Category Archives: Current News

What if Nobody Shows up for BEAD?

Charter CFO Jessica Fisher recently announced that Charter will spend substantially less on pursuing BEAD grants than the company spent on RDOF. This is big news, because a natural assumption in some state broadband offices is that Charter would likely be a big player in the BEAD grant process. Charter has been a major participant in pursuing and winning State broadband grants funded by ARPA and the Capital Projects Fund.

To put this into context, Charter won about $1 billion in the RDOF reverse auction. Substantially less than that would make Charter a minor participant in the BEAD process. Fisher said part of the reason for not strongly pursuing BEAD is the unfavorable BEAD grant rules.

This will be a problem for some states if Charter doesn’t play at all. Anybody who has looked closely at the RDOF award areas understands the issue that RDOF funding was often awarded in a way that the coverage could best be described as Swiss cheese. In states where Charter won a lot of RDOF subsidy, the company is the only sensible ISP to pursue a solution for the ‘holes’ inside the current Swiss cheese areas – because if they don’t, it will be virtually impossible for any other landline ISP to affordably reach the small pockets of BEAD areas surrounded by Charter fiber areas.

Nobody outside the company knows the real motivation and decision-making process inside a company like Charter. Certainly, the complexity of applying for the BEAD grants and then reporting afterward is a believable reason for walking away from BEAD. In comparison, RDOF has very few rules other than requiring a specific technology, meeting construction goals over a long timeline, and providing a letter of credit to support each project. Charter is probably considering other issues too. For example, the company has been losing customers to FWA and due to the end of ACP. A decision not to pursue BEAD might simply be a reaction to tightening its focus on current markets.

The real concern for State Broadband Offices is that Charter might not be the only large ISP thinking of ignoring BEAD. Most states are counting on large ISPs like Charter, Comcast, Frontier, Windstream, and Brightspeed to pursue BEAD.

After anticipating the matching fund requirement, the total awards for BEAD projects will be more than $50 billion. If the big companies don’t participate, there may not be enough financial capacity in the rest of the industry to take on the matching requirements for winning BEAD grants.

Consider Comcast, which said in 2023 that it remains return-driven and will have a high bar for participating in BEAD. Comcast didn’t participate in RDOF, but it did pursue and win a substantial amount of state broadband grants.

I doubt that anybody knows what the Verizon and Frontier merger will mean in terms of BEAD. Verizon said when the merger was announced that it wants Frontier to continue with any BEAD plans. But Verizon has historically been the most disciplined fiber builders in terms of staying within a defined construction budget. It wouldn’t be shocking to see Frontier pull back from BEAD to some extent.

A lot of industry folks have predicted that a handful of big companies would win the majority of the BEAD funding. Perhaps many of them will sit it out, making it even more likely that large portions of BEAD might go to Starlink or wireless ISPs.

Cellular from Satellites

There was a burst of recent press about cellular service provided from satellites. This was probably prompted by the two recent hurricanes that have disable terrestrial cellular and broadband networks in the southeast. I’ve seen speculation and discussion on Reddit and other forums where people have been wondering if satellite is the future of cell service and if the ubiquitous giant cell towers will eventually become obsolete.

The short answer to that question is no, but the longer answer is that there are a lot of reasons why this is unlikely to happen. The first is pure physics. Radio waves of all types spread over distance, and a cellular signal sent from a satellite will spread and weaken a lot compared to the same signal sent from a cell tower in your neighborhood. As radio waves spread, the size of the receiving antenna needs to be larger to catch the full signal. A cellphone does not present a big enough area to receive a strong satellite signal. You can easily see this by comparing the size of your cellphone to the size of a Starlink receiver.

Everything I’ve read says that there is also a major line-of-sight issue with cellular wireless connections. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of my cellphone calls are made inside my house, a business, or a moving car. How useful is satellite cellular if it only operates optimally when you are outdoors?

The strength of cellular signal equates to quality. Speed tests show that my AT&T cellular signal is consistently over 100 Mbps and sometimes as high as 200 Mbps. Space cellular companies cannot match those speeds. My cellphone is consistently faster than the speed test results I’ve seen for Starlink home broadband.

Another huge issue is spectrum. Terrestrial cell companies use several different bands of spectrum to deliver cell traffic – all they need to do to add a new band is to get handset vendors to build it into future phones. None of these same bands of spectrum are available for satellite providers since the spectrum has been allocated to cell companies by the FCC through auctions. To provide ubiquitous satellite cellular, the space carriers need to find a lot more spectrum and get it built into handsets.

Then, there is a national security issue. Imagine if we moved all cellular coverage to space. It would present an attractive target in times of war. It would be much easier to sabotage a satellite network than the hundreds of thousands of terrestrial cell towers.

Finally, I’ve always believed in the old maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I think a large majority of people are happy with the way their cellular works. It’s hard to imagine people ditching traditional cellular service for something that doesn’t work as well.

With all of that said, there is still a market for satellite cellular in the U.S., and probably a bigger market for it around the world. There are still many rural places in the U.S. where cellular coverage is terrible, or non-existent. The FCC is poised to tackle the holes in rural cell coverage using the soon-to-be-launched 5G Fund for Rural America. When those networks are built, the market for satellite cellular in the U.S. will be even smaller.

But even then, there will be a sizable market for satellite cellular in the U.S. Nobody is going to ever build cell towers to cover the vast wilderness areas of the country. Satellite cellular is going to be very popular with campers and hikers and folks who work in remote areas since it gives them a lifeline to the world.

Satellite cellular could be a boon to much of the rest of the world. Even countries with a lot of cell sites often do not have the same kind of fiber backhaul used at our towers. In places where cellular is the primary form of broadband, cell towers are often already badly oversubscribed. Where our cellular speeds are often over 100 Mbps, the speeds in many third world countries is a tiny fraction of that speed.

I suspect the companies doing this will do quite well if they can make the cellular reasonably functional. But it’s hard to envision satellite cellular as a competitor to terrestrial cellular in first world countries.

Disasters and the Supply Chain

One of the unexpected consequences of Hurricane Helene is that it disrupted and shut down the high-quality quartz mines near Spruce Pine, North Carolina. This will cause a temporary disruption for the semiconductor industry.

One of the most important steps in making silicon chips and key components for solar panels is to melt down a highly purified substance called polysilicon. This can only be done in crucibles that don’t react with the polysilicon, and the best material for making the crucibles is the ultra-pure quartz that is mined at Spruce Pine. The mines there are said to have the highest-purity quartz in the world and most of the crucibles in the world used for making chips come from Spruce Pine.

The pandemic showed us how vulnerable the world is to disruptions in the supply chain of important materials. In the telecom industry we had some surprising shortages caused by breaks in the supply chain for raw materials. One of the earliest and biggest disruptions during the pandemic came from the shortage of the raw materials used to make the resins that are used as enclosures for telecom gear. Resins require polyethylenes, nylons, polycarbonates, and acrylonitrile butadiene (ABS). The supply chain broke for several of these key components.

A longer-lasting shortage in the industry crippled the manufacture of computer chips. It turns out that chip manufacturing relies on almost two hundred raw minerals like silicon, germanium, gallium, indium phosphide, boron, phosphorus, and many others. The worldwide supply chain issues shut down chip manufacturing when many of the raw materials became hard to acquire.

While major weather events can disrupt the supply chain, the impact is usually temporary, except when severe weather destroys key facilities that are part of the supply chain. There are many other causes of supply chain disruption including political unrest, labor shortages, high fuel costs, transportation restraints, and cybersecurity threats.

We are constantly reminded of the fragility of the international supply chain. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore killed the delivery of raw materials to numerous U.S. manufacturers. A recent rumor of a dockworker strike caused a shortage of toilet paper as consumers recalled one of the biggest early issues during the pandemic. Political unrest in Africa routinely cuts off major supplies of cobalt, platinum, and chromium.

Some supply chain problems are purely political, like when nations get into tariff wars and raise the cost of importing goods. Farmers too well remember the impact of the Chinese tariffs on U.S. pork that were imposed as part of a larger trade war a few years ago.

The newest cause of disruptions comes from cybersecurity attacks on companies. Corporations can be shut down for weeks or months as a result of major hacking. Many U.S. auto dealers suffered major problems a few months ago when CDK, a supplier of the software that operates dealers, was hacked.

One of the key characteristics of supply chain disruptions is that they are most often a big surprise. There is nobody who could have imagined the disruption of mining for ultra-pure quartz in western North Carolina. I’m sure that the folks running that mine would have sworn that such an event was unthinkable. What we’ve learned in recent years is that almost nothing is unthinkable anymore.

Remote Learning and Preschoolers

A recent article in the MIT Technology Review described the benefits that remote learning can bring to preschoolers. The articles describes a study by the MacArthur Foundation that has not yet been peer-reviewed. The research describes the results of bringing preschool to Syrian refugees.

Syrians are the largest displaced population in the world. Seventy percent of Syrians fled the country over the last decade as violence in the country grew out of control. Most of the displaced population is living in nearby countries like Lebanon. The life of the refugees remains unsettled because they have not been accepted in the new countries and have no path to citizenship. For example, Lebanon is itself in strife. The country currently has no president. Events like the Israel-Palestine crisis have brought new violence to the country.

The vast majority of children on the planet have had disruptions in education due to the pandemic, climate disasters, and war. According to UNICEF, there have been 43.3 million children driven from their homes worldwide since 2020.

The study concerns an effort coordinated by the International Rescue Committee, the Sesame Workshop, and educators to create a preschool program that can be delivered to students in tough situations. One of the programs created in the package of materials is Ahlan Simsim (Welcome Sesame) that is created in Arabic using many of the familiar Sesame Street characters. The educational programming is being broadcast into refugee centers using cellphones and is being made available to many other children in more traditional ways to deliver video content. Over 2 million preschoolers have watched the content and participated in the program.

Lebanon is a challenging environment for anything digital because only 78% of residents have any access to broadband, and only about two-thirds of adults have a cellphone. The Syrian refugees typically have one cellphone per family.

There was already a movement underway in Lebanon before the pandemic to create this content. Sesame street had created programming using Ma’zooza the goat, Jad a yellow monster, and Basma a purple friend. But the pandemic put the project on the shelf.

The study that been conducted with the release of the content seems promising. It appears that remote learning is nearly as effective as live preschool. Children viewing the programming have seen noted improvements in literacy, number skills, motor skills, and social-emotional skills. Best of all, kids viewing the programming have incorporated what they have learned into their play.

One thing that probably enhanced the experience for kids is that Syrian mothers have embraced the programming and watch it with their children. That provides strong reinforcement for tasks like learning the alphabet or how to count.

The effort has been so successful that it’s now being copied and modified for other refugee populations around the world. Educators understand the risk to children who grow up in stressful environments without learning the basic skills that lead to life-long learning. Children who don’t get this kind of mental stimulation in the early years lose the ability to ever catch up with their peers.

Tech Hubs

Late last year, the Biden Administration announced the creation of 31 tech hubs. There is a complete list of the hubs at the end of the blog. Not all of the hubs are in cities, and 22 of the hubs include rural communities, including six hubs being created in association with Indian tribes. Within each tech hub region, funding will be stressed to benefit and create jobs in distressed communities.

Each tech hub will become a center for research, development, and manufacturing high-tech areas like biotech, clean energy, semiconductors, and materials management.

The government will make funding available for each hub area from agencies like the Economic Development Administration, the Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Small Business Administration.

As part of the program, the USDA will work with Tech Hubs to make sure that each hub has the needed broadband, and when possible, will get power needs supplied by electric cooperatives.

Each tech hub is being established as a nexus to focus on research and manufacturing for a specific area of high tech. The specific tech hubs list is below. You can click on the links to see the specific communities included with each tech hub.

 Safe and Effective Autonomous Systems

Headwaters Hub – smart photonic sensor systems in MT

Ocean Tech Hub – ocean robotics, sensors, and materials in RI, MA

Trustworthy & Equitable Autonomous Systems Tech Hub – secure autonomous systems in OK

Maintaining Our Quantum Edge

Elevate Quantum Colorado – quantum information technology in CO

The Bloch Tech Hub – quantum computing and communications in IL, IN, and WI

Advancing Biotechnology: Drugs and Devices

Advanced Pharma Manufacturing Tech Hub – active pharma ingredient manufacturing in VA

ReGen Valley Tech Hub – cells, organ, and tissue biofabrication in NH

iFab Tech Hub – precision fermentation and biomanufacturing in IL

Kansas City Inclusive Biologics and Biomanufacturing Tech Hub– vaccine-related biologics and manufacturing in MO and KS

Heartland BioWorks – biologics manufacturing in IN

PRBio Tech Hub – biopharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing in Puerto Rico

Advancing Biotechnology: Precision and Prediction

Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub – personalized medicine in WI

Baltimore Tech Hub – predictive healthcare in MD

Birmingham Biotechnology Hub – equitable AI-driven biotechnology in AL

Greater Philadelphia Region Precision Medicine Tech Hub–  end to end precision medicine in PA, DE, MD, and NJ

Minnesota MedTech 3.0 – smart medical technologies in MN and WI

Accelerating Our Energy Transition

Gulf Louisiana Offshore Wind Propeller – offshore wind and renewable energy in LA

Intermountain-West Nuclear Energy Tech Hub– small modular reactors and microreactors in ID and WY

SC Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy – clean energy supply chain in SC and GA

South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub – sustainable and climate resilient infrastructure in FL

New Energy New York (NENY) Battery Tech Hub – end to end battery development and manufacturing in NY

Strengthening Our Critical Minerals Supply Chain

Critical Minerals and Materials for Advanced Energy (CM2AE) Tech Hub– critical mineral processing in MO

Nevada Lithium Batteries and Other EV Material Loop – lithium batteries and electric vehicle materials in NV

Regaining Leadership in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Texoma Semiconductor Innovation Consortium – fablet-based semiconductor manufacturing in TX and OK

Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub – microfluidics platforms in OR

Advancing GaN Tech Hub – gallium nitride-based semiconductors in VT

NY SMART I-Corridor Tech Hub – end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing in NY

Growing the Future of Materials Manufacturing

Sustainable Polymers Tech Hub – sustainable plastics and rubbers in OH

Forest Bioproducts Advanced Manufacturing Tech Hub – sustainable wood biomass polymers in ME

American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Tech Hub – aerospace materials manufacturing in WA and ID

Pacific Northwest Mass Timber Tech Hub– mass timber manufacturing and design in WA and OR

Santa Needs Broadband!

The other day, I ran across a website for kids to send an email to Santa. It turns out there are many such sites, and it made me realize that Santa needs broadband today, just like other people who live in rural areas. Santa doesn’t just receive millions of emails, but it turns out that a lot of kids now also send videos to Santa to tell him how nice they have been during the year.

Santa not only needs broadband to communicate with millions of kids, but in today’s world of a complex supply chain, Santa needs broadband to be able to order the raw materials needed to build the large volumes of toys. Most vendors have moved their ordering systems online, and there are no longer rooms full of people taking orders from customers, even from Santa’s elves. It’s hard to say how much bandwidth Santa needs. Just due to receiving millions of emails and videos, his toy operation looks like a large business and needs a serious broadband connection. It’s hard to think today that Santa and his team don’t also use various cloud software programs to keep track of everything.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about the exact location of Santa’s workshop. One problem Santa has in getting broadband is that the true North Pole isn’t in any country. It sits in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, making it impossible to reach with wired broadband unless somebody builds an undersea fiber.

It seems unlikely that something like a Starlink subscription could provide enough bandwidth (and from what I can tell, Starlink doesn’t have much coverage that far north yet). However, OneWeb is up and running and has significant coverage in the far North. The company is now specializing in wholesale bandwidth connections to government locations and is probably the perfect solution for Santa today.

But it’s obvious that an operation the size of Santa’s will eventually need fiber. Many people have speculated over the years that his workshop is not at the true North Pole but somewhere nearby on dry land. The closest populated place to the North Pole is the town of Alert on Ellesmere Island in Canada. The Canadian government has pledged to connect 98% of rural households to broadband by 2026 and 100% by 2030. Perhaps Canada has made a secret and special arrangement to include the North Pole in its broadband plans. If not, somebody should start a petition!

It’s too bad that Santa’s workshop is not in the U.S. If it was, then the BEAD grants would be bringing better broadband since there is a mandate to bring broadband to every unserved location, no matter how remote.

So while most of you are all taking the day off, I’m going to start formulating a plan to get broadband to Santa’s workshop. Otherwise, he’s probably only a few years away from being unable to maintain the business.

I’ll leave you with what I know my wife will think is the best Santa joke:

Why does Santa always go down the chimney?

Because it soots him!

I hope everybody has a safe and wonderful holidays!

Childcare and Working From Home

The childcare industry in the county is on the verge of a major collapse, and this could mean millions of families will be looking for jobs that allow them to work from home. That will mean a lot of additional demand for decent broadband.

The childcare industry ran into troubles at the beginning of the pandemic, and over 20,000 childcare centers, or about 10% of the total, closed within a short time after the onset of the pandemic. At the time, this resulted in about 40,000 lost daycare jobs.

As the pandemic started to ebb, Congress provided $24 billion in subsidies to bolster salaries to keep people interested in taking the high-stress jobs of childcare. That funding is going to end this month. Several non-profits that concentrate on the sector say that the end of the subsidies will likely cause another 70,000 childcare centers to close – about one in three of the remaining centers. That will kill another 230,000 childcare jobs, but more importantly, will mean that around 2.3 million families will be confronted with some difficult childcare choices.

Many families will suddenly be without childcare because they won’t be able to find an alternative. It seems likely that without the subsidies, that the remaining childcare centers will raise rates – and, in many cases, making childcare costs too high to justify working.

Some families that lose childcare will find a more expensive alternative, but many will not. The loss of 70,000 childcare centers is going to affect most communities in the country. It might seem logical that some of the childcare workers who lose a job could start taking care of children in their own homes – but that is not practical in most communities. Most places now require all childcare facilities to be licensed, and any home or location used for childcare must meet a lot of requirements that are expensive or impossible to meet for the average home.

Childcare workers who lose their jobs can hopefully find employment somewhere in the overheated job market. But families who decide that a parent must stay at home without access to childcare are likely going to be looking for jobs that can be done at home – and probably online.

This raises all kinds of issues. Many of the families that are suddenly back in the home to take care of their own children will not be proficient with computers. Many will unfortunately live in places where the broadband is not good enough to support working from home.

I wonder if there are enough virtual jobs available to meet this new influx of workers seeking online work? There is a well-known national trend that many Gen X and Millennial workers prefer online work, and new job seekers will be competing with folks who have more computer skills and experience. We’re also starting to see some of the largest employers, including the federal government, starting to insist that workers come back to the office. This is likely going to make it even more competitive to pursue the remaining online jobs.

But there is still a vibrant work-from-home economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that 34% of workers did at least some of their work at home in 2022, down from 42% in 2020 and 38% in 2021. But those same statistics showed that getting work from home is highly correlated with the level of education – 54% of those with a bachelors degree or higher work at home some of the time compared to only 18% for those with a high school diploma or less.

New Battery Technology

The world is growing increasingly dependent on good batteries. It’s clear that using the new 5G spectrum drains cellphone batteries faster. Everybody has heard horror stories of lithium batteries from lawnmowers or weed eaters catching fire. Flying with lithium batters is a growing challenge. People with electric cars want better range without having to recharge. The best way to capture and use alternate forms of power is to store electricity in big batteries. The increasing demand for batteries is happening at the same time that trade wars for the raw materials used for batteries are heating up through tariffs and trade restrictions.

Luckily there is a huge amount of research underway to look for batteries that last longer, charge faster, and are made from more readily available minerals.

Zinc-manganese oxide batteries. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Northwest National Laboratory have developed a technology that can produce high-energy density batteries out of zinc and magnesium. These are readily available minerals that could be used to create low-cost storage batteries.

Scientists have experimented with Zinc-manganese batteries since the 1990s, but they could never find a way to allow batteries to be recharged more than a few times due to the deterioration of the manganese electrode. They have found a technique that reduces and even replenishes the electrode and have created batteries that can be recharged over 5,000 times. This technology creates the larger batteries used for electric storage in solar systems, vehicles, and power plants.

Organosilicon Electrolyte Batteries. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin were searching for an alternative to lithium batteries to avoid the danger of the electrolyte catching fire. Professors Robert Hamers and Robert West developed an organosilicon electrolyte material that can greatly reduce the possibility of fires when added to current Li-ion batteries. The electrolytes also add significantly to battery life.

Gold Nanowire Gel Electrolyte Batteries. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine, have been experimenting with gels as the main filler in batteries since gets are generally not as combustible as liquids. They had also been experimenting with using nanowires as the diode, but the tiny wires were too delicate and quickly wore out. They recently found that they could use gold nanowires covered with dioxide along with an electrolyte gel. This combination has resulted in a battery that can be recharged 200,000 times, compared to 6,000 times for most good batteries.

TankTwo String Cell Batteries.  One of the biggest problems with batteries is the length of time it takes to recharge. The company TankTwo has developed a technique to build batteries in tiny modular compartments. These are tiny cells with a plastic coating and a conductive outer coating that can self-arrange within the battery. At an electric car charging station, the tiny cells would be sucked out from the battery housing and replaced with fully charged cells – reducing the recharging process to only minutes. The charging station can recharge deleted cells at times when electricity is the cheapest.

NanoBolt Lithium Tungsten Batteries. Researchers at N1 Technologies have developed a battery structure that allows for greater energy storage and faster recharging. They have added tungsten and carbon nanotubes into lithium batteries that bond to a copper anode substrate to build up a web-like structure. This web forms a much greater surface area for charging and discharging electricity.

Toyota Solid-state Batteries. Toyota recently announced it is introducing a new solid-state lithium-iron-phosphate battery as a replacement for the lithium-ion batteries currently used for its electric vehicles. These batters are lighter, cost less, and recharge faster. Toyota claims a range of 621 miles per charge. They say the battery can be fully recharged in ten minutes. By comparison, the best Tesla battery is good for about half the distance and can take a half-charge in fifteen minutes.

Competing with ChatGPT

I’ve been writing this blog daily since 2013, and writing it is the favorite part of my day. Writing the blog forces me to research and solidify my thoughts and opinions about various topics. But suddenly, I’m seeing headlines everywhere saying that ChatGPT will soon handle most writing and there will be no need for folks like me who write every day.

I was obviously intrigued and investigated the ChatGPT software. The latest 3.5 version of the software was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. OpenAI is a for-profit software firm that has been researching the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the stated goal of developing friendly AI. It’s interesting that friendly is a key part of their mission statement because many AI industry pundits predict that AI will likely eventually compete with humans for resources, much like Skynet in the Terminator movies.

ChatGPT is written atop OpenAI’s third generation of software and is aimed at communicating in a written or conversational way so that a reader can’t tell the difference between the software and a human. The company has numerous investors, but Microsoft just offered to buy a 49% stake in the company for $10 billion. This instantly has me wondering when there will be a fee to use the software instead of the free version that is available now.

The press on ChatGPT has been over-the-top. I’ve seen articles comparing the impact of the launch of ChatGPT to other big events in web history, like the first web browser or the iPhone. Articles are touting that the software will mean that programmers will no longer have to write code, that students will no longer have to write papers, and that there will soon be no need for journalists (or bloggers!)

Early-generation AI writing software has been around for a few years and many baseball box scores and press summaries of quarterly earnings reports have been generated by software. These are writing tasks that are formulaic and repetitive, and I doubt that most folks noticed – although the software never captured the magic of a sports reporter like Shirley Povich, who I enjoyed reading every day for years in the Washington Post.

I had to give this platform a try. Was this software capable of writing something like this blog? If so, it would make me reconsider writing every day because if the software is that good there won’t be much need for human writers before long. As I was testing, I also considered the idea of using the software to get a jump start on a new piece of writing – the idea of seeing if the software could structure and organize an idea would be a time saver if the results were usable.

You can give complicated instructions to the software. You can provide the topic, the desired length of the end product, and describe the desired style of writing. I gave the software several topics to write about, and I was impressed with the speed of the process. The finished product is created almost as soon as you say go to the software.

But I was underwhelmed by the results. The sentences are grammatically perfect, and each paragraph has a topic and tries to make a point. Yet the end result was stilted, and some paragraphs were unreadable – I had to reread them several times to try to decipher the point (but for all I know, my readers have to do the same thing!).

The biggest flaw was that the writing was full of factual errors. That makes a lot of sense because the software distills what is written on the web when writing content. It takes the good and the bad, the factual and non-factual, and the easy-to-understand and obtuse writing that exists on the web and mashes it in a synthesis of what it finds. I realized that I would have to fact-check everything ChatGPT writes because the software has no way to discern what is true or untrue. There is a term for this among data scientists, and I read that ChatGPT currently has a hallucination rate of between 15% and 21%, meaning that it seems to make up that percentage of facts in its writing.

I know there is instant hope among students that this software can churn out the dreaded school essay – but that doesn’t look likely. The software has been out for only two months, and I saw that a software engineer has already developed a program that can detect with more than 90% accuracy if something is written by a human or by ChatGPT. Students beware.

The day will likely come when the ChatGPT writing gets better, but there is nothing in this software today that would make me consider giving up writing or even using this as a tool. The hallucination rate means I can’t trust it to be factual, so it’s not even worth using to create a kernel of an idea for a blog. Most importantly, the output is not readable – it’s all perfect English, but I couldn’t understand the point of about half of what it wrote for me. If my blogs are going to be unreadable, I want the obtuseness to be fully human-generated!

Broadband Satellite Issues

One of the most interesting aspects of serving broadband from low-orbit satellites is that it brings issues related to space into the broadband discussion. Space issues were less important for high earth orbit satellites that sit 20,000 miles above the earth. Other than an occasional impact from sunspots, there wasn’t much of note. But there are two recent events that highlight our new focus on low-earth orbit satellites. I would never have imagined a decade ago that I would be interested in these topics in terms of the impact on broadband.

The first is a piece of legislation introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Roger Wicker (R-MS). The legislation is called the Orbital Sustainability (ORBITS) Act. The bill is intended to begin the development of a technology called active debris removal (ADR) that would be used to remove dangerous debris from low earth orbit.

The risk of space debris has been well documented by NASA and others. There are over one hundred million pieces of debris orbiting the earth today. These range in size from dust-sized up to out-of-service satellites and rocket boosters. Space will be getting a lot more crowded as the industry plans to launch tens of thousands of additional satellites in the coming years. Space is going to get crowded.

So why is debris a problem? The issue was described by NASA scientists Don Kessler in 1978. He postulated that as mankind put more objects into orbit that the inevitability of collisions would increase and that over time there would be more and more debris. This is easy to understand when you realize that every piece of debris is circulating at over 20,000 miles per hour. When objects collide, even more debris is created, and Kessler postulated that there would eventually be a cloud of debris that would destroy anything in orbit, making low-space unusable.

The legislation would fund research into different technologies that can be used to clean debris, with NASA tackling some of the trials. The hope is for an eventual system that scrubs space of debris as it is created to keep the valuable low-orbit space usable.

In other news, President Putin of Russia has threatened to destroy Starlink and other satellites that are helping Ukraine in the war between the two countries. Targeting satellites as part of war is an idea that has been used by Hollywood for years. The first such movie I remember is Moonraker, the James Bond movie that sent the British secret service agent into space.

In September, a Russian diplomat said at the United Nations that satellites could be legitimate military targets. He argued that civilian satellites that provide broadband might be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty that provides for only peaceful uses of satellite technology. He is obviously aiming his comments at Starlink, although in a few years, there will be multiple companies in the same category.

Russia has already been targeting Starlink with cyberwarfare hacking to try to corrupt the satellite software. It’s been reported that Russia was also looking for a way to identify the location of the satellite receivers on the ground.  But it was clear from recent threats that Russia is hinting at some method of crippling or destroying satellites in orbit.

The earth has become massively reliant on satellite technology. It’s now becoming a source of broadband, but there are many other vital uses such as GPS technology, weather forecasting, studying and tracking resources like water and minerals, and numerous other uses.

The idea of attacks on satellites is scary. This might range from some sort of hunter satellites that attack other satellites or more indiscriminately through something like nuclear blasts that would disable all electronics. But the investment in satellites is huge and would not easily be replaced. The bigger question raised is if it is worth spending money on satellites that can be destroyed.

It’s likely that the threats are just rhetoric because every country depends on satellites for a lot of everyday functions. But countries have done insane things in wartime before, so it’s not off the table.