Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/20 - Why 5G Could Ruin Weather Forecasting

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Why Google ghosting Huawei might lead to a chain reaction for all of tech, the Sprint/T-Mobile merger gets a shot in the arm, GM sort of gets the point of software, I guess, and why 5G might be horrible for weather forecasting. Sponsors: AirTable.com/techmeme Tech.FidelityCareers.com The Castro Podcast App Links: Exclusive: Google suspends some business with Huawei after Trump blacklist - source (Reuters) Huawei responds to Android ban with service and security guarantees, but its future is unclear (TechCrunch) Y Combinator promotes Geoff Ralston to president, while Sam Altman shifts to advisor role (TechCrunch) Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 and adds Qualcomm’s XR1 (VentureBeat) T-Mobile, Sprint Get Merger Backing From FCC Chairman (WSJ) 5G NETWORKS COULD THROW WEATHER FORECASTING INTO CHAOS (Wired) GM GIVES ALL ITS VEHICLES A NEW SOUL (Wired) Top ‘Live-Streamers’ Get $50,000 an Hour to Play New Videogames Online (WSJ) Subscribe to the ad-free Premium Feed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Memer Right Home for Monday, May 20th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, why Google ghosting Huawei might lead to a chain reaction for all of tech. The Sprint T-Mobile merger gets a shot in the arm. GM sort of gets the point of software, I guess, and Y5G might actually be horrible for weather forecasting. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. In a bombshell, late yet, Yesterday, Reuters was reporting that Google will stop collaborating with and providing technical support to Huawei, at least in the capacity that it provides Android and Google services for Huawei devices. This comes on the back of last week's executive order from President Trump.

Horace Deju underlined the significance of this by tweeting, quote, Huawei is nearly the world's biggest smartphone vendor. Their exclusion from licensed Android and fork away from Google is the biggest news in smartphones since, well, Android, end quote. I would point out that looking at it from another direction, the trade war with China might finally be cutting technology companies deeply. Think about it like this. If this plays out, Google is being forced to walk away from a huge number of customers who use a phone vendor that is one of the fastest growing in the Android ecosystem. and it might not stop there. Sources are telling Bloomberg that shipmakers,

including Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinks, and Broadcom have all told their employees that they cannot support Huawei until further notice. But let's come back to the original story. Is Huawei cut off from the Android ecosystem? And what would that do to Huawei? The Reuters story explicitly says this. Quote, Google has suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware, software and technical services accept those publicly available via open source licensing,

a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday. Holders of current Huawei smartphones with Google apps, however, will continue to be able to use and download app updates provided by Google, a Google spokesperson said, confirming earlier reports by Reuters. We are complying with the order and reviewing the implications, the Google spokesperson said. For users of our services, Google Play and the security protections from Google Play Protect, will continue to function on existing Huawei devices, the spokesperson said, without giving further details.

But the suspension could hovel Huawei's smartphone business outside of China, as the tech giant will immediately lose access to updates to Google's Android operating system. Future versions of Huawei smartphones that run on Android will also lose access to popular services, including the Google Play Store and Gmail and YouTube apps. Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android and will not be able to get access. to proprietary apps and services from Google, the source said, end quote. So, Huawei gets no search, no Play Store, no Gmail, YouTube, etc., but in theory, Huawei could still use Android as the OS for its phones. Still, not having access to the latest and most popular won't sound good to users in major Huawei markets outside of China, like, for example, Europe.

Huawei released a statement this morning saying, Huawei will continue to provide security updates and after-sales services to all existing Huawei and Honor smartphone and tablet products covering those that have been sold or still in stock globally. We will continue to build a safe and sustainable software ecosystem in order to provide the best experience for all users globally, end quote. But as TechCrunch noted, quote, it made no mention of the future, and that really is the key question. Indeed, sources within both Google and Huawei have told TechCrunch that the immediate plan of action for what happens next remains unclear. It could turn out that Huawei is forced to use the open source version of Android AOSP, which comes stripped of Google Mobile Services,

a suite for Google services such as Google Play Store, Gmail, and YouTube. That's unless it doesn't plump for its own homespun alternative, which media reports have claimed it has built in the case of an emergency situation, end quote. So in essence, either Huawei has some work around that it can release fast, or the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world is probably dead in the market outside of China. And even then, as Android Polices, David Ruddock noted, quote, of course, Google still owns the Play Store, but Google literally owns push notifications on Android. They own fused location services. They own voice assistant. They own wireless audio and video casting, end quote. So to survive, will Huawei essentially be forced

or at least strongly incentivized to go in a completely different direction now. Could this actually be the catalyst that adds a third major player to the iOS-slash-Android duopoly worldwide? And speaking of Apple, quoting Ruddock again, this ends with a trade deal or China starts extorting Apple, i.e. blocking sales of iPhones in China. It's the one ship they have here. There is no way Huawei can afford to lose Google without decimating their smartphone business, end quote. And, quote, Apple can't readily protect itself from adverse actions like export taxes or trade embargoes inside China. Their supply chain is going to be an extremely

tempting bridge to burn, end quote. Two months ago when Sam Altman announced he was stepping down as president of Y Combinator in favor of becoming the CEO of OpenAI, it sort of took everyone in the tech world by surprise. At the time, Y Combinators seemed to hint that Altman's role would not be filled. Well, it turns out that that is not the case, as Y Combinator announced today that long-time partner, Jeff Ralston, will now be elevated to the role of president. And Altman says he will no longer even be the chairman of Y Combinator and will merely be an advisor. As I say, Ralston has been at Y Combinator for a long time. He's the longest tenured partner. He's the longest tenured partner. He's known Paul Graham for 20 years going back to Yahoo, after both of their companies were acquired

by that company in the dot-com era. And he founded Imagine K-12 with Graham, which was merged recently into Y Combinator itself. And speaking of surprises, kind of, guess what? Google Glass is still a thing. Google has announced Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, with a Snapdragon XR1 chip, an improved 8 megapixel camera, and around 8 hours of battery life. Pre-orders for the new device begin today, and it's going to run you $999,000, which is an improvement over Enterprise Edition 1, which came in at $1,500. Quoting Venture Beat. Optional Smith Optics Safety Frames are perhaps the most eye-catching change to the new device.

Glass 2 appears to house almost all of its hardware. inside the right stem with asymmetrical bulges on that side, while the front can use hip, thick, plastic lens frames instead of a rimless design. There's also a thin, wired frame closer to the original model. The new model also adds a USBC port for faster recharging, and features both Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 5 support, end quote. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said this morning that he would recommend his agency approve the proposed T-Mobile and Sprint merger. Quote, I believe that this transaction is in the public interest and intend to recommend to my

colleagues that the FCC approve it, said Pai. This is a unique opportunity to speed up the development of 5G throughout the United States and bring much faster mobile broadband to rural Americans, end quote. This came after Sprint and T-Mobile made further concessions to get the deal through, including being willing to sell off the Boost Mobile brand to retain competitive. in the prepaid wireless market and promises that the combined network would cover 99% of the U.S. population within six years of the deal closing, and of that 90% coverage for rural Americans, and a guarantee that 90% of Americans will have mobile broadband access at 100 megabits per second or more, with 99% able to access speeds of 50mbPS or more. Well, good news for T-Mobile and Sprint then, but there's one huge flies still left in the ointment. The deal also requires the approval of the Department of Justice, and they've not exactly

been signaling lately that they're fully on board, quoting the Wall Street Journal. An FCC agreement would be a notable boost for the companies, but it isn't clear whether the concessions will help them at the Department of Justice, which is considering whether the merger would harm competition. The department has been concerned about the transaction for months and told the companies in April that the deal was unlikely to get a green light from the department as it was structured. The Wall Street Journal reported last month, end quote. So file this segment under what? Because meteorologists say that interference from 5G phones could reduce the accuracy of weather forecasts by around 30%, which would mean we would be.

getting weather predictions at about the quality we got them in the 1980s. In other words, folks would have, say, two to three fewer days to prepare for a hurricane strike, for example. So, and I did not know this, when the FCC began auctioning off the 24 gigahertz frequency to wireless carriers to use for 5G, it did so over the objections of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the American Meteorale. Society. Why? Quoting from Wired, Jordan Girth, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying this issue as part of a group at the American Meteorological Society. He says that while the FCC can switch which regions of the spectrum it allocates to phone companies, forecasters are stuck. That's because water vapor emits a faint signal in the atmosphere at a

frequency of 23.8 gigahertz. That is extremely close to the one sold for next generation 5G wireless communications at 24 gigahertz. Satellites like Noah's GoZR and the European Metop monitor this frequency to collect data that is fed into prediction models for upcoming storms and weather systems. We can't move away from 23.8 or we would, Girth told Wired. Gertz says that wireless carriers could turn down the power emitted by 5G cell phone transmitters so they don't drown out the sensitive sensors on the satellite. In the meantime, Girt says this issue probably won't go away anytime soon. The FCC plans future 5G auctions for the radio frequency bands near ones used to detect rain and snow, 36 to 37 gigahertz, atmospheric temperature, 50.2 to 50.4

gigahertz and clouds and ice 80 to 90 gigahertz. This is not one and done, Girt added. Today it's 23.8, tomorrow it's 36, end quote. General Motors is rolling out what it calls its new, quote, electric platform, by which it means the software guts of all of its cars going forward for the next several years, quoting Wired. The architecture will debut on the 2020 Cadillac CT5 due to enter production later this year. Over the next four years, GM will roll it out to most of its global lineup, which counts 56 models across four brands. In terms of both bandwidth and compute power, the new setup is five times more capable than the system underpinning GM's current cars, the rough equivalent of going from the original iPhone to the iPhone 7. And so more cars will get Cadillac's Super Cruise, semi-autonomous driving system, and other active safety features.

GM will now be able to issue over-the-air software updates, improving how it's engine. engines run or how its suspensions handle bumpy roads even years after a car has been sold. This idea is old hat for smartphone users and Tesla drivers, but new to most automakers. More processing power allows for better resolution on screens. Smarter battery management systems can squeeze more miles out of electric cars batteries. With its current electric architecture, GM could offer some of these things on any given vehicle. The point of the reworked beefed up system is to provide all of it, along with whatever the folks in the R&D department cookup next. That's increasingly necessary in an age where customers want cars that work as cleanly as their phones

and where tech-forward automakers like Tesla show that's possible, end quote. So, all right, GM showing that it's getting with the times. Your car can and should get over-the-air software updates. But note to GM folks, I get it. You want us to know that you understand software is eating cars as well as it's eating everything else. 300 engineers and computer scientists worked on this, several years in development, more than 100 patents. But if this is the game that you want to tell us you want to play in these days,

here's a tip for you. Don't just call it a, quote, electronic platform. Give it a friggin name. Brand it. If this is your glorified operating system, call it that. Give it version numbers. Something. If you're going to play in the software game,

get with the sexy software naming conventions as well. Finally today, the Wall Street Journal takes a lot of, look at the hot new way that companies build buzz for video games. You might have noticed this recently. They get celebrity game streamers to play their new releases online. And if you're one of the lucky few who can call themselves a game streaming celebrity, let's just say it's a good gig to get. Quote, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Take Too Interactive are among the publishers making hefty payouts for the real-time broadcasts or live streams. The amounts vary depending on the popularity of the streamer and could go as high as $50,000 an hour for top celebrity gamers

according to talent and marketing agents. Take two plans to pay streamers to play Borderlands 3 when the comedic shooter game launches September 13th. Ubisoft, an early adopter of the live streaming strategy, plans to use it again for the October 4th release of its special ops shooter game Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Having celebrity streamers play games is an important part of the business, Strauss Zellnick. Take-2's chief executive said in an interview, it is relatively new, but it has to be organic. The streamers have to believe in it, end quote. The launch week of a big budget video game has become almost as important as the opening weekend is for Hollywood blockbusters. It's all about creating buzz, and since people spend 8.9 billion hours watching video game content

just on Twitch, just in the last year alone, this seems to be the ideal way to give people a taste and wet their appetites for a new title. According to the article, the table stakes to be offered this kind of gig is to be a streamer that can attract 15,000 viewers simultaneously, as that can translate into millions of views later on. As Hidden Experia joked on Twitter, all right, lads, at Halo, I'm willing to drop my price to 40k an hour to play Halo Infinite, being the dedicated fan I am. accountants will be in touch, end quote. Yeah, so I'm pretty sure that there's some sort of law or something that says everyone has to have a comment on the Game of Thrones finale, but instead of adding more hot takes, I'll just echo something that I said on this week in tech

last night. I feel like this is the last time we will ever collectively watch a TV show together like this ever again. And that kind of makes me sad. But also, no matter what I thought of how it ended, the overwhelming feeling I have right now is sadness, just not having Game of Thrones as a part of our cultural mix anymore. So pour one out for the monoculture, I guess, but especially pour one out for a show that was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted. Talk to you tomorrow.