Category Archives: Technology

The Space Cannon

As if low-orbit space isn’t already getting over-crowded, there is a startup that may send huge numbers of additional satellites into orbit. The California company is Spinlaunch.

Spinlaunch plans to shoot microsatellites into orbit using what they call a centrifugal cannon (pictured to the right). The cannon spins and accelerates a small rocket that will hold multiple satellites. The cannon accelerates the rocket using spinning arms inside a vacuum chamber that achieve a force of 10,000 G and a speed of 5,000 miles per hour – fast enough to achieve a suborbital height. From there, the rocket engines will fire to finish the trip to space. The company has done ten test launches that successfully reached suborbital heights.

The launches will be done from Adak Island, near the western end of the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. Spinlaunch’s partner is the Aleut Corporation, an Alaskan Native business. They chose the Aleutians since it provides a clear launch path over the Pacific Ocean with minimal disruption to commercial flights. The area also has steady winds, which allow for the use of cheap renewable wind power. The site also takes advantage of an abandoned U.S. Navy base on the island.

The company plans to start shooting satellites into orbit in 2026. The satellites, shaped like a disk, are 7.5 feet across and weigh about 154 pounds. This is significantly lighter than a Starlink satellite, with the current V2 satellites weighing in at 1,760 pounds. The plan is to place 250 satellites into orbit in a single launch, the most ever. Last year, Starlink launched 143 satellites in a single launch.

The satellite fleet will be owned by a sister company, Meridian Space. Meridian Space currently holds an FCC license to launch 1,190 satellites. Spinlaunch raised $150 million, including a recent infusion of $12 million from Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace, which will manufacture the satellites. Meridian Space plans to compete head-to-head with Starlink and Kuiper in selling broadband.

Spinlaunch thinks it has a number of advantages over other launch technologies. It requires 70% less fuel to put a satellite into orbit, meaning a much lower cost of deployment. The launch cannon should be fully usable for many years of future launches.

On the flip side, placing even more satellites into space increases the problems that have been identified with proliferation of low-orbit satellites. That includes an increased risk of space collisions and the resulting debris that could make low-orbit space into a dead zone. It means more interference with light pollution and interference with astronomy. It also means more satellites falling back to earth, which can cause degradation of the ozone layer.

But like it or not, the satellite age is upon us, and is going to accelerate as companies find clever ways to launch more satellites into low-orbit space.

Free-space Quantum Optics

In a joint effort by Yale University, Stony Brook University, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have been working on a project using free-space optics to transmit quantum signals through the air using lasers. The specific project is called Q-LATS for Quantum Laser Across the Sound, where signals are being transmitted 27 miles from a tower at Yale across Long Island Sound to a tower at Stony Brook University.

Quantum computers are used to create qubits, which have the ability to exist as both a one and a zero simultaneously. This allows a quantum computer to explore multiple scenarios at the same time. Qubits can be created using trapped ions or photons. Quantum communications function by generating entangled photon pairs. One photon is retained and used for calculations, while the other is sent to a distance location. Anything done with the retained photon is sensed at the distant end, thus transmitting the details of the computations.

The project is looking for alternatives to using fiber cables. It turns out to be very challenging to transmit quantum signals through fiber since some of the qubits are lost during the transmission. Fiber cables used to transmit quantum signals work best when heavily shielded and buried, making it costly to establish paths for future quantum communications.

The Q-LATS project hopes to show a reasonable alternate to fiber in places where costly fiber routes are impractical, such as across the Sound. Free-space optics can be used to transmit quantum signals in urban locations, across water, and even into space.

Transmitting light signals through the air has limitations due to rain, fog, and atmospheric turbulence, but the scientists believe these shortcomings can be more easily overcome than finding the funding to build specialty fiber routes.

For now, quantum transmissions are mostly of interest in academia to transmit signals between universities. But quantum computing holds some interesting properties that should eventually make it of use for data centers, large businesses, the military, and others. Quantum signals are seemingly nearly impossible to intercept or hack because the effort to do so instantly interferes with the transmission of qubits. That’s even more so with free-space optics, where a hacker would have to somehow intercept a line-of-sight transmission through the air.

Quantum communications might eventually become the standard for sending highly confidential or sensitive information. It’s not hard to imagine using free-space lasers to transmit quantum signals between Wall Street firms, between large businesses and data centers, and between government and military locations that require a secure path.

Cellular Upload Speeds

T-Mobile recently announced a cellular speed test where the company was able to achieve an upload speed of 550 Mbps on a live cellular link. The test was clearly done in ideal conditions in order to achieve the fast speed, but T-Mobile acknowledges that upload speeds are increasingly important to customers. Fierce Network quoted T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson as saying, “uplink is the next big thing.”

This is something the broadband industry has known for many years. Fiber companies set a standard of symmetrical download and upload speeds, which frankly provide more upload speed than people need. But the public complained loudly about the slow upload speeds from cable companies during the pandemic, and cable companies have scrambled to increase upload speeds using mid-split upgrades. Cable companies have upgraded many markets to upload speeds of 100 to 200 Mbps.

This new speed test record seems to have been released to complement T-Mobile’s press release in April, where it announced that it now offers the first nationwide 5G Advanced network. By that, T-Mobile means its 5G network has begun to incorporate the latest industry 5G standards included in 3 GPP Release 17 and 18. According to the press release, T-Mobile has implemented 5G Advanced nationwide, although there is some discussion in the Fierce Network article saying that is not likely.

There is no doubt that T-Mobile has upgraded networks to a greater degree than the competition, as documented in the latest report from Ookla for the end of 2024 where T-Mobile had a median download speed of 281.5 Mbps, compared to 199.1 Mbps for Verizon and 140.1 for AT&T.  However, during that same period, T-Mobile’s median upload speed, as measured by Ookla, was much slower at 21.3 Mbps. In the April press release, T-Mobile said its typical upload speeds are between 6 and 31 Mbps.

Upload speeds likely matter a lot more to T-Mobile now that it has passed the 6 million customer mark with its FWA home broadband product. Folks who use broadband for gaming, working from home, online schooling, and conferencing are not going to be enamored with a broadband product where poor upload speeds can degrade performance. The current median speed of 21 Mbps is basically the same as the speed customers don’t like on cable company networks.

Upload speeds are probably the biggest long-term weakness of FWA broadband. FWA customers who live in rural areas might not have another alternative other than Starlink, which also has slow upload speeds. But a lot of FWA’s growth is coming from suburbs and cities where customers have a broadband alternative. Cable companies are scrambling to get much faster upload speeds, and fiber generally has symmetrical speeds. Ookla points out in its latest quarterly report that upload usage is growing at a much faster pace than download usage. T-Mobile is being smart in looking at a way to improve upload speeds.

The Growing Risk of Space Debris

Low orbit space is growing increasingly crowded. Starlink has over 7,100 satellites in orbit and has plans to grow to 30,000. Project Kuiper has plans for a constellation of 3,232 satellites. One Web’s first-generation constellation has 648 satellites, with plans to grow to over 6,300 satellites. The Thousand Sails (Qianfan) constellation is planning for up to 15,000 satellites. Numerous countries and businesses are launching or planning for smaller constellations for a wide variety of purposes.

The European Space Agency issued a recent report that looks at the debris issue. Low-orbit space is already full of debris. Space scientists worry that collisions between satellites will create a lot more debris. NASA scientist Don Kessler warned about this years ago, and the Kessler effect describes a scenario where a major satellite collision can lead to a chain reaction that will lead to more collisions until an altitude of space becomes unusable.

NASA released a comprehensive financial analysis on space debris in 2023.  The report says there may already be 170 million pieces of space debris, and we’re only able to track around 55,000 objects today that include live and dead satellites, dead rocket boosters, and relatively large pieces of debris. It’s already becoming routine for operators to have to move satellites to avoid collisions. In one scary incident, Starlink satellite 44 was on a collision course with the European Space Agency (ESA) Aeolus satellite. ESA was able to make a last-minute course correction, but ESA reported that it was unable to make contact with Starlink during the incident.

The only real solution is to have a comprehensive effort to remove debris. There are now worldwide conferences of space scientists who are concentrating on the debris issue.

There are a number of possible solutions for removing space debris. The most important step is to make sure that every object that is launched has the ability to be intentionally deorbited. Starlink has done a good job of this, but not every satellite has this ability. Deorbiting has it’s own risks to the planet, and scientists warn that aluminum oxide from deorbiting satellites can kill the ozone layer.

Another tactic being explored is to repurpose existing satellites by visiting them to refuel and to swap components to modernize as needed. This would save on expensive new launches and the problems from deorbiting materials. Scientists are envisioning robotic satellites that service other satellites.

Because of the huge volume of existing debris, there also needs to be some method of scrubbing the sky of debris. Active debris removal would involve satellites that snag debris using robotic arms, tethers, nets, or space tugs for large debris. Scientists think it’s possible to use space-based lasers to zap and evaporate small debris. There is also the possibility of using ground-based large lasers to nudge larger debris into deorbiting.

But like with most issues, the question is who is going to pay? The only worldwide agreement on the issue is the Outer Space Treaty signed by multiple parties in 1967. This treaty says the country responsible for making debris is responsible for removing it. This treaty is far out of date since the large majority of space objects are being launched by commercial companies and not governments.

Somebody will have to start the effort to pay for this before it’s too late and big swaths of orbits become unusable. Governments could chip in to do this. There could somehow be requirements for commercial operators to pay for this – increasing the cost of operating satellite constellations. Scientists believe that satellite companies have an incentive to see this done, but we’ve seen too many other industries that have pawned off their environmental costs to others.

Closing Copper Networks

In a precursor to the headlines we’ll be seeing in the U.S., Telefónica announced on May 27 that it shut off its copper telephone network in Spain. Telefónica today has $41 billion in revenues that include broadband, voice, and cellular business. The company was the legacy monopoly telephone company in Spain, founded in 1924, and still serves a major share of the telecom market.

The company began replacing copper with fiber in 2009 in reaction to a European Union order to unbundle copper networks to allow competition – an order that did not apply to fiber. Closing the copper networks also means the wholesale business has ended for companies that were using unbundled copper access.

The company was able to decommission the first two of its 8,500 exchanges in 2014, and the pace has accelerated since then, with 4,300 exchanges shut in 2024. Telefónica claims to be the first telephone company in Europe to have completed the transition from copper to fiber.

Unlike here, the European Union has strong rules that insist that every dropped copper customer has access to another source of broadband and voice – mostly fiber, but also wireless. The EU allows remote locations to be transitioned to satellite broadband. In the U.S., telcos are supposed to find an alternative for customers but often just wink at the requirement.

AT&T made a formal announcement in January of this year that it intends to get rid of copper everywhere except California by the end of 2029. The company has been quietly decommissioning copper long before that formal announcement. AT&T will likely have a prolonged battle with the California Public Service Commission before it can tear down copper.

AT&T said in its announcement that it will offer an alternate technology to customers – either fiber or wireless. AT&T announced plans at the end of last year to build 45 million additional fiber passings on the same 2029 deadline as killing copper. Cities are anxiously waiting to see if AT&T will really build fiber in the poorest neighborhoods and in places where fiber construction is very expensive. It seems more likely that the company will get 80% fiber coverage in some cities and call it good.

Rural areas are another matter. In rural areas, AT&T will offer FWA cellular broadband as an alternative to copper. But FWA technology has two major shortcomings in rural areas. First, there is zero cellular coverage in huge parts of rural America, and even less coverage when you account for FWA customers needing to be within a few miles of a cell tower. Even close to a cell tower, there is always the question if a given tower has the capacity to accept a lot of new FWA customers. There are already stories in the press of rural customers losing copper coverage with no wireless alternative.

The FCC recently changed rules to make it easier for legacy telcos to walk away from copper networks. These changes were adopted by the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, meaning they didn’t come to the full Commission for a vote.

One rule change allows a telco to turn off copper wires without having to conduct a test to first see if a replacement technology can take over the functions that were being performed by copper. This rule clarification says a telco can justify tearing down the old network if the “totality of the circumstances” proves that the change is needed. That seems to provide justification for tearing down copper as long as some adequate number of homes in an area will have a replacement.

Another rule change puts a two-year moratorium on telcos for having to disclose and seek public comment about closing copper networks.

Of course, to speed things along even faster, there is a good chance that all rules pertaining to copper networks will be scrapped during the Delete, Delete, Delete process.

New Radio over Coax

Charter, Rogers Communications, and CableLabs have collaborated on a new technology they are calling new radio over coax (NRoC). The immediate goal of the new technology is to use a cable company’s coaxial network to transmit 5G signals. In Charter’s case, the company wants to use new bandwidth to take advantage of Charter’s CBRS spectrum.

The technology to make this happen relies on opening up new spectrum inside the HFC (Hybrid fiber coaxial) network at frequencies higher than 1.8 GHz, which is the current bandwidth needed to implement DOCSIS 4.0. Much in the same way that DSL transmits broadband at a higher frequency on telephone copper, NRoC will transmit at a higher frequency that won’t interfere with the current network transmissions of video and broadband.

There are numerous potential uses for a cable company by opening a new data path on an HFC network. Charter wants to turn neighborhood HFC nodes into small cell sites using CBRS spectrum. Charter purchased a substantial amount of CBRS spectrum in 2020 and has already deployed several hundred CBRS transmitters in neighborhoods in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Charters wants to use its own CBRS spectrum to provide cellular relief in neighborhoods with high cellular demand and to reduce the MVNO cellular minutes it buys from Verizon.

Charter says that NRoC can transform the cost of small cell deployment. The company already has huge numbers of existing neighborhood nodes where the network transitions from fiber to coaxial cable. This technology would enable Charter to add a new small cell site at any node for a significantly lower cost than adding a traditional small cell site. Deploying NRoC radios takes advantage of existing networks and don’t require new backhaul or fiber construction.

Having a second data path across the whole network opens up a lot of other possibilities.

  • The extra bandwidth might be a good place to house AI software used to maximize the performance of the network.
  • The extra bandwidth could be used for new products, such as supporting communications with IoT sensors.
  • An intriguing possibility would be to use the extra bandwidth as a way to distribute earthbound traffic from direct-to-satellite cellular communications.

Charter hasn’t disclosed any details about the CableLabs development, but it’s not hard to envision dozens of market uses for a second data path for networks that are already routed into every neighborhood in urban and suburban markets.

Repurposing TV Station Spectrum

The FCC received an interesting petition in March from the owner of low-power TV stations. HC2, which owns 14% of the 1,800 low-power station in the country, asked the FCC to allow the stations to cease the requirement to provide at least one free traditional broadcast signal. Instead, HC2 wants to repurpose the TV spectrum to use 5G technology to broadcast signals to 5G-enabled devices.

Low power television service (LPTV) was established by the FCC in 1982. The intention of the order was to allow the creation of more TV stations in small markets and to add stations in urban areas that want to broadcast alternative programming to the big network stations that were prominent at the time. LPTV stations that have converted to digital broadcast use 3 kilowatts for VHF and 15 kilowatts for UHF channels. Analog stations broadcast at 50 watts for VHF and 500 watts for UHF channels.

HC2 is asking that the FCC allow a transition to the 5G standard as an alternative to having to upgrade stations to the ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 standards. HC2’s vision is to abandon transmissions to TV sets and instead transmit high-quality video to cell phones and other 5G-capable devices. They recognize that the market for linear TV is dying and that a huge number of people spend many hours per day on cell phones. There are currently no cell phones capable of receiving these signals, but HC2 believes that if the FCC allows the change that phone makers will build the technology into phones.

TV delivered straight to cell phones would be an interesting product. HC2 believes the direction of the video market is towards mobility and wants the ability to change their operating model to meet shifting consumer demand. They argue that at a time when carriers are complaining about a lack of 5G spectrum, the spectrum from the LPTV stations will bring more mobile applications to the market without eating into normal cellular spectrum.

HC2 sees a lot of other possible applications. For example, the spectrum could be used by vehicle fleets to send software updates to vehicles without bogging down normal 5G networks. The LPTV networks could be used to provide last-mile connectivity to customers communicating with direct-to-device satellites. Those satellites could beam signal to a hub and have the signals redistributed locally using the LPTV spectrum, eliminating the need for a customer to have direct line-of-sight to a satellite.

HC2 says that early tests of the technology show the ability to transmit signal for up to 20 miles. They’ve also been able to maintain signals to a cell phone in a car traveling at 60 miles-per-hour.

It’s an interesting petition, and it will be interesting to see who opposes it. It sounds like satellite providers might side with the idea. It will be interesting to see if cellular carriers see this as a threat or an opportunity – I suspect they won’t like a new competitor. Handset makers might support the idea if they think it will help to sell more cell phones.

To be clear, the FCC is not obligated to open a rulemaking. The agency gets petitions all of the time asking for rule changes. But it would be unusual for the agency to not at least consider an idea that creates a new market.

Repairing Undersea Fiber

I saw several articles voicing concern about sabotage when two different undersea fiber operators, C-Lion and BCS East-West Interlink, reported breaks in fiber in the Baltic Sea in the same week. There was speculation that Russia was cutting fibers to try to disrupt European broadband. It was eventually reported that the cuts looked like accidents, but conspiracy theorists still like the sabotage story better. Having two cables broken in the Baltic Sea got headlines because of tensions caused by the war in Ukraine. To put the Baltic Sea fiber cuts into perspective, there are two to four cable cuts to undersea fiber somewhere in the world every week.

Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world. A single fiber getting cut is an inconvenience and not a huge problem. Even if all of the fibers in the Baltic Sea were cut, Internet traffic would still be delivered through long-haul fiber routes across Europe.

There are exceptions, and there are island nations that can be isolated by even a single fiber cut. Multiple fiber cuts can cause localized slowdowns. There were four cable cuts off Africa in a relatively short time in 2024 that caused broadband outages in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin. It’s more of a challenge in Africa to reroute traffic using landline fiber since much of the continent still has inadequate middle-mile and long-haul fiber routes.

There are a wide variety of ways that undersea cables get cut. The two most predominant causes are fishing vessels and fibers snagged by anchors. Breaks can come from natural causes like earthquakes, volcanos, or heavy seas. Fibers are cut more often in relatively shallow water than in the deep water in the middle of oceans.

The constantly weekly cuts to fiber have spawned a naval repair industry of ships that constantly circle the globe to fix cable breaks. While that might sound like an exotic job, fixing fibers in the Baltic Sea in February sounds like it deserves hazard pay to me.

The process of repairing cut fibers is interesting. In shallow water, the repair ships locate and grab the end of the cut fibers using ROVs (remote operated vehicles). The mini-submarines grab the fiber with robotic claws and drag the fiber to the surface.

Repairing fibers in deep water is harder. The repair ships locate the fiber using sonar and voltage drop test equipment to locate the ends of the cut fiber. Anybody who locates buried fiber would be intrigued by the process. They then use grapnels, which are large hooks, to snag the fiber and pull it to the surface.

Once the two fiber ends are retrieved, the repair process would be familiar to any fiber field technician. The one difference is that long-haul fiber routes have periodic light repeaters built into the fiber, so it’s more challenging if one of those in part of the repair.

Pushing the Speed Limit

Today’s blog is about several new fast broadband deployments. It seems that every year that vendors are developing new technologies that will speed up our networks and broadband connections.

The first was an announcement from AT&T that the company completed a live test of a 1.6 terabit fiber connection on a route between Newark and Philadelphia. The connection was tested over AT&T’s long-haul network that was also running 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps links.

The fast link was created by combining two 800 Gbps links created by white hardware operating with the Broadcom Jericho3 packet processor chip. The two links were combined using Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme cohere optical transponder. At the two ends of the link, the signal was processed by 800 G DR8 pluggable transceivers from Coherent which created the cross-connectivity to communicate with other packet and optical technologies.

This new link is four times faster than the 400 Gbps lasers that are being installed nationwide as the newest iteration of ling-haul and middle-mile networks – replacing the 100 Gbps lasers that were the standard for the last decade.

Lumen announced that the company successfully created a 1.2 terabyte connection connection on an 1,800 mile long link. The link was accomplished on what Lumen calls its ultra-low-loss (ULL) network. The test used Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme technology and Ciena’s Waveserver platform along with Juniper 800 Gbps routers.

The AT&T news release of the test quoted Mike Satterlee, VP of Network Infrastructure and Services as saying that these tests are vital for AT&T to keep up with future demand. He was quoted as saying that AT&T expected that overall long-haul network traffic will be doubling by 2028.

The other groundbreaking speed trial was conducted by T-Mobile. The company was able to achieve a 6.3 Gbps connection on a Samsung Galaxy S25 cell phone. The phone was using the Snapdragon X80 5G modem-RF system. The 6.3 Gbps test was achieved in the lab, and the speed achieved on a real-world 5G network was 4.3 Gbps. A second test achieved the same speeds using a non-commercial handset that used Qualcomm’s X85 5G Modem.

The network test was conducted using Nokia’s 5G radio access RAN. The sped was achieved by aggregating 2.5 GHz, AWS, and 600 MHz spectrum. The test was not as much about speed as it was the ability to combine multiple frequencies to create a high-bandwidth path.

These trials are proof that carriers are constantly pushing vendors to develop the next-generation of network gear that brings greater capacity. Middle-mile and long haul routes are under strain from unexpected traffic from AI data centers. But long-haul network operators are reporting a big uptick in requests for 100 gigabit data connections across markets and unrelated to AI.

Pew Report on Pole Attachments

Jake Varn of Pew authored a report based on a deep dive into the impact of pole attachments on broadband expansion. The report highlights how issues with pole attachments are adding extra costs to the many grant projects being funded like BEAD and the Capital Project Fund.

The report highlights what anybody who has been building networks has known for many years. The process of adding fiber to the pole can be horrendously complex and time consuming. The rules on how to get onto poles differ significantly by State, but also by pole owner. 23 states and Washington D.C. manage the pole attachment process while the rest of the states follow rules established by the FCC.

Every step in the pole attachment process can be expensive and time-consuming. Applications to attach fiber to a pole often must be done on a pole-by-pole basis since neighboring poles can be significantly different. Many pole owners have no good inventory of poles and must send somebody out to look at each pole to compare to what’s being requested in an application. All of the costs of this process are ultimately borne by the ISP making the application.

The real issues arise when there is not enough room to add a new fiber that will meet national standards for clearance with other wires. In many cases, there’s no room because parties that added wires in the past did not follow standards when placing their wires, and the pole owners never made sure it was done right. The new attacher must pay to fix these old errors.

The most expensive pole attachments come when a pole is too old or too full of wires to add a new fiber, in which case the pole must be replaced. The applicant is saddled with the entire cost of replacing the pole, although a federal order last year tried to soften that impact. But the real damage from having to replace poles is the time required, which differs by State and pole owner.

As the report highlights, the process to do the make-ready work just to get ready for fiber construction can take a long time, which isn’t compatible with the construction deadlines required by the many grant programs. There are already examples of ISPs who have returned RDOF and other grant awards once they realized that the poles were in worst case than they thought, or the learned the pole owner was not going to be cooperative.

The Pew report made some great recommendations, which are aimed at states and federal policymakers and pole owners:

  • The process would be speeded up if there was a requirement to create an electronic inventory of the basic data about every pole – how old, how tall, how many existing attachments? Some pole owners have done this, and it really eases the process.
  • Pew recommends that states standardize the application and permitting process to eliminate the maze of different paperwork and processes needed. A single broadband project might include poles on city, county, and state roads, with each jurisdiction requiring a different paperwork process and forms.
  • Pew recommends that governments form rapid response teams to resolve disputes or delays in the pole attachment process.
  • Pew recommends that States consider pole replacement funds to replace bad poles. They also recommend that states take advantage of any disaster relief funding to replace poles damaged by storms or other disasters.

There is still time for State and local governments to act on these recommendations – but they need to act now to ease the process of ISPs trying to bring better broadband to rural areas.

In full disclosure, I provided some input to this report.