Weekly output: Starlink on United, spectrum policy, Google updates (x3), Ecosia, Charter to buy Cox, user-groups talk

I’m flying to San Francisco tomorrow evening only to turn left at SFO so I can spend the next two days in Mountain View for Google I/O–my 12th trip to cover Google’s developer conference.

(This past week also involved flying, but only for fun; Patreon readers got a breakdown of the long miles-and-points game that led up to my bucket-list 747 flight.)

5/13/2025: I Tested Starlink on a United Airlines Flight: It’s Fast and Steady Once You Get Past the Ads, PCMag

The strange sequence of airports on my calendar two Thursdays ago–DCA-ORD, ORD-ORD, ORD-IAD–yielded this recap of my experience trying out Starlink inflight broadband on a United Airlines-marketed Embraer 175 regional jet.

5/14/2025: CTIA conference shows how FCC spectrum auction authority is becoming telecom’s Groundhog Day, Light Reading

This post also started with reporting the week before from the wireless trade group CTIA’s 5G Summit in D.C., which I continued by quizzing Public Knowledge’s walking telecom-policy database Harold Feld.

5/14/2025: Google Unwraps Android 16 Design Details: Springier Animations, With a Side of Improved Battery Life, PCMag

I got an advance briefing from Google about its I/O announcements, which turned into three posts–the first covering some of the more important user-facing parts in Android 16 and Wear OS 6.

5/14/2025:Google Tips Big Security Upgrade for Your Phone in Android 16, PCMag

The second part of my coverage focused on the security changes in Android 16. If you’d like to know more, Citizen Lab researcher ‪John Scott-Railton took a closer look at them in a Bluesky thread.

5/14/2025: Gemini Everywhere: Google Expands Its AI to Cars, TVs, Headsets, PCMag

Of course AI will figure in Google’s I/O news, so part three of my advance coverage outlined Google’s ambitions to put its Gemini AI platform on some less-obvious screens.

5/16/2025: This Search Engine Uses Its Earnings to Help the Environment. New Dashboard Lets You Track Your Impact, PCMag

I’ve written about the environment-minded search site Ecosia a few times over the past few years, which was apparently enough times to get their PR folks to offer me a heads-up about this announcement.

5/16/2025: Charter to Buy Cox: We Have Questions About What This Means for Your Plan, PCMag

This was the one post I didn’t have anywhere on my cloud of probabilities for this week, but I had enough free time Friday to write up Charter Communications’ deal to buy Cox Communications and turn the second- and third-biggest cable broadband providers into the biggest cable ISP.

5/17/2025: May 2025: Rob Pegoraro: 2025 in Tech: what fresh hell is this?, Washington Apple Pi/Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society/Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Personal Computer User Group

I made my more-or-less annual appearance before these three user groups (last summer’s was via Zoom), unpacking some serious concerns I have about the state of tech but also sharing some reasons for optimism. And as I’ve done in earlier IRL appearances, I showed up with a bag of tech-event swag and gave away almost all of it.

#5GSpectrum #Android16 #BrendanCarr #CharterCommunications #Cox #CTIA #Ecosia #google #GoogleIO #IO #OLLI #PATACS #spectrum #spectrumAuctionAuthority #Starlink #UnitedAirlines #userGroup #WashingtonApplePi #WearOS6

For the fourth weekend in a row, I went on a long bike ride–this time, out the C&O Canal trail to Great Falls. That was one of the first destinations I visited on two wheels after I bought a bike in 1994, and the sight of the Potomac crashing over rocks has not gotten old over the 29 years since. It’s also nice to confirm that my aging body is not, in fact, too old for this.

Patreon readers got a bonus post in which I unpacked how I’m dealing with a handful of new features on that site.

10/24/2023: Telcos ask for spectrum specifics as feds say ‘stay tuned’, Light Reading

This post was originally going to recap the spectrum-policy discussions at a pair of conferences in D.C. two weeks ago, but after getting some more good quotes at the Competitive Carriers Association’s conference in Atlanta last week, I made it a three-event recap.

10/24/2023: Qualcomm Unveils ‘Snapdragon Seamless’ Device-to-Device Connectivity, PCMag

After two years of covering Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii in person (with Qualcomm covering my airfare and lodging), I spent this week at home and filed this report from my own desk about a new file- and peripheral-sharing platform developed by the company behind the chips in most Android phones.

10/25/2023: Security Expert: Apple’s Lockdown Mode Still Defeats Commercial Spyware, PCMag

With Maui not in my schedule this week, I had a much shorter trip to an event Tuesday: Metro to McLean, where Mitre hosted its ATT&CK security conference. I thought the opening keynote might yield a good post, and Runa Sandvik’s talk did not disappoint.

10/26/2023: Sen. Schumer: AI Needs Govt Guardrails, and They Can’t Be Made in China, PCMag

I was going to take Metro downtown to attend this event at the Washington Post, but having a contractor doing work on a closet made it wiser to watch online in case the project downstairs needed any snap decisions from me.

10/28/2023: SmartTechCheck Podcast S03 E6828/10/2023, Mark Vena

If you watch the video version of this podcast, you can see me demonstrate the Reactions feature of macOS Sonoma–which works even in non-Apple video services.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/10/29/weekly-output-spectrum-policy-snapdragon-seamless-spyware-defenses-ai-guardrails-mark-vena-podcast/

#5GSpectrum #AIRegulation #AmericasSpectrumManagementConference #AppleLockdownMode #ChuckSchumer #CompetitiveCarriersAssociation #ForumGlobal #MarkVena #PegasusSpyware #PredatorSpyware #Qualcomm #RunaSandvik #SHLBAnchorNets #SnapdragonSeamless #spectrumPolicy