Rob PegoraroThis week took me to Atlanta and back to moderate two panels at the Competitive Carriers Association’s conference there, with that group of regional wireless carriers picking up my airfare and lodging. This trip also yielded my first Atlanta dateline since a 1998 Washington Post recap of the Electronic Entertainment Expo and added a new transit stored-value card to my collection.
10/16/2023: Startup Tackles Wireless Dead Zones With Balloons, Blockchain, and Cash Payouts, PCMag
After I had closed out my reporting at MWC Las Vegas last month by interviewing two World Mobile executives on the show floor there, fact-checking and actually writing the piece ate up another two weeks.
10/17/2023: IRS Will Offer Free (But Limited) Direct E-Filing Next Year, PCMag
I’ve spent years objecting to Intuit’s rent-seeking strategy of getting governments to cede the tax-prep market to the commercial sector–see, for instance, this 2014 Yahoo Tech column. So I will admit that I wrote this report about the Internal Revenue Service launching a pilot program for direct online tax filing with a certain amount of glee. Intuit PR was apparently not nearly as pleased to read it, leading to the bitter statement that we appended to the post after publication.
10/18/2023: Mozilla ‘Creep-O-Meter’ Gauges the State of Online Privacy: Here’s Where We Stand, PCMag
I got an advance copy of this announcement from Mozilla PR, allowing me to finish and file this Tuesday afternoon in the same temporary working space I’d used to write the IRS post on arriving in Atlanta: the United Club in ATL’s T concourse.
10/18/2023: FierceWireless Keynote Panel: You’ve Built 5G. Now Put It Into
Action, CCA Annual Convention
My first CCA panel had executives with four regional carriers–Darlene Howell of Appalachian Wireless, Slayton Stewart of Carolina West Wireless, and Adriana Rios Welton at UScellular–as well as Ericsson North America’s Surya Bommakanti talking about ways that smaller wireless firms could monetize 5G’s potential beyond getting individual customers to sign up for new wireless plans.
10/18/2023: Smaller carriers talk bigger 5G ambitions, with FWA first, Fierce Wireless
That afternoon, I wrote a recap of my own panel. I had recorded audio of it from my phone, but my attempt to outsource some of the work by having Otter transcribe that recording may have taken more time than I would have needed to play back the YouTube clip at 1.25x speed while typing only the meaningful quotes.
10/19/2023: Developing a Complete eSIM Strategy, CCA Annual Convention
This conversation with three experts in eSIM deployment–Chris Jahr, RiPSIM Technologies; John Myhre, GCI; and Randy Van Buren, Nokia–became an acoustic performance when we learned that the microphones had somehow stopped working. Fortunately, the meeting room we occupied was compact enough for our unamplified voices to suffice.
10/19/2023: Dashlane Diminishes Free Password-Manager Tier, PCMag
I learned about this downgrade of Dashlane’s free tier from an e-mail notice sent to customers Thursday morning–which I received because I had opened a Dashlane account for fact-checking purposes a couple of years ago. I then had two hours between CCA panels to write this post and get lunch, and for once I wrote fast enough to leave myself 55 minutes to eat.
#5GBroadband #Atlanta #CCA #CompetitiveCarriersAssociation #Dashlane #digitalPrivacy #eFileTaxes #fixedWirelessAccess #FWA #Intuit #IRSDirectFile #Mozilla #passwordManagers
