Saudi Arabia Joins the Drone Arms Race

As reported by The Verge: Last week, Saudi Arabia bought its first drone fleet, according to a dispatch from Tactical Reports. Saudi Crown Prince Salman met with Chinese General Wang Guanzhong to sign a contract for a shipment of Chinese Wing Loong drones, also known as Pterodactyls. The drones that make up the shipment are designed to mimic America's Predator drone, with surveillance capabilities and enough lift to carry two matched air-to-ground missiles.

If the report is true, it means Saudi Arabia may have joined an exclusive club, one of the few nations with armed, unmanned aircraft. It's a group that, to date, includes just the US, Britain, Israel, China, and (depending who you ask) Iran — but beyond those countries, the capability is increasingly available to whoever can pay for it. At the Singapore Air Show earlier this year, both Israel and China were showing off their wares to would-be clients, including the Pterodactyl drone named in the report, and you could find similar displays at dozens of other air shows. With American counterterrorism efforts providing an ongoing test of how valuable the machines can be, there are lots of countries willing to buy.

The US is still responsible for the vast majority of drone strikes, but that may have more to do with politics than capability. A GAO report from 2012 found that more than 75 countries have some form of drone system. Most are unarmed but some, like the systems used in Australia, Japan, and Singapore, could be retrofitted for military purpose. More importantly, the US’ use of drones — more than 50 strikes in 2013 alone — seems to have whetted a global appetite for combat drones. "If you think of this as part of a broader trend of the proliferation of military robotics, then the idea that we were going to have a monopoly on this kind of technology was always a bit far-fetched," says University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michael Horowitz. "The American monopoly on drones is over and probably never really existed."

International trade barriers have slowed down the spread, but they haven’t stopped it. For US companies, combat drones are controlled under the same agreement as cruise missiles, through an association called the Missile Technology Control Regime. But China and Israel aren't part of the group, and the two countries have begun aggressively marketing drone systems to outsiders eager to keep up with US capabilities. One report from the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan estimated that Israel had exported $4.6 billion in drone systems between 2005 and 2012.

Experts also say Saudi Arabia has previously demonstrated both the interest and the budget for this kind of purchase. "Saudi Arabia and smaller countries like the UAE are trying to get their hands on whatever they can, and the US has pretty restrictive export policies," says Cornell University professor Sarah Kreps, who studies drone proliferation. The result leaves China as one of the only sources available in town.

One of the biggest questions is whether the new generation of foreign drones can match US capabilities. "We don't know at all about the quality of the pterodactyl," Kreps cautions, "these aren't combat-tested." Since unmanned aircraft rely so heavily on satellite and communications infrastructure, it’s hard to tell from the craft alone how well it will perform in the field. The Pterodactyl is also typically sold for a fraction of the price of the Predator, which has only fueled skepticism.

But even if China needs help to bring its drones up to US standards, that expertise may not be hard to find. UAVs are built on mostly commercial technology, drawing from the robotics and aviation industries. That’s much harder to keep under wraps than military tech like warheads or missiles. As long as there’s a market, there’ll be an incentive to build cheaper and more powerful drones, and the club of drone-armed countries will continue to grow. As Horowitz puts it, "What we know about the history of military technology suggests it will be really difficult to keep a lid on this."

Google’s Self-Driving Car Logs 700,000 Miles Navigating City Streets

As reported by GigaOm: Google says its self-driving car is now proficient at navigating the hazards of city driving.

In a blog post, Chris Urmson, director of the company’s self-driving car project, wrote that the Google cars have successfully completed 700,000 miles of city driving — around Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters — without incident:

“We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously — pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t — and it never gets tired or distracted.”

As of the last status update in August, the cars had completed 300,000 miles of service without an accident, at least under computer control — an actual person also sits in the car — but those miles were logged in a variety of conditions. Now Google seems to have doubled down on city driving, which presents more variable conditions than highway driving.

While this post is interesting, the comments are even more intriguing. One commenter predicted an increase in unsafe driving practices by human drivers who will now be tempted to cut off the Google cars, if they’re so darned accurate. Another requested  an “On-Board Missile Launcher” option, perhaps to deter or punish such cutoffs and counter road rage.

While negotiating Mountain View roads may be tricky, Google needs talk to me after the cars have mastered the potholes, rotaries and creative drivers of Boston. Now that would really be something.

Developing A Self-Cleaning Car Finish Using Nanotechnology

As reported by Tech Times: Drivers may soon be able to put away their buckets and cleaning rags after Nissan announced that it has developed a car that can clean itself instantly using a special kind of paint.  

Engineers at Nissan's European Technical Center in Bedfordshire, England applied a "super-hydrophobic" and "lipophobic" paint finish called Ultra-Ever Dry, which was developed and patented by UltraTech International, on the new Nissan Note supermini. The ultra-resistant paint can repel water and oils, as well as dirt, dust, mud and grit.

Although Ultra-Ever Dry has been used in other fields, Nissan claims that this is the first application of the special paint on automotive bodywork.

The paint uses nanotechnology to create a thin air shield above the surface of the car that makes rain, road spray, frost, sleet and standing water roll off the car without tainting its surface at all.

"By creating a protective layer of air between the paint and environment, it effectively stops standing water and road spray from creating dirty marks on the car's surface," explains Nissan in a press release.

So far, initial tests conducted on the self-cleaning Note were effective. Nissan engineers used Ultra-Ever Dry to paint one side of the car and regular paint on the other side. A video below shows how the side of the Note coated with Ultra-Ever Dry did not accumulate mud or dirt.

"The Nissan Note has been carefully engineered to take the stress out of customer driving, and Nissan's engineers are constantly thinking of new ways to make families' lives easier," says Nissan chief marketing manager Geraldine Ingham.

"We are committed to addressing everyday problems our customers face and will always consider testing exciting, cutting edge technology like this incredible coating application," she continues.

Nissan says it has no plans of making the special paint job a standard on factory models. It will, however, consider offering the self-cleaning paint as an aftermarket option. The company also promised to continue testing the technology in its European testing center.

This is not the first time Nissan introduced a self-cleaning function. The company has already developed a smart rear-view mirror that provides a better back view using a camera piped on the rear windshield. This camera is equipped with its own "wash and dry" function that uses water and air to keep the lens free from dust and dirt, allowing the driver a clear view of what's behind the car at all times.

Scale Is Increasingly The Name Of The Game In Cloud Computing

As reported by GigaOm: Resistance to cloud computing might not be futile, but it’s at least beginning to look foolish — especially as services from the top providers such as Amazon Web Services keep getting cheaper while their performance gets better. It’s also looking like smaller-scale or “enterprise” cloud platforms will have to promise some serious differentiation in order to justify their higher costs.

To highlight this trend, here’s a chart from publishing analytics startup Parse.ly graphing its IT spending from inception until early 2014.

The long story made short — you can read the whole thing up through September 2013 here — is that Parse.ly started off using Rackspace primarily and AWS for backup and a variety of ad hoc workloads (e.g., Hadoop jobs). In 2012, it opted to cut costs by switching its primary analytic database to physical servers in a co-location center while continuing to run its cloud workloads primarily in Rackspace. In late 2013, it began transitioning more workloads to AWS and completed an entire transition to AWS in late February 2014.

After paying double (to both Rackspace and AWS) during the transition, Parse.ly is now paying less than monthly than it was before making the move. Its spending patterns might be unique because of the workloads it’s running, but they’re compelling nonetheless.

And, Parse.ly Co-founder and CTO Andrew Montalenti told me, there’s icing on this cake, as well: “What’s crazy is we got a speed-up and saved money.” The company’s primary analytics database is now running significantly faster on AWS SSD-backed instances than it did on bare metal (albeit hard-disk-backed) servers.

If recent claims from Google about adjusting its pricing in accordance with Moore’s Law come true — and if its unique strategy around price reductions on long-running instances catches on — we should be in for continually lower prices on basic cloud computing services. AWS is the cloud king, but Google and Microsoft are positioned as strong contenders, and if low costs are what wins users, they’ll all play along to ensure no one else owns that story. The same goes for improved performance and rapid feature updates.

More and more, it looks like the future of cloud computing will be renting the infrastructure that lets users operate like, well, Amazon, Google and Microsoft but at a fraction of the cost (and scale). We’ll hear a lot more about where the industry is heading at the Structure conference, which takes place June 18 and 19 in San Francisco, and features, among many others, Google’s Urs Hölzle, Amazon’s Werner Vogels and Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie.

T-Mobile Has Started Building A More Resilient LTE Network

As reported by GigaOm: T-Mobile has begun upgrading its LTE network with a new kind of antenna technology that will help fix one of the biggest problems in mobile: the inconsistent signals and connection speeds our phones see as we move through the mobile network.

Anyone who has ever had five bars and a rocking data link to the tower, only to lose it 20 yards later, can attest to this. But starting in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio, T-Mobile users will soon see those peaks and valleys become plateaus.

The technology is called 4-by-2 multiple input-multiple output, or 4×2 MIMO. You may already be familiar with MIMO if you’re familiar with how LTE or Wi-Fi works: multiple antennas send multiple parallel transmissions from the transmitter to the device. While nearly all LTE systems today use 2×2 MIMO — two antennas at the tower connecting to two antennas in the phone — T-Mobile is doubling up on spatial streams being transmitted over the network.

What that means is that there will be a lot more signals flying at your T-Mobile 4G phone, tablet or mobile hotspot, ensuring you can get a better downlink connection even if you’re at the fringes of the network or their obstacles between you and the tower. The biggest benefits will be on the return trip, though. With more antennas at the tower to pick up your phone’s generally weaker signals, you’ll get a big boost in your uplink connection.

Gigaom first got the scoop on T-Mobile’s plans last June, when one of its vendors Nokia Solutions and Networks confirmed to me T-Mobile planned on deploying the antenna array technology. At the time, T-Mobile wouldn’t even acknowledge that it was using 4×2 MIMO, but this week T-Mo VP of Technology Mark McDiarmid confirmed to me that T-Mobile is in the process of rolling it out in multiple cities across its network this year as part of a larger LTE upgrade.

“We do see the benefits 4×2 MIMO offers and will be deploying this in many cities in 2014 as part of our Wideband LTE rollout,” McDiarmid said in a statement to Gigaom. “All of T-Mobile’s available devices currently support 4×2 MIMO and we’ll ensure that new devices will as well. We believe this will be one of the first deployments by a top carrier network in the US.”

Source: Flickr / swruler9284

Sprint is performing trials of a similar technology called 8T8R, which actually creates eight transmit paths as opposed to T-Mobile’s four, and will incorporate it into future upgrades to its new tri-band Spark network.

Historically T-Mobile has always trailed its competitors when it comes to launching new generations of network technologies. It was the last to get 3G and the last to start rolling out LTE, but once it had gotten started it took advantage of its newer network equipment to surpass its rivals. It built the fastest 3G network in the U.S. in 2011, and with 4×2 MIMO its now among the pioneers in one of the latest advancements in 4G networking.

T-Mobile wouldn’t offer any details as to where the network is now live, but Gigaom’s favorite network tracker Milan Milanovic found evidence of 4×2 in the wild in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio by polling fellow network testers on Howard Forums. This screenshot supplied by forums user besweeet shows iPhone in engineering mode in San Antonio with the arrow indicating four transmit signals from the tower.

Source: Howard Forums user besweeet

What does this mean to me?

So if you’re a T-Mobile subscriber with an LTE handset, 4×2 MIMO basically means you’re going to get a more resilient connection as you move throughout the network. You won’t actually see your peak speeds improve, but you’ll be able to maintain a fast, consistent connection far more often, even when the network starts getting crowded.

According to Nokia networks’ Head of Technology for North America Petri Hautakangas, at the cell edge – those fringe areas of the network where your connection often suffers the most — you could see a 50 percent to 60 percent boost in download speeds and as much as 100 percent increase in upload speeds.

That boost provides a lot of advantages to T-Mobile as well as its customers. By connecting more customers throughout its network with faster speeds it increases its overall data capacity considerably, meaning it will take a lot more traffic to make its network congested.

As for where the network heads next, the location of the three sightings we've had so far provides a hint. They’re all Nokia-built networks. Nokia’s systems are concentrated in the interior of the U.S. Ericsson holds T-Mobile’s contract for most east and west coast cities. If Nokia has the jump on Ericsson for this new technology, then it might take a while before it arrives in New York or San Francisco.

In any case, this technology is an important step for mobile networking, demonstrating the subtle shift away from building faster networks, to building better networks. The 5-10 Mbps speeds we typically see on a smartphone today is plenty fast. But providing a consistent 5-10 Mbps connection no matter where you go in the network? That’s where the mobile industry should be heading.

FTC Comes Out In Favor Of Tesla Direct Sales, Against Dealer-Backed Bans

As reported by Green Car Reports:  The ongoing fight between Tesla Motors and car dealers across the country has spilled from the headlines into the legal system, but so far, the outcome is far from certain. Will Tesla be allowed to sell its cars directly to consumers? Or is there some state interest in forcing Tesla into the dealer franchise model America's major carmakers use?

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) weighed in through its "Competition Matters" blog, making it plain that the agency supports the Tesla direct sales approach, likening it to past technological advances in consumer-business relations.

"In this case and others, many state and local regulators have eliminated the direct purchasing option for consumers, by taking steps to protect existing middlemen from new competition. We believe this is bad policy for a number of reasons," wrote Andy Gavil, Debbie Feinstein, and Marty Gaynor in the FTC's "Who decides how consumers should shop?" posting to the Competition Matters blog.

The strong statement of policy is not a change to any law or regulation, but it does clearly indicate the FTC's stance on the matter. Gavil is the director of the FTC's Office of Policy Planning, Feinstein is director of the Bureau of Competition, and Gaynor is director of the Bureau of Economics.

The post continues, "Dealers contend that it is important for regulators to prevent abuses of local dealers. This rationale appears unsupported, however, with respect to blanket prohibitions of direct sales by manufacturers. And, in any event, it has no relevance to companies like Tesla. It has never had any independent dealers and reportedly does not want them."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has explained why Tesla doesn't want conventional car dealers in the past. Though noting that it would be an easier path for Tesla, Musk thinks that conventional car dealers would have a conflict of interest in conveying the benefits of electric cars, since they would still rely on conventional (gasoline-burning) cars for the majority of their sales and profits.

Tesla's battle for direct sales is framed by existing franchise laws that prohibit anyone not licensed as a car dealer from selling vehicles to the public. Laws vary from state to state, but in all, 48 states have some version of the restriction.

The FTC appears to take issue not with those laws, but with how they're being used, and with the direct-sales bans being passed in several states.

"Regulators should differentiate between regulations that truly protect consumers and those that protect the regulated," the post continued.

Tesla now has more than 50 stores and galleries in the U.S., with six more due to open soon. Over 40 service centers are also currently in operation, with another 23 planned.                                         

Verizon, AT&T Will Face Bidding Limits In Incentive Auction

As reported by GigaOm: Last week the Federal Communications Commission laid out all of its proposed rules for next year’s controversial broadcast airwave incentive auction, save one. It didn't address the most contentious rule of them all: whether the countries’ two mega-carriers AT&T and Verizon will have free rein in the auction or face restrictions on how many airwaves they can buy.

The FCC is now taking a whack at the political piñata, and AT&T and Verizon aren't going to be pleased with what comes out. On Thursday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler began circulating proposed rules for low-band spectrum auction — of which the incentive auction is most definitely one — that would limit Verizon and AT&T’s ability to bid on all licenses in markets where competition for frequencies is particularly  intense.

What that means is that in areas where there’s the most demand for mobile broadband airwaves, such as the big cities, the FCC will set aside up to 30 MHz of airwaves for carriers that don’t already own a lot of low-band spectrum. The rules aren’t exactly a surprise since Wheeler has been leaning in this direction for months, though they’re likely to get overshadowed by the FCC’s controversy du jour, net neutrality.

The reason low-band spectrum is valuable is because of its propagation — it can reach out long distances in rural areas and punch through walls in dense metro areas. Most of the low-band spectrum in use in the U.S. today is owned by, you guessed it, Verizon and AT&T, both of which have tapped 700 MHz for the backbones of their LTE networks.

Wheeler elaborated in the FCC’s blog:

“… two national carriers control the vast majority of that low-band spectrum.  This disparity makes it difficult for rural consumers to have access to the competition and choice that would be available if more wireless competitors also had access to low-band spectrum.  It also creates challenges for consumers in urban environments who sometimes have difficulty using their mobile phones at home or in their offices.

To address this problem, and to prevent one or two wireless providers from being able to run the table at the auction, I have proposed a market based reserve for the auction.”

The nitty gritty
The way the auction would work under the FCC’s proposal is that in any given market, all carriers would bid freely for these 600 MHz airwaves. But after bidding hits a particular trigger point indicating high demand for those licenses, the FCC would basically split the auction in two, creating a reserve chunk of airwaves up to 30 MHz that only smaller carriers like Sprint, T-Mobile and regional operators could bid on. The unreserved portion would remain open to all bidders.

Verizon and AT&T wouldn’t necessarily face restrictions in every market. It all depends on the extent of their low-band holdings in any given region. There are even a few geographical cases where regional carriers like U.S. Cellular hold enough 700 MHz spectrum that they would be excluded from the reserve camp, FCC officials said.

FCC Commissioners (L to R): Commissioner Ajit Pai, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, Chairman Tom 

Wheeler, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly (Source: FCC)

The rules certainly aren't final. In May they go before the full commission, which will decide on specific mechanisms such as which auction stage reserve bidding would be triggered and what percentage of licenses in any given market could be reserved. It could also change up the rules entirely, easing restrictions on AT&T and Verizon, or toss them out entirely. Those carriers are putting a lot of political pressure on the FCC and Congress for an entirely open auction, and AT&T even threatened to sit the whole auction out.

AT&T may just be bluffing, but the threat has to give the FCC some pause. A major bidder sitting out the auction wouldn’t just mean less revenue for the government, it could cause the entire auction to fail. The way this complex auction is structured (I spell out all the details here), the broadcasters currently using the UHF band would agree to part with their TV channels, but only if their selling prices are met. The fewer bidders there are to buy those repurposed airwaves, the less likely the auction will meet those prices.

We’re still a year away from the first bids being placed, and it’s becoming increasingly clear there’s no way the FCC is going to be able to make happy all the various broadcasters, carriers, politicians and public interest groups involved. It’s just a question of whether it can make enough of them happy to actually pull the auction off.