Can Hackers Infer Smartphone Key Strokes from Wi-Fi Signals?

A study suggests hackers can infer user keystrokes by analyzing Wii-Fi signals. The ability to estimate keystroke information uses Wi-Fi multipath signal analysis.

Still, most small business owners and managers believe they are safe from hackers.

source: Small Business Trends

Telecom Infrastructure Industry is in a Cyclical Lull; Is it a Secular Trend?

With the caveat that industry trends are one thing and individual company fortunes can diverge from the overall trends, Ericsson now says its total addressable market expected to grow by one to three percent in 2016 from 2018, despite expected decline in mobile infrastructure market by 2 to 6 percent in 2017.

Some softness in the mobile infrastructure market might well be expected, as operators largely complete their 4G upgrades, with a lull until the advent of mass market 5G upgrades.

So it is that Ericsson expects a decline in its networks business, with an addressable market of US$100 billion in 2016, with -2 to zero percent compound annual growth rates.

The information technology and cloud segment represents an addressable market of US$100 billion in 2016, with five percent to seven percent CAGR.

Media represents an addressable market of US$12 billion in 2016, with nine percent to 11 percent CAGR.

Still, networks represents 75 percent of total sales. IT and Cloud produces 20 percent of total net sales. Media drives five percent of sales.

That noted, it is not crazy to argue that markets are shrinking. Mobile and fixed network infrastructure is subject to the same performance-price trends that have affected other IT industries, ranging from PCs to smartphones to servers. Open source and “do it yourself” trends also mean users can create their own products at lower cost than buying from third parties.

Also, upstart providers are taking share, creating pricing pressure on infrastructure prices globally.

U.S. Net Mobile Account Growth Now Driven by IoT

Of the 5.38 million net account additions gained the top-four U.S. mobile service providers, about 1.79 million were of the postpaid smartphone type that are prized by carriers. In other words, about 66 percent of the net account gains were devices of other types, such as tablets, connected cars or machine-to-machine links. Included in that bucket are wholesale accounts, such as net adds by mobile virtual network operators.

One common feature of all those types of connections is lower average revenue per account than smartphones represent.

Note that connected car and IoT accounts represented about 57 percent of the total retail net additions in the third quarter of 2016, vastly more numerous than the 10 percent of tablet adds.

To the extent that MVNOs continue to exist, it is as niche specialists, many serving credit-challenged or language and culture minorities.

source: Chetan Sharma

source: Strategy Analytics

Verizon	AT&T	T-Mobile	Sprint
140,100,000	130,400,000	65,500,000	58,800,000
Operator Brands
	Cricket Wireless	GoSmart Mobile	Boost Mobile
		MetroPCS	Virgin Mobile
America Movil US MVNO Brands 25.7 million subs
Tracfone	Tracfone	Tracfone	Tracfone
Net10	Net10	Net10	Net10
StraighTalk	StraightTalk	StraightTalk	StraightTalk
Page Plus Cellular		Simple Mobile
Total Wireless		Telcel America
Other MVNOs
GreatCall	Consumer Cellular	Consumer Cellular	Republic Wireless
Red Pocket Mobile	H2O Wireless	Ultra Mobile	Ting
Selectel Wireless	Airvoice Wireless	Ting	Credo Mobile
ROK Mobile	Red Pocket Mobile	Lyca Mobile	iWireless (Kroger)
		Red Pocket Mobile	Red Pocket Mobile
		TPO Mobile	TPO Mobile
		Univision Mobile (Ultra)	Kajeet
		Family Mobile	Text Now
		Project Fi	Project Fi

source: MVNO Blog

Quality, Not Just Quantity, is Required for Sustainable Consumer Internet Access

One can argue that ever-increasing capacity expansion, combined with relatively inelastic willingness to pay, pose either a challenge or a crisis for the internet access industry, at least at the tier-one level. Conversely, openings in the market for local, small specialists should increase.

Consultant Martin Geddes always talks about the need to emphasize quality, not just quantity, where it comes to internet access.

“The broadband industry is presently caught in an insane ‘fat pipes’ model that simultaneously fails to deliver predictable and consistent experiences, whilst also wasting huge amounts of capital and thus inflating costs,” he says. “In this model, the central belief is that the job of a network is to create as much data throughput as possible, which is (wrongly) conflated with enabling good user experiences.”

In effect, “quality of experience” issues underlie thinking about network neutrality (outlawing direct measures to improve quality in favor of measures to increase quantity). At the same time, measures that make “experience” possible within a sustainable business model (zero rating, for example) likewise are viewed strictly through a “restraint of trade” lens, ignoring the alternative issues of “experience that also is sustainable.”

In virtually all other product categories and industries, products can be developed and marketed within a framework that includes both price and quality. Consumer internet access often outlaws any dimension but quantity.

Those issues will begin to cause increased friction as the driver of internet access and bandwidth clearly shifts to video entertainment apps.

Municipal and State Networks for Internet Access Getting More Attention

One trend you always can count on when any former-monopoly market is opened to competition is that many new niches develop. In the telecom business, that meant the development of firms selling mostly to smaller businesses or enterprises; metro fiber wholesalers; data center operators and affinity mobile services companies. Some firms sell managed services; others Wi-Fi hotspot service.

But regional optical fiber networks also have developed, and some emerging networks are operated as public-private partnerships or municipal cooperatives. In a growing number of cases, towns themselves are opting to sell internet access directly to citizens.  

The KentuckyWired project (also known as Kentucky I-Way in eastern Kentucky) is building a network backbone costing $350 million over the next 30 years and plans to lease capacity to retail service providers.

The Massachusetts WiredWest program is a cooperative formed by 32 towns to build a wide area network and local fiber-to-home networks delivering local internet access in each of the towns.

Communities must get at least 40 percent of households in their area to commit to purchasing internet access service, making a $49 deposit that is reimbursed as a credit against the first bill.

The cost to build the network in the 32 towns is an estimated $79 million. The state is contributing up to 40 percent of the funds, but the towns must provide the rest.  A 55 percent vote in a town meeting is needed to approve borrowing the funds each town must contribute.

Retail internet access of 100 Mbps costs $79 a month. Gigabit service costs $109 a month.

WiredWest also sells phone service for $25 a month and also plans to sell entertainment video services.

Facebook Millimeter Wave Radios Hit 20 Gbps Each Direction

Facebook’s Connectivity Lab now is flight testing its first generation air-to-ground bidirectional link capable of 20 Gbps in each direction, intended to support the Aquila unmanned aerial vehicle for internet backhaul.

The aerial payload is mounted on a Cessna aircraft and is being flown at altitudes up to 20,000 ft., Facebook says.

The next generation air-to-ground communication system capable of supporting 40 Gbps each on uplink and downlink between an aircraft and a ground station will be flight-tested in early 2017.

source: Facebook

Earlier in 2016 Facebook tested a terrestrial point-to-point link in Southern California.

In that test the link achieved a data rate of nearly 20 Gbps over 13 km at millimeter frequencies.

Using a set of custom-built components, the team achieved that data rate using 105 watts of total direct current (DC) power consumption at the transmitter and receiver.

The transmission used a bandwidth of 2 GHz, resulting in an overall spectral efficiency of 9.8 bits per second per Hertz.

AT&T to Introduce Stream Saver Feature in 2017

Almost every decision made by service providers about consumer data consumption turns on video entertainment demand, as that is the application that drives most data consumption, by most consumers.

Starting in early 2017, AT&T will introduce AT&T Stream Saver, a free feature, user controllable, that reduces mobile data plan consumption by converting video content to 480p resolution. That feature will work for most, but not all video, as some providers deliver video in ways that can be converted, AT&T says.

Decried by some as unwanted “throttling,” the “Binge On” feature that likewise reformats mobile video to 480p is loved by consumers, T-Mobile US says. In fact, Binge On got a 99-percent approval rating by consumers, in a study by Strategy Analytics.