Weekly output: Google I/O teaser, satellite-to-phone services, passkeys, connected-home considerations, Matter

I’m spending a few days in cooler confines–Monday morning, I head to Vancouver for the second year of Web Summit’s conference there. And just like last year, I won’t have enough time to do much wandering around British Columbia’s largest city and taking in its stunningly beautiful mountains-and-sea scenery, because I have three panels to moderate over Tuesday and Wednesday (with the conference hosts paying for my hotel and reimbursing my airfare).

5/5/2026: Google Teases I/O Pregame Event. How to Watch ‘The Android Show’ on May 12, PCMag

This was one of the shortest posts I’ve written for PCMag, owing to the paucity of information in the brief teaser video Google published.

5/7/2026: FCC Chair: Starlink Isn’t Enough. We Need at Least 3 Satellite-to-Phone Services, PCMag

I spent Wednesday afternoon at the wireless trade group CTIA’s annual summit in Washington. Most of the talks on the program didn’t yield anything too newsworthy, but Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s appearance met that bar even though he didn’t talk about his clumsy attempts to leverage the FCC’s broadcast licensing authority to punish TV shows and TV hosts for being mean to Republicans.

5/7/2026: Passkey-Adoption Report Finds Many Orgs Don’t Know How to Quit Passwords, PCMag

I had an advance copy of this FIDO Alliance survey but didn’t have time to write it up in advance; fortunately, Thursday did have enough idle time for me to get this post written and filed.

5/8/2026: Smart Homes In Practice: Bridging Design, Integration, And Market Promises With Real Human-Centered Living Outcomes, Smarter Infrastructure Summit

I had a brief trip to Chicago–well, its suburb Rosemont–for this small conference. I was a late addition to this panel, in which moderator Lisa An Wong quizzed me and architect Stephen Yas and connect-home integrator Corey Ardell about ways to get homes and the appliances in them thoughtfully wired.

5/9/2026: Matter Smart Home Standard Still Looks Immaterial At Retail, Smarter Infrastructure Summit

The title of this talk I did mirrors the story I did for PCMag almost three years ago; that post caught the attention of the conference organizers, and the chance to revisit the topic and get in some practice with doing a solo presentation led me to accept their travel-expenses-covered invitation.

Louis rips CTIA and Samsung to shreds - because they deserve it

https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/w/fNuu9ZEZqiQgan61zbpXoA

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

Weekly output: next-gen philanthropy, new FCC priorities

If you’re reading this somewhere around the greater Washington area and a) want to say hi in person and b) want to come home with some of the tech-event swag I’ve accumulated over the last two years, head out to Fairfax Saturday afternoon for the joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society, Washington Apple Pi, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. The event starts at 1 p.m., and my talk unpacking 2025’s tech plot twists begins at 2 p.m.

5/6/2025: Millennials Are Shifting What Counts as Philanthropy, Worth

I wrote my first piece for this publication in more than a year. I shouldn’t have taken that long, but it seems I needed to run into one of Worth’s editors at an AI conference in Vegas to renew those ties.

5/7/2025: In Setting Priorities, New FCC Chair Happy to Be ‘Moving on Trump Time’, PCMag

I spent Tuesday afternoon at the wireless-industry trade group CTIA’s conference in D.C. and decided that FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s friendly conversation with CTIA CEO and president (and former FCC chair) Ajit Pai was the newsiest bit for PCMag readers.

5/12/2025: Updated this post to add a mention of the other host of Saturday’s event, the longstanding Apple users group Washington Apple Pi.

#AjitPai #BrendanCarr #charity #CTIA #donations #GenZ #millennials #philanthropy #spectrumPolicy

Americans used record 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023

Americans used just over 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023, up 36% over the prior year in the largest single-year increase in wireless data consumption

#CTIA #data #mobiledata #smartphone #phone #mobilephone #5G #technology #tech

https://www.reuters.com/technology/americans-used-record-100-trillion-megabytes-wireless-data-2023-2024-09-10/

I’m flying to San Francisco Monday evening for Google I/O–which I last covered in person in 2019. That feels like a lot longer than five years ago, both for the obvious reason of the pandemic in between and because of how much my lineup of freelance clients has changed since then.

5/8/2024: CTIA’s 5G summit sees renewed pleas for FCC’s spectrum authority, Light Reading

After spending Monday afternoon at this wireless-industry gathering in D.C., I needed to get some context about the politics behind the weird lapse of the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to auction spectrum. Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld came through Tuesday afternoon, lending his insight in an info-dense call that yielded far more notes than I could put into this piece.

5/9/2024: Comcast Now Offers No-Data-Cap, No-Contract Broadband Nationwide, PCMag

Comcast writes the “Now” in “Now Internet” in all caps, and every time I see a company use the Caps Lock key as an attention-grabbing device I remember how my old Post colleague Bill Walsh wouldn’t stand for that. Fortunately, PCMag also declines to put brand names in all caps when they’ve never been abbreviations for anything.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/05/12/weekly-output-fcc-spectrum-authority-comcasts-new-no-data-cap-broadband/

#Comcast #CTIA #dataCap #FCC #FederalCommunicationsCommission #GoogleIO #midband5G #spectrum #Xfinity

CTIA is a trade association representing the wireless communications industry in the US. They offer a short code to which you can forward spam SMS messages: 7726 (which spells “SPAM”) and it will supposedly help train telecom network SMS filters: https://www.ctia.org/consumer-resources/protecting-yourself-from-spam-text-messages

They also have resources for blocking robocalls: https://www.ctia.org/consumer-resources/how-to-stop-robocalls

#telecom #spam #ctia