risks-2023-broadband-subscriber-stats-actors-negotiating-for-ai-rights-office-space-reunion-how-companies-talk/

#ACAConnects #actorsStrike #AffordableConnectivityPlan #AlanDavidson #Austin #Barcelona #BEAD #cybersecurity #DuncanCrabtreeIreland #federalBroadbandBuildout #fixedWireless #FWA #informationSecurity #LeichtmanResearchGroup #LynkGlobal #MobileWorldCongress #MWC #OfficeSpace #OneWeb #SAGAFTRA #Sateliot #southBySouthwest #sxsw #VerizonHome5G

2024-02-03

So it turned out that @nlnetfdn brought even some amazing #LibreQoS 🤩 stickers for us to @fosdem 2024!

Thanks a million, #NLnet.

#OpenSource #FLOSS #FOSDEM #FOSDEM2024 #QoE #QoS #QualityOfExperience #ISP #WISP #InternetServiceProvider #ULB #broadband #FWA #FixedWireless

2024-01-29

After clocking 17 days in a row of work–thanks to the run-up to CES, CES itself, and then needing to catch up on projects set aside during that week in Vegas–I ditched professional obligations Monday to go skiing. And then I answered some business e-mails from the chairlift anyway.

1/23/2024: T-Mobile Plans to Deprioritize ‘Heavy Data’ Users of Its Home 5G, PCMag

Once again, Reddit enlightened me about a plot twist at a company I cover–this time, in the form of a post on r/tmobile pointing to a report of T-Mobile stepping slightly away from offering unlimited data on its fixed-wireless service. I e-mailed the company for comment Monday night, got a reply hours later and wrote this post Tuesday morning.

1/24/2024: Connected-car ambitions risk collision with regulators’ concerns, Light Reading

This post closed out my CES 2024 coverage, and I had planned to write it sooner. But after a few days of being in the weeds with other deadlines, I realized that the Washington Auto Show’s public-policy day would probably yield useful quotes from policymakers about the privacy implications of the connected-car tech that I’d seen hyped at CES. Fortunately, my editor agreed with my suggestion that I hold off on filing this post so I could fold in that later reporting.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/01/28/weekly-output-t-mobile-fixed-wireless-gets-a-little-less-generous-connected-car-concerns/

#AWSAutomotive #ces #connectedCars #fixedWireless #home5G #Qualcomm #TMobile #TMobileHome5G #WashingtonAutoShow

2024-01-09
2024-01-04

Yay! Our LTS (Long-Term Stats) are finally open to everyone: libreqos.io/lts/

✅CAKE Queuing
✅CRM/NMS Integrations
✅Live Statistics
✅Cloud-Hosted Long Term Statistics
✅30 day free trial

Give it a try now! #LibreQoS #latency #bufferbloat
#ISP #WISP #broadband #FWA #QoE #QoS #WiFi #WirelessBroadband #InternetServiceProvider #FixedWirelessAccess #FixedWireless #QualityOfExperience #QualityOfService #sch_CAKE #OpenSource #FLOSS #FOSS

2023-12-31

#LibreQoS Adoption Worldwide:

🇺🇸 (17 states) 🇵🇭🇨🇿🇿🇦🇭🇰🇻🇪🇦🇺🇨🇴🇩🇴🇱🇹🇳🇿🇵🇱🇬🇧🇦🇷🇧🇷🇨🇦🇨🇾🇭🇺🇮🇩🇲🇼🇲🇽🇵🇰🇹🇷🇬🇹 🇮🇳🇱🇻🇱🇾🇸🇬🇹🇳 and counting!

Fast, Flexible #QoE for Smart #ISPs That Effectively Manages #Latency & #Bufferbloat Over Existing Infrastructure:

libreqos.io

#WISP #ISP #FixedWireless #FWA #broadband #InternetServiceProvider #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS

2023-12-20

Seems like a number of ISPs are selling "fiber Internet" but what they're really selling is fixed wireless and hoping customers won't know the difference. Has anyone else experienced this? #fiber #fixedwireless.

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