Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are battling
for space supremacy, said Joey Roulette
in TheVerge.com—and it’s not just about
their dueling rocket companies, SpaceX
and Blue Origin. The world’s two richest
men are also “racing to build vast net-
works of satellites in low-Earth orbit ca-
pable of bringing high-speed broadband in-
ternet” around the globe. SpaceX, Musk’s
interstellar transport venture, already
“has 955 satellites in orbit for its Starlink
network and plans to launch thousands
more.” But when SpaceX asked regulators
for permission to lower the planned altitudes for its satellites,
Amazon objected, claiming that would interfere with its own
broadband satellite effort, Project Kuiper. The feud spilled out
into the open last week, when Musk complained on Twitter that
the FCC was trying to “hamstring Starlink” in favor of an Ama-
zon system that was “at best several years away.”Starlink is quickly generating the same viral appeal as Tesla, said
Dana Hull in Bloomberg.com, and it’s not just Amazon that has
cause to worry. “Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and Twitter
are filled with reports from early customers sharing images of
their download speeds,” and YouTube has videos of people “un-
boxing” their Starlink satellite dish. SpaceX is focusing on bring-
ing “broadband to over 10 million Americans in rural areas.” But
as it “sends up more satellites, the coverage area will grow” andtelecom could turn into Elon Musk’s next
“disruption.” The early results have been
encouraging. “It’s a game changer,” said
Brian Rendel, a Starlink tester in Michi-
gan’s Upper Peninsula who is “now getting
speeds of 100 megabytes per second for
downloads and 15 to 20 for uploads—far
faster than his previous internet provider.”Satellites are clearly beating balloons in
the race for “flying internet,” said Zoe
Kleinman in BBC.com. Google gave up
on Loon, its effort to “beam the internet
down to rural areas via a network of helium balloons,” and
Facebook abandoned a drone-based internet project, Aquila, in- Once “considered the slowest, most expensive option”
for broadband providers, satellites are now smaller and cheaper.
But affordability remains a challenge. Starlink’s service currently
costs $99 per month, plus $499 for the equipment.
Stargazers are also upset about the crowding of the night sky,
said Lucie Green in Wired.co.uk. In addition to worries about
orbital collisions between satellites and space “debris,” astrono-
mers are complaining of “seeing their images ‘photobombed’ by
satellites.” SpaceX is adding “sunshades” to reduce the objects’
brightness. But Musk has downplayed the concerns. “There are
already 4,900 satellites in orbit,” he tweeted last year, “which
people notice ~0% of the time.”Space: The final broadband frontier
StarlinkFirst decisions from Facebook board
Facebook’s Oversight Board has overruled
the company on four of its first five cases,
said Timothy Lee in ArsTechnica.com. These
involved “decisions on a wide range of topics,
from ethnic conflict to health information.”
The posts that the board said should have been
allowed include one from a user in Myanmar,
who posted that “Muslims have something
wrong in their mindset,” and a breast cancer
awareness post in Brazil that featured photos
of female breasts (Facebook had already re-
instated the Brazilian post). The Oversight
Board, a 20-person panel of academics, jour-
nalists, lawyers, and even one Nobel laureate,
has been called Facebook’s Supreme Court.
Its independent authority on “controversial
decisions” will be watched closely by former
President Trump, whose Facebook suspension
has been referred to the board.Apple phones again No. 2 worldwide
Sanctions took a substantial toll on Huawei
last year, said Jon Porter in TheVerge.com, as
Apple overtook the Chinese telecom giant as
the world’s No. 2 smartphone maker. Huawei’s
“shipments were down 21 percent in 2020
compared with 2019, and it dropped out of
the top five in the fourth quarter for the firsttime in six years.” In late 2019 and 2020, the
Trump administration restricted U.S. compa-
nies from selling technology to Huawei. The
pandemic, meanwhile, has hurt sales across
the entire smartphone market. Samsung, the
top manufacturer, shipped 255 million phones,
down from 296 million in 2019. It still leads
Apple’s 201 million, but the gap is narrowing,
and the Cupertino, Calif., company shipped
the “most iPhones ever in the fourth quarter.”Crashing the latest social media club
Clubhouse, an invitation-only social network
that has become the buzz of Silicon Valley, is
facing more scrutiny as journalists crash the
party, said Ellen Huet in Bloomberg.com.
The audio-focused app— conceived as a set-
ting where no record is kept of what’s said,
and “sharing what happened on Clubhouse
outside of Clubhouse” is forbidden—has
grown to more than 2 million members. But
among the users are some prominent alt-right
figures, and conversations have occasionally
“dabbled in homophobia or taken anti- Semitic
turns.” Alarmed by the lack of moderation
or accountability, one Clubhouse user, Sarah
Szalavitz, “has made it a personal mission to
invite as many reporters are possible” as a way
of increasing transparency.Bytes: What’s new in tech
Xiaomi announced it has developed
a wireless charging system that can
power devices “within a radius of
several meters,” said Sam Byford
in TheVerge.com. The Chinese
phone maker said its “Mi Air Charge
Technology” is the first step in mak-
ing “living rooms truly wireless.” It
uses 144 antennas located within a
base station to beam millimeter-wide
waves to your phone, and is not
obstructed by physical objects. The
company claims the technology can
charge several devices at once with
the power of a typical 5-watt phone
charger. Companies “have been
making announcements about truly
wireless charging for years” without
serious traction. The entry of a major
phone maker could change the
minds of some skeptics, though the
company “declined to provide a time
frame for release.”Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
Starlink satellites stacked for launch