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In Today’s Issue

What’s Happening On Earth?

FCC Framework Fuels Satellite-Terrestrial Partnerships - Telecom carriers have shown that a little creativity and a lot of satellite power can go a long way toward bridging connectivity gaps traditional networks don’t serve, according to space communications experts.

My Take: ..And it will continue as terrestrial providers continue to find ways to integrate with non-terrestrial options. The convergence is inevitable and is already underway.

Ookla Study: Wireless Network Speeds of Comcast, Charter Have Soared - Customers of two leading mobile virtual network operators have seen a boost in network performance recently, largely thanks to a shift toward wireless service.

My Take: Some decent speed improvements, approaching Starlink type results.

The future of telcos: Mapping the routes to renewed success - For all their efforts to reignite growth, telcos have yet to overcome their fundamental challenges. Doing so is still feasible, but the viable paths will require unprecedented transformation.

My Take: Focusing on B2B, Delayering (NetCo/ServCo) and shifting to a utility-like model are all potential paths to success, according to the report.

802.11ah HaLow at CES - Depending upon the circumstances, HaLow can support data transfer on the order of 1 kilometer, which, compared to more traditional Wi-Fi is something like an order of magnitude greater.

My Take: Anyone using HaLow in any real deployments yet? Looks good on paper but real examples will tell the story.

BEAD Spending in 2025 - I’ve seen some vendors speculating that BEAD is finally going to unleash a big pile of spending in 2025. I don’t want to be the one to burst their bubble, but even if the BEAD grants continue to move on the current path, there will not be a big wave of construction from BEAD this year

My Take: ..never mind the turbulence that the incoming administration may cause…

Telcos need to clean up technical debt like hoarders need to clean their houses - Technical debt is akin to a very messy house — perhaps even a hoarder’s house — where someone other than the hoarder needs to take charge and clean things up. And telcos, which have some of the messiest houses, really need a helping hand.

My Take: No one likes to get rid of anything because you may need it one day,

🇨🇦 Telcos removing Huawei equipment left in the lurch after Trudeau kills cyber bill - The promised law, Bill C-26, never got through Parliament. Introduced in June 2022, it spent more than two years drifting through votes and committees—not actively held up but not prioritized.

My Take: Neither did the Capital Gains Tax amendment, but that’s not stopping the CRA. It just means the stuff will stay in the networks longer and provide a possible entry point, longer.

Is 2025 the year optical fiber makes a comeback? - Dell’Oro predicts 2025 is the year optical networking vendors will be able to put their inventory issues to rest. Vendors view artificial intelligence (AI) as a bright spot on their road to recovery. Nokia will likely emerge as a market leader once it closes its Infinera acquisition.

My Take: Data Centre connectivity needs a lot of optical connectivity to carry all those ChatGPT prompts.

🇨🇦 What is Canada doing with its Internet Connectivity Inequality? - The Internet has become so indispensable to modern life that it’s often joked about as the real foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,¹ nestled even below food, water, and shelter, nowadays. While this meme brings a chuckle, there’s a sobering reality behind it.

My Take: Access to wholesale Internet makes no difference if the business case doesn’t make sense to build infrastructure.. which is why Starlink becomes an option, and not necessarily the “band aid” solution.

🇨🇦 After a dreadful 2024 for Canada’s telecoms, investors shouldn’t expect much more over the next 12 months - No matter how you look at it, 2024 was a dreadful year for Canada’s telecommunications sector.

My Take: =There was no reason to drive the cost of a 1Gbps service that low. Are any of the big three actually ISPs anymore or media companies looking for a path to market?

🇨🇦 Rogers calls for jail time for copper crooks amid rising telecom sabotage - Rogers Communications is urging Parliament to treat copper theft as sabotage under the Criminal Code, arguing the crimes are causing widespread outages and endangering public safety.

My Take: So the coppers should put the copper thieves in jail.. but we let repeat offenders out on bail?

🇨🇦 Telecom watchdog sees 38% jump in consumer complaints against providers, led by Rogers - Complaints about telecommunications and television companies in Canada surged 38 per cent over the course of a year, fuelled by billing issues and service interruptions, with Rogers responsible for nearly a quarter of overall gripes, according to the industry watchdog.

My Take: It’s usually good to be King, but not necessarily this time,

What’s Happening In Space?

What’s in Space This Week?

🇨🇦 Elon Musk’s Starlink: A lifeboat for rural Canada or a dangerous trojan horse? - Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has grown rapidly in Canada since its launch five years ago. Starlink now has 400,000 subscribers and by the end of 2024 it had an estimated revenue of $420-million. It is the sixth largest internet service provider (ISP) in the country and is set to grow much bigger. For example, the Ontario government’s recent commitment of $100-million to fund subscriber equipment and assured capacity starting in June, 2025, will boost Starlink’s presence in its rural communities even further.

My Take: It’s not like Starlink is being used by CSIS to the RCMP. Yea, sure, Elon could hit the big OFF button any time he wants, and yea, the data is neither sovereign or secure, but neither is much of the application-related data that we all use (everyone just clicks “accept” instead of reading privacy and governance terms). Big question is, what’s the alternative?

Mavenir's space quest: a 'fantastic' opportunity or a Hail Mary? - Mavenir, a vendor primarily targeting mobile networks on the ground, is now looking to non-terrestrial network (NTN) operations – satellites in space – for a financial boost.

My Take: Big business while the D2C market sorts its self out over the next number of years.

China plans to blow Starlink out of the sky in a Taiwan war - China’s bold moves to counter Starlink’s military applications with cutting-edge satellite disruption methods spotlight the pivotal role space would play in a Taiwan Strait conflict.

My Take: Best headline. It’s a real issue that needs to be addressed.

What do Starlink Satellites Look Like And Can You Track them? - Have you looked up at the night sky recently and seen a streak of light flash across that black void between the stars? It might have been a plane or an asteroid, but it also may have been one of Starlink's satellites

My Take: I’ve yet to see a Starlink trail, but I frequently, and clearly, see the ISS - as long as it’s really dark and not a full moon, and it’s high enough over the horizon.

Starlink's $50-Per-Month 'Backup' Plan Has One Big Downside - The plan only offers 50GB of data per month, so it's meant to appeal to consumers looking to use Starlink as a backup internet connection.

My Take: 50G is a lot, actually, for temporary backup applications. See the first article about the FCC. Remember the chat about convergence?

Top 5 places you CAN'T use direct-to-device services - Direct-to-device (D2D) services between satellites and 5G — and even 4G — phones are actually something to watch in 2025.

My Take: And it works great in the other 99% of locations. I don’t plan on being in a collapsed building anytime soon.

China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than 'all the oil on Earth' - Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.

My Take: I can hardly wait. If they find a way to get rid of clouds, let me know,

Loft Orbital Raises $170M, Plans to Scale With Inter-Satellite Links and AI - Loft’s model is to integrate customer payloads, both physical and virtual, onto its YAM satellites, which stands for “Yet Another Mission.” The company reports it has deployed tens of missions across five satellites, using its modular payload adapter and mission operations software. 

My Take: I have nothing to add…

Edge AI could test Starlink's mettle - AI workloads are expected to move from centralized training to inferencing at the edge. Starlink might have more trouble serving these workloads than terrestrial telcos. Latency, power and compute are key issues

My Take: I guess it depends on how much processing happens in space before it’s sent back to earth.

T-Mobile Begins Cellular Starlink Beta, But It Only Works on These Samsung Phones - It looks like T-Mobile is now accepting customers into the free beta program for SpaceX’s cellular Starlink service—but only if you have the latest Samsung handsets. 

My Take: I think you’ll be seeing more “but it only works on…” type of caveats for the next number of years.

The Final Frontier… of Data Centers - The company in question is Lumen Orbit. At the end of the process, in a round led by NFX with participation from FUSE, Soma Capital, and the scout funds of Andreesen Horowitz and Sequoia, they raised $11M to address one of the most critical issues affecting the scaling potential of AI — the limitations of terrestrial data centers.

My Take: Go read this. Pretty interesting if they can pull it off.

I turned my Starlink Mini into a near-perfect off-grid internet solution. Here's how - It's as close to an ideal solution as I've managed to put together - and the concoction is useful for power outages too.

My Take: Yea, you can just plug it into a battery.

A Word From Our Partner

What’s Happening SubSea?

Amazon's First Trans-Atlantic Cable: USA/Ireland - Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing near Castlefreke on Ireland's South Coast in county Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far.

My Take: Subsea. Satellites. Next day delivery of things I don’t need. What else can they do?

Latest Fibre Optic Transmission Record: 400 Petabits A Strand - Long haul fibre optic bandwidth ranges from a few terabits per second into the low thirties with the equipment and operating expense sharply rising as transmission rates go up. Repeatered subsea cables generally lie in the 12 to 25 Tbps window with most spatial division multiplexing deployments pushing 12 to 20 Tbps whereas the traditional 6 to 8 pair coherent optics deployments transmit at least 20 Tbps or higher per strand. 

My Take: The article explains how they did it. My head hurts.

Sweden joins NATO push to boost Baltic Sea naval presence - Sweden has said it will assist NATO in its efforts to bolster the alliance’s presence in the Baltic Sea by providing up to three warships and other defense equipment to help deter any potential sabotage of undersea infrastructure.

My Take: Maybe they should get the copper cops to join them?

Enabling AI

Microsoft Cracks Down on Malicious Copilot AI Use - Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit is pursuing legal action to disrupt cybercriminals who create malicious tools that evade the security guardrails and guidelines of generative AI (GenAI) services to create harmful content.

My Take: Isn’t that really one of the big issues, and why we need governance and guardrails?

ChatGPT now lets you schedule reminders and recurring tasks - Paying users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now ask the AI assistant to schedule reminders or recurring requests. The new beta feature, called tasks, will start rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users around the globe this week.

My Take: Seems kinda cool, it won’t by concert tickets for you or anything like that… and it can’t clean cat litter, so it’s useless to me.

Compose royalty-free music instantly - Start creating AI-generated music on SOUNDRAW for free. Dive into the world of music production without any upfront cost. Create, edit, and personalize your tracks seamlessly—perfect for experimenting and finding your sound. Keep in mind, music created with the free version is available for in-app use only.

My Take: Not happy I found this. Where did the last 45 minutes go?

Apps as we know them are going away, and will be replaced by AI Agents.

My Take: Goodbye SaaS. Hello Agentic AI. He makes some good points. Interesting video. He looks a little like the Great Gazoo, don’t you think?

Learn About - The Great Gazoo

Because I made the reference in the prior article, I thought it appropriate to provide some additional context.

The Great Gazoo is a memorable character from the iconic animated series "The Flintstones." This diminutive green alien made his debut in the show's sixth season, first appearing on October 29, 1965. Voiced by the talented Harvey Korman, known for his Emmy-winning performances on "The Carol Burnett Show," Gazoo quickly became a distinctive and quirky addition to the prehistoric world of Bedrock.

Hailing from the planet Zatox (or Zetox), Gazoo was exiled to Earth as a form of punishment. His crime? Creating a minuscule button capable of obliterating the entire universe with a single press. Despite having no intention of using it, Gazoo's superiors deemed him dangerously irresponsible and self-indulgent, sending him to prehistoric times not just as punishment but also for rehabilitation.

Upon crash-landing on Earth, Gazoo was discovered by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, who became the unwitting recipients of his magical services. Interestingly, only Fred, Barney, small children, and animals could see Gazoo, adding an element of comedic frustration to his interactions with other characters.

Gazoo possessed an impressive array of reality-warping abilities. He could stop time, transform people into other creatures, create robotic duplicates, and manipulate reality at will. These powers, combined with his mischievous nature, often led to more trouble than success for Fred and Barney. Gazoo's capabilities seemed to be a blend of advanced science and psionic abilities, though he occasionally referred to himself as a sorcerer in jest.

The introduction of Gazoo to "The Flintstones" was a bold move, bringing a futuristic element to the Stone Age setting. This juxtaposition played against the show's premise, which already featured contemporary concepts in prehistoric guises. Gazoo's sporadic appearances throughout the latter part of the series added an unpredictable and fantastical element to the storylines.

Despite appearing in only half the episodes of the final season, The Great Gazoo left an indelible mark on "The Flintstones" legacy. His unique blend of otherworldly powers, sarcastic wit, and the complications he brought to Fred and Barney's lives made him a standout character in the series' twilight years.

Sarcastic wit. That’s the ticket.

This and That!

A company that tracks and sells Americans' location data has seemingly been hacked - Russian cybercriminals have hacked one of the largest companies that tracks Americans’ location through smartphone data in exchange for ransom, according to two cybersecurity researchers, a person who has posted a massive trove of allegedly hacked files and a notice the company sent to the Norwegian government.

My Take: Well, I guess they know where to call the folks who they’re extorting.

60+ Newsletter Statistics for 2025 - Newsletters have attracted considerable attention in recent years—and with good reason. Not only are they still one of the best ways to nurture deeper connections with engaged audiences, but they have also emerged as a lucrative business model.

My Take: My metrics are way better. I have no idea why I keep giving all this great content away for free. Send this newsletter to 10 people you know, and tell them to do the same.

Elon Musk says a third patient got a Neuralink brain implant. The work is part of a booming field - “We’ve got ... three humans with Neuralinks and all are working well,” he said during a wide-ranging interview at a Las Vegas event streamed on his social media platform X.

My Take: Does the recipient’s name rhyme with Ronald Plump?

Verizon uses network slicing to enhance video calls - Verizon launched enhanced video calling on iPhones by using 5G-Advanced features to enable network slicing to power the service, which improves communications in congested areas.

My Take: Sounds cool, especially since it’s automated.. One step close to application-driven autonomy??

The Henley Passport Index - The Henley Passport Index is the original, authoritative ranking of all the world’s passports according to the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa.

My Take: Singapore, #1. Canada, #7 :(

Infographic Of The Week

My Take: “This phenomenon, known as “hallucinations,” is described by IBM as occurring when a large language model (LLM)—such as a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—detects patterns or objects that do not exist or are imperceptible to humans, leading to outputs that are inaccurate or nonsensical.”

They should just call it “Saturday night”.

Podcast Recommendation

Threat Status: Is America losing the hypersonic weapons race?

Ben and Guy break down the unfolding legal drama around the future of TikTok, the latest developments on the Korean peninsula, and whether the incoming Trump administration can exploit tensions between Iran and Russia.

Then, Michael Johns, senior vice president of the company Kratos, joins the show to discuss U.S. hypersonic weapons development and whether the nation is still lagging behind China and Russia. Plus, the "Threat of the Week."

This podcast fuels the conspiracy engine ;)

Listen Here!

Movie/Streaming Recommendation

Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action

IMDb: 6.4/10

JMDb: 8.5/10 (Jerry.. Jerry.. Jerry.. Jerry!)

“Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action" offers a riveting glimpse behind the curtain of America's most notorious talk show.

This two-part Netflix documentary exposes the shocking tactics employed to create the on-screen chaos that captivated millions. Through interviews with former producers, we witness the calculated manipulation of guests and the pursuit of ratings at any cost.

The series doesn't shy away from addressing the show's darkest moments, including a tragic murder case linked to an episode.

While it could have delved deeper into Springer's conflicted feelings about his legacy, the documentary highlights the ethical quandaries and cultural impact of this controversial television phenomenon (including the episode with the guy who married a horse.)

Until Next Time

Comments here are my own and do not represent the opinions, views or thoughts of any person, company or organization that I may be associated with.

Feedback, comments and ideas are welcomed. Message me on LinkedIn or contact me at [email protected]