Weekly output: AT&T OneConnect, federal privacy fears, Artemis II, better inflight WiFi, 6G

This week started with me in Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference, then had a quick trip to Boston to see family for Easter, and tomorrow will have me off to San Francisco for the HumanX conference to lead two panels there. 

I wrote an extra post Tuesday for Patreon readers recapping some scenes from SXSW, including a not-yet-campaign appearance by California governor Gavin Newsom and a stemwinder of a speech by Patreon founder Jack Conte on how human creativity can endure through the rise of AI.

3/31/2026: AT&T OneConnect Bundles Fiber, Wireless, Doesn’t Say What Mobile Service You Get, PCMag

I had just enough spare time at ONA to field this story–even factoring in time to try, without success, to get AT&T to explain just what wireless plan subscribers would get with this new offering.

4/1/2026: The One Thing Americans Can Agree On: The Feds Collect Too Much Personal Data, PCMag

I wrote up this study by the Center for Democracy & Technology a day after it was published Tuesday in part because I had nearly no free time on day two of ONA.

4/1/2026: NASA Launches Artemis II, Its First Moonshot Since 1972, PCMag

I watched the launch Wednesday evening of Artemis II with fingers crossed through main engine cutoff, then followed the first few hours of the mission while writing up this post. I updated the story a day later after the translunar injection burn of the Orion spacecraft’s service module engine committed astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen on a flight around the Moon and then back to Earth. I can’t wait to see this American and Canadian crew’s Earthrise photos.

4/2/2026: Fast, Free Wi-Fi Now Arriving at These Airlines, AARP

I showed up at my occasional client’s site not as a writer but as a subject-matter expert, courtesy of AARP writer Berit Thorkelson quizzing me over e-mail for this piece about how low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink are upgrading inflight WiFi.

4/3/2026: Unfortunately, It’s Time to Talk About 6G. Here’s What You Need to Know, PCMag

I got most of my reporting for this done at MWC Barcelona, but then needed a little more time to collect some industry insight about the wireless industry’s curious rush to hype 6G when so many of its customers are still trying to discern how 5G is supposed to make a noticeable difference in their everyday phone experience.

Weekly output: T-Mobile Live Translation, Android 17, Southwest Airlines + Starlink

Despite Las Vegas not being my favorite travel destination, I returned there barely a month after coming home from CES. My excuse this time was the consumer-experience management firm Medallia inviting me to its conference there, travel expenses included; after some back and forth with their PR firm that raised the possibility of my moderating a panel at their event, I decided to accept the offer. The speaking gig did not work out, but I did learn a fair amount about the state of CX these days.

2/11/2026: T-Mobile Debuts AI-Backed Live Language Translation, No App Needed, PCMag

T-Mobile had offered me an advance on this news last week without sharing any details about it until Tuesday afternoon, right after my flight to Vegas had taken off. Then I realized that their press release left out such critical details as whether this network-hosted AI translation would keep any transcripts, so I sent back a series of follow-up questions; answers arrived just in time for me to finish the post before showing up to dinner half an hour late.

2/11/2026: Google (Almost) Announces First Beta of Android 17, Emphasizing Flexibility For Larger-Screen Devices, PCMag

This post written off Google’s embargoed announcement ran in two versions–one describing the release of Android 17’s first beta as an event that had just happened, then one posted later Wednesday reporting that Google had pushed back that release without explanation. This is nowhere near the first time I’ve seen software releases not happen on schedule, but it is the first time I can remember that a company clicked “undo” on an embargoed announcement an hour after the embargo time.

2/12/2026: Southwest Airlines Will Switch Part of Its In-Flight Wi-Fi to Starlink, PCMag

Southwest’s announcement of this went out late enough Wednesday that nobody on staff at PCMag was able to pick it up then, allowing me to file this Thursday morning. I had hoped that the time in between would allow Southwest’s PR office to answer the questions I’d e-mailed Wednesday afternoon, but I never heard anything back.

Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations

This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)

2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar

My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.

2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag

I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.

2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag

I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.

2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag

Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.

2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag

I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.

2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag

Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.

United Airlines is ditching frustrating in-flight Wi-Fi for Starlink, and apparently, you can actually stream the World Series mid-flight! No more buffering purgatory at 30,000 feet.
Are we finally entering an era of truly usable airplane internet? What's your worst in-flight connectivity horror story?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/watch-the-world-series-live-on-a-plane-uniteds-starlink-wi-fi-can-do-it/#ftag=CAD590a51e
#Starlink #InFlightWiFi #TechNews #TravelTech #Connectivity