#chartercommunications — Public Fediverse posts

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

LAS VEGAS–To answer every “are you going to CES?” PR query I’ve gotten over the last three months: Yes, I’m here. I’m around through Thursday night, which I already know will not be enough time to process the info-overload of CES.

In addition to the posts below, Patreon readers got a look into the purple prose that Google Bard can generate, which I compared to “the Simpsons’ Kent Brockman writing a tech blog post in the style of a 1950s romance novel.”

1/3/2024: SpaceX Inches Toward Cellular Starlink Service With First ‘Direct to Cell’ Launch, PCMag

SpaceX’s first of what I suspect will be well over 100 launches this year delivered the first six satellites capable of serving as cell towers in space for T-Mobile and other participating carriers. This roaming option should work on almost all T-Mobile phones in service, but we’re an unclear number of months away from it being available–at first only for text messages.

1/4/2024: Spectrum to Hike Rates Again, Including Its Low-Income Internet Option, PCMag

In my latest contribution to the cable-rate-hikes genre, I closed out the post by suggesting ways that Spectrum customers could blunt or avoid these increases. That gave me an opportunity to remind readers that the government’s Affordable Connectivity Program is at risk of being defunded by Republicans in Congress.

1/5/2024: T-Mobile Touts New Top Speeds for the Second-Fastest Flavor of 5G, PCMag

One of my editors asked Thursday morning if I could write up this wonky feat of speed that T-Mobile had just announced, and then errands and a prolonged bout of writer’s block meant that I did not file this short post until Thursday evening.

1/7/2024: Launch.IT, CES

As I did last year, I helped judge this pitch competition for Japanese startups exhibiting at CES–sponsored by the Japan External Trade Organization and produced by the ShowStoppers tech-events firm, with whom I’ve worked before.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/01/07/weekly-output-starlink-direct-to-cell-spectrum-rate-hikes-t-mobile-touts-speeds-japanese-startups/

#5G #carrierAggregation #ces #CharterCommunications #JapanStartups #LasVegas #LaunchIT #pitchCompetition #SpaceX #spectrum #Starlink #TMobile #Vegas