First SpaceX Satellites Launch for Breakthrough Direct to Cell Service with T-Mobile

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January 3, 2024 | T-Mobile |

Major step forward in companies’ vision to create truly universal coverage by pairing SpaceX’s Starlink satellite technology with T-Mobile’s industry-leading network. Five international partners have joined T-Mobile and SpaceX on their quest for global connectivity.

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — January 3, 2024 — 3…2…1…Lift off! Today, T-Mobile announced that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched the first set of Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capabilities, following the livestreamed webcast last night. This is a significant milestone following last year’s joint announcement of the Coverage Above and Beyond initiative, which aims to bring connectivity nearly everywhere in the U.S. for Un-carrier customers — even in many of the most remote locations previously unreachable by traditional cell signals from any provider … aka dead zones. Now that the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, field testing can soon begin on the new service that will leverage SpaceX’s constellation of satellites with Direct to Cell technology and T-Mobile’s industry-leading wireless network.

“Our mission is to be the best in the world at connecting customers to their world and today is another step forward in keeping our customers connected even in the most remote locations for added peace of mind when they need it most,” said Mike Katz, President of Marketing, Strategy and Products, T-Mobile. “Today’s launch is a pivotal moment for this groundbreaking alliance with SpaceX and our global partners around the world, as we work to make dead zones a thing of the past.”

With well over half a million square miles of the U.S. and vast stretches of ocean unreachable by terrestrial network coverage, due to terrain limitations, land-use restrictions and more, this new service aims to give customers a crucial additional layer of connectivity when and where they need it most. With the new service, the goal is to eliminate worrying about mobile dead zones and lugging around expensive satellite phones — Un-carrier customers would be connected nearly everywhere they can see the sky, and in most cases, with the phone they already have.

Today marks the first of many Starlink satellite launches to come that will include Direct to Cell capabilities. Initially, the service will begin with text messaging, with voice and data coverage to follow in the coming years.

“The launch of these first Direct to Cell satellites is an exciting milestone for SpaceX to demonstrate our technology,” said Dr. Sara Spangelo, Sr. Director of Satellite Engineering. “We look forward to rapidly scaling up Direct to Cell with our partner operators around the world and rolling out messaging service for T-Mobile customers!”

T-Mobile and SpaceX’s shared vision is to provide truly universal coverage and last year, they issued an open invitation to wireless providers worldwide to expand globally with reciprocal roaming. As of today, five wireless providers are already onboard to launch Direct to Cell technology including KDDI (Japan), Optus (Australia), One NZ (New Zealand), Rogers (Canada) and others, with more to come. And the invitation still stands for any carrier with the shared goal of global connectivity to join. Additional details on the alliance and for those interested in joining can be found at direct.starlink.com.

For more details at T-Mobile, head to t-mobile.com/coverage/network.

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Some uses may require certain plan or feature; see T-Mobile.com.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This communication contains certain forward-looking statements, including T-Mobile’s plans to increase cell phone coverage while utilizing Starlink, and offer such coverage to its customers. Forward-looking information is based on management’s estimates, assumptions and projections, and is subject to significant uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond the Company’s control. Important risk factors could cause actual future results and other future events to differ materially from those currently estimated by management, including, but not limited to: the time and costs relating to building out the network.

Read original article HERE.

Amazon’s Ring to shutter video-sharing program popular with police

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January 24, 2024 | By Brian Fung | CNN |

Amazon’s Ring will no longer let police and other government agencies request doorbell camera footage from within the company’s Neighbors app, in what privacy advocates are hailing as a long-awaited victory for civil liberties.

Authorities seeking Ring surveillance videos must now submit a formal legal request to the company, rather than soliciting footage directly from users through the app, Ring said in a blog post Wednesday.

“Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events,” the blog post said.

On January 31, law enforcement will no longer be able to make new posts asking users to submit footage, though Ring users may continue to respond to existing police requests on the app until February 29, a Ring spokesperson told CNN.

Ring’s decision to wind down the video-sharing program, known as Request for Assistance, has nationwide implications. Hundreds of law enforcement agencies have struck up partnerships with Ring, according to a tracker maintained by the consumer advocacy group Fight for the Future. The partnerships highlight authorities’ appetite for data from an increasingly ubiquitous gadget that can help shed light on local crimes but that critics say is invasive and creepy and threatens citizen rights.

A ‘dystopian business model’?
“Ring shutting down the ‘red carpet’ surveillance portal they offered to police is unquestionably a victory for the coalition of racial justice and human rights advocates that have been calling to end these partnerships for years,” said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future. “That said, this move only scratches the surface of addressing the harm done by Ring’s dystopian business model.”

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said Ring’s decision will end the ability for police to make warrantless requests for information through the Neighbors app and is a step in the right direction.

But, he warned, it would not necessarily stop police from continuing to persuade Ring users to voluntarily give up their rights. Police are able to contact Ring users off the app. And Ring users can still decide if they want to voluntarily send video, sounds or images from their Ring devices to law enforcement.

“Ring users should also know that when police knock on their door, they have the right to, and should, request that police get a warrant before handing over footage,” if they don’t want to turn over footage, Guariglia said.

A spokesperson for the Fraternal Order of Police, a group that represents law enforcement officers, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Ring’s announcement.

Ring has faced years of scrutiny over its video sharing practices. In 2021, after pressure from groups including EFF, Ring said it would no longer let government agencies contact users privately to request their surveillance footage, requiring them instead to solicit video submissions through public posts on the Neighbors app.

Critics allege that Ring’s doorbell cameras have contributed to racial profiling and invasions of privacy. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, who has questioned Ring about its practices, has said authorities’ use of Ring footage “creates a crisis of accountability.”

In response to Markey’s questions, Ring has said it reserves the right to hand over camera footage to law enforcement in an emergency and without a warrant and disclosed in 2022 that it had done so at least 11 times in the first half of that year alone.

Surveillance scrutinized
Guariglia said that despite Wednesday’s announcement, he is “still deeply skeptical about law enforcement’s and Ring’s ability to determine what is, or is not, an emergency” allowing authorities to bypass legal process.

Ring has also faced blowback over “Ring Nation,” a TV show highlighting humorous video clips captured by Ring devices that the company said were intended to spark delight but that critics said normalized and made light of Amazon’s growing surveillance power.

And Ring has received wider criticism over its handling of user data and its ability to protect users’ privacy. Last year, Ring agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it gave employees unrestricted access to videos from customers’ Ring devices and ignored reports that some Ring employees were secretly viewing user footage. The FTC also alleged that numerous instances of hacked Ring cameras undercut the company’s marketing claims that the cameras would enhance user security.

Wednesday’s announcement comes the same day that Senate lawmakers questioned law enforcement and academics about the rising use of artificial intelligence in policing. And it coincides with reports of wrongful arrests arising from the use of facial recognition analysis of surveillance camera footage.

“While AI has the potential to improve law enforcement efficacy, it can also cause harmful errors with high-stakes consequences for life and liberty,” Rebecca Wexler, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, testified to lawmakers at Wednesday’s hearing.

“Congress should require [AI] vendors to allow independent audits by clarifying that AI tools used in the criminal legal system must be subject to independent review.”

While Ring did not disclose its specific reasons for ending the video-sharing program, at a certain point the company must have calculated that its perceived closeness with authorities hurt more than it helped overall, said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I would’ve loved to have been a fly on that wall,” Stanley said. “It seems significant that they decided to pull back from a hand-in-glove relationship with law enforcement, at least in their marketing.”

Read the original article HERE.

Google Just Killed Warrants That Give Police Access To Location Data

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December 14, 2023 | By Cyrus Farivar & Thomas Brewster | Forbes |

CellHawk Support Note:  We recommend continuing to request Google Geofence/Reverse Location Searches as usual until Google rejects the warrants entirely and no longer produces any responsive data.

“Geofence warrants,” which allow law enforcement to get location data across a wide area, have become commonplace in recent years.

On Wednesday, Google announced it would soon change the way it would store and access users’ opt-in “Location History” in Google Maps, making the data retention period shorter, and making it impossible for the company to access it. That means it will no longer respond to “geofence warrants,” a controversial legal tool used by local and federal authorities to force Google to hand over information about all users within a given location during a specific timeframe.

Because geofence warrants — also known as reverse-location searches — have the potential to implicate anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a crime, Google’s decision to end access to location data is a major win for privacy advocates and criminal defense attorneys who have long decried these warrants.

The company confirmed the impact of the change to Forbes. A current Google employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told Forbes that along with the obvious privacy benefits of encrypting location data, Google made the move to explicitly bring an end to such dragnet location searches.

“The repository of everyone’s location data dating back months or years was a hazard, and Google is trying to clean up that hazard,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes. “That is a real benefit for people’s privacy for people’s locations over time which is some of the most revealing information about us.”

Armed with facts about a criminal incident, and the vast location history data and associated device data from a geofence warrant, investigators would try to identify a suspect who might have committed a crime.

“These warrants are dangerous,” wrote Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a Wednesday blog post. “They threaten privacy and liberty because they not only provide police with sensitive data on individuals, they could turn innocent people into suspects.”

The change doesn’t prevent the government from getting information on a specific user by demanding their full account details, the Google employee said. But investigators can no longer hand over some coordinates and a timeframe, and compel Google to give it either identifying data or metadata on all users within those parameters.

The move comes just days after the very first federal appellate court, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Virginia, heard oral arguments in a case called United States v. Chatrie, where it was asked to evaluate the fundamental legality of geofence warrants. (The court’s ruling, which only would cover five states largely along the eastern seaboard, will likely not come until next year.)

“Good news from Google, I never thought I’d say that,” said Michael Price, one of Chatrie’s lawyers, and the litigation director for the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“From a practical perspective, judges are often concerned about taking a tool away from law enforcement. But here that decision has just been made and may lower the stakes in some respects for finding it unconstitutional.”

Earlier this year, a California state legislator proposed a bill that would have outlawed the practice for California-based companies – notably, Google – to comply with such court orders. (That bill did not advance in the statehouse.) Now, in one fell swoop, Google has now largely taken the decision out of future judges’ hands.

Google doesn’t typically break down how many geofence warrants it receives, though it broke with tradition in 2021, revealing that more than 25% of the warrant requests it had received in the U.S. at the time were reverse location warrants. The volume of geofence warrants received by Google tripled from the end of 2018 to the end of 2019, reaching 3,000 warrants in a single quarter.

As Forbes has previously reported, practically all geofence warrants are targeted at Google, given its vast amount of search and location data. While other tech firms could theoretically be served with similar warrants, public court records nearly always point to a data request from Google over other companies.

While it may receive more geofence demands than any other tech company, it isn’t the only tech giant being told to respond to them. Apple said earlier this year that it had received such geofence requests, but could not provide the data because of the way it protects user locations.

Such warrants have been used in some of the most significant law enforcement cases in recent memory.

They were used to identify those who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6 and to identify individuals involved in the Kenosha riots of 2020 in response to the shooting of Black citizen Jacob Blake. Forbes learned last year that law enforcement were raiding historical Google location data, going back seven years in one case where cops were trying to gather evidence to send two men to death row.

Geofence warrants have also reportedly been used to investigate relatively minor crimes, such as a wallet stolen from a Utah hospital.

The California District Attorneys Association, a state level group that has previously opposed new restrictions on geofence warrants, noted that in 2022, sheriffs deputies in Santa Clara County used the technique to solve “9 separate residential burglaries.”

Similarly, Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on X on Wednesday that “from a public policy standpoint, that seems like a bummer.”

“Geofencing has solved a bunch of really major cases that were otherwise totally cold,” he wrote.

“And there are lots of ways of doing the legal process (including Google’s warrant policy, although that’s just one way) that are a lot more privacy protective than ordinary warrants. But I can see why this might be in Google’s business interest. If there isn’t a lot of economic value to Google in keeping the data, and having it means you need to get embroiled in privacy debates over what you do with it, better for Google to drop it.”

Read the original article HERE.

To read Google’s Location History update, visit: https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-history-and-new-controls-coming-soon-to-maps/

More 2G and 3G shutdowns loom in the US

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November 28, 2023 | By Mike Dano | Light Reading |

UScellular said it will turn off its 3G CDMA network on January 14, 2024. Separately, Cellcom said it plans to shutter its 2G network in December after shutting down its 3G network in March.

UScellular and Cellcom recently set dates to shutter their aging wireless networks. The smaller network operators are following in the footsteps of their bigger, nationwide rivals, which are making similar moves.

On its website, UScellular said it would shutter its 3G CDMA network on January 14, 2024.

“Major wireless carriers have already shut down their 3G CDMA networks and you’re likely starting to notice the effects on your older devices. When we shut down our network, 3G devices will lose service completely,” the operator reported on the site. “We are committed to supporting our customers and are ready and available to assist you through this transition. To keep you connected, we’re offering big discounts on 4G/5G devices.”

UScellular CEO Laurent Therivel said there are fewer than 42,000 customers left on that network, down from 386,000 around 18 months ago.

“We believe we’re going to continue to see more customers migrate over the next several months,” he said during UScellular’s recent quarterly conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “We intend to reform that spectrum to support our LTE network. And we expect to see additional systems operation savings once that CDMA network is fully shut down in 2024.”

Like Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, UScellular said it would shut down its aging 3G network in order to put more resources – including spectrum – toward its 4G and 5G networks. Indeed, UScellular is in the process of adding valuable midband spectrum to its 5G network.

UScellular operates a wireless network across around 21 states and counts around 5 million mobile customers. It recently announced it is for sale, though it’s not clear whether there are any buyers.

Separately, as noted by Wave7 Research, Cellcom said in September it would shutter its 2G network at the end of 2023 after shutting down its 3G network in March.

“Cellcom will be contacting customers who need a new device, which includes phones that are not compatible with VoLTE [voice over LTE] and some models of our home phone replacement unit,” the company said on its website.

As Light Reading previously reported, Cellcom began its 5G rollout in 2022 with equipment from Ericsson and Cisco. The company provides telecom services throughout Wisconsin and upper Michigan.

Follow the leader
The nation’s big network operators turned off their 3G networks during the course of last year. According to the financial analysts at MoffettNathanson, the 3G network shutdowns by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile affected a combined total of 2.3 million lines of service during 2022. But the financial analysts at Wells Fargo put the figure at 1.1 million.

In either case, it’s unclear exactly how many of those lines were active or unused. The operators recorded their 3G disconnections as “subscriber adjustments” rather than in their tally of gained and lost customers.

As for 2G, AT&T discontinued service on that network in 2017, while Verizon shuttered its 2G network around 2020. T-Mobile said earlier this year it would turn off its 2G GSM network on April 2, 2024.

Meanwhile, some regulators are starting to look at spectrum and standards for 6G networks.

Read the original article HERE.

Unleashing 5GSA’s Potential: Pioneering Network Slicing and Automation Obstacles

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November 22, 2023 | By Kamile Bigenyte | VoIP Review |

5G technology is receiving significant attention and becoming an exciting hotbed of innovative potential, with a multitude of experimental features currently under scrutiny. According to Marco Gatti, 5G Product and Solution Manager at Anritsu Service Assurance, one of the most promising developments involves network slicing. Network slicing allows potentially hundreds or even millions of simultaneous network slices to come about dynamically, each boasting its unique customer-defined attributes.

However, at this time, most telecom operators continue to limit the number of slices. But as the full potential of 5G Standalone (5GSA) matures closer to realization, the technology is poised to unlock an array of revenue-generating business opportunities across various industries. These include gaming, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile edge computing.

Network slicing can especially contribute significantly to critical remote services that heavily rely on high availability and guaranteed redundancy. With the advent of this technology, tasks such as remote robotic surgeries, which require ultra-reliability over low latency, can become a reality. Moreover, intensive plant and machinery can considerably minimize downtime and avert breakdowns with the aid of embedded monitoring capabilities connecting over a reliable 5G slice, thus managing potential issues within microseconds.

There are, nevertheless, certain challenges and complexities being faced. With the increasing scale and diversity of network operations, traditional management techniques might prove insufficient. Moreover, the pursuit of dynamic 5G slicing, if not accompanied by innovation and adaptability in managing processes, might lead to unsustainable operating costs. The solution, as Marco Gatti posits, lies in increased automation.

In such a context, service assurance emerges as a critical enabler for effective automation since one can only control what is under active monitoring. Unlike standard call detail records, which can present post-event, effective service assurance hinges on the adoption of real-time monitoring. This, in turn, immediately alerts the orchestration, which can actuate on the core network. Establishing this closed loop helps anticipate potential issues when certain metrics approach a defined threshold, thus enabling the orchestration to take appropriate preventive measures.

However, the adoption of automation also hinges on a significant culture change within operations teams. These teams need to adopt a more developer-centric mindset, with an emphasis on repeated testing till full confidence is established in the solution’s ability to operate reliably.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can also complement automation by extracting insights from the multiple data streams collated by service assurance across the network. For instance, ML based on neural networks can enhance prediction reliability and anomaly detection capabilities. This, coupled with ML-based scripting, can enable faster and more effective network management in future networks.

But bringing about the full potential of 5G to create new business opportunities will only be possible when ZSM matures, OSS environments are prepared, and 5GSA-compatible devices are made available for diverse consumer and industrial applications.

 

Read original article HERE.