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White House Pledges $400M To Back Speedier 5G Wireless Networks (fortune.com)
The Obama Administration has announced a new funding initiative to ensure the United States maintains its leadership in the mobile technology space. For this, it will spend over $400 million on large-scale test platforms led by National Science Foundation with an aim to develop and advance wireless technology to 5G and beyond. Fortune reports: To be sure, the private sector has also been getting smarter and better organized for 5G this year and the new Obama effort will be conducted in conjunction with a bevy of technology and telecommunications partners. All four major wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon Communications, Sprint, and T-Mobile, are participating. Tech companies on board include Intel, Juniper Networks, Qualcomm, and Nokia. Notably, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are missing from the list. "These super-fast, ultra-low latency, high-capacity networks will enable breakthrough applications for consumers, smart cities, and the Internet of Things that cannot even be imagined today," the White House said in a statement. The report adds: The transition to the next generation standard for wireless networks, so-called 5G, has so far been fraught with confusion, complications, and even some contradictions. But in a few years, when 5G gear sending data at up to 100 times the speed of current networks is commonplace, people may remember July 2016 as a major turning point. The private sector has offered mixed messages about when 5G will be available for regular people and just what it will be used for. Without many standards yet agreed upon, some predicted 5G would be ready starting next year, but others said not until 2020 or later. Some wanted to use it to speed up smartphone connections, while others said it was better suited to improve home and business Internet connections or to collect data from smart devices in the "Internet of Things."
The speeds will increase, but the old dinosaurs won't let go of their silly data caps.
-SR
Yet another subsidy to the telecoms to not deliver what they promise, and then go completely ignored by the government.
Sincerely,
my bi-directional 45Mbit access from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that should have been available 10 years ago according to the Act, and the hundreds of billions of dollars paid in the form of excise taxes by the public.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's the 2016 update to the language of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. And this will be another federal payment to the same fraudsters that already made hundreds of billions on that scam without anyone of consequence noticing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Why don't they collect on the broadband promises that never materialized from the last round of subsidies before giving away another half billion dollars? Oh, right, never mind. They're just bribing people with our own money and trying to make it sound like a good thing, knowing that most people won't be able to call them on it.
Maybe this time it'll be different? I wish I could believe that.
White house pledges 400m to cell carriers profit margins