Apple recently announced that it is not building millimeter-wave spectrum antennas into the next generation SE iPhone. Interestingly, this is a phone sold by Verizon, which spent a year advertising on TV and showing us speed tests on cellphones that were receiving gigabit speeds.
For the last twenty years, the industry has talked about broadband in cities as a duopoly, meaning there was competition between cable companies and telcos -- competition between cable modem broadband and DSL broadband. Twenty years ago, there was a true duopoly when the speeds on DSL and cable modem were close in capability. The market at that time demonstrated real duopoly behavior.
Speculation about Russia disconnecting or being disconnected from the wider Internet abounds. In this article, we look at the connectivity of the Russian Internet to the wider Internet and how this evolved around the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the related sanctions.
On March 1, I wrote that a small number of SpaceX Starlink terminals had arrived in Ukraine, and they would be an important asset for distribution to selected government and resistance leaders and journalists. I didn't know who would get the terminals or how many there were, but it was a single truckload. A week or so later, we learned that two more shipments of terminals had arrived and fifty of them went to DTEK, a company struggling to repair Ukrainian electrical infrastructure.
On March 2, Russia covered the US flag on the Roscosmos Space Agency rocket that was scheduled to launch 36 OneWeb broadband satellites on March 5. The Russians made two obviously untenable demands -- that OneWeb guarantee that the satellites would not be used for military purposes and the United Kingdom government remove its investment in the company. OneWeb declined, and the satellites were removed from the rocket.
Leichtman Research recently released the U.S. broadband customer statistics for the end of the fourth quarter of 2021. The numbers show that broadband growth has slowed significantly for the sixteen largest ISPs tracked by the company. LRG compiles these statistics from customer counts provided to stockholders, except for Cox, which is privately owned. Net customer additions sank each quarter during the year.
I've often joked that I don't play computer games because I'm holding out for a holodeck. While that may sound ridiculously far-future, we're on the verge of seeing the web-based virtual reality that will be a major step towards a holodeck. There is already some awesome virtual reality software and games where a person can get immersed in another world using a headset.
Telstra might regret having signed a commercial deal with London-based OneWeb as this company has now become a pawn in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Telstra agreed to host two OneWeb gateway Earth stations in Australia, one in the west and one in the north, which would also cover the APAC region, with a third Earth station currently under discussion for the east coast.
According to a report just released by McKinsey & Company, we are on the verge of seeing a major shift to health care from home. The report says that as much as $265 billion in annual fees to Medicare and Medicare Advantage could shift to homes by 2025. We've already seen the start of the trend towards telemedicine. The spending on telemedicine was 38 times higher in 2021 compared to 2020. Most of that shift is obviously due to the pandemic.
Last week I wrote about the arrival of a truckload of SpaceX Starlink terminals in Ukraine and their potential value to government and resistance leaders. A lot has happened in the ensuing week - this is an update. Last week, using Mike Puchol's Starlink tracking service, I found that users in Kyiv would have 100 percent uptime with connections through as many as nine satellites to ground stations in Turkey, Poland, and Lithuania.