“Here comes a trailer truck out on the open highway, miles from the nearest town,” says the narrator of the short film above. Suddenly, it becomes “important for someone to get in touch with the drivers of this outfit. How can it be done?” Any modern-day viewer would respond to this question in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Telephones dates from the nineteen-forties, well before the eponymous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the massive Motorola DynaTAC 8000X came on the market. The idea of calling someone not at home or the office, let alone a trucker on the road, would have seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Yet the engineers at Bell had made it possible, using a system that transmits conversations “partway by radio, partway by telephone lines.” This necessitated “a number of transmitting and receiving stations connected to telephone lines,” installed “at intervals along the highway so that one will always be in range of the moving vehicle.”
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Continue reading.

Appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG just can't understand. They added Wi-Fi antennae to their latest dishwashers, ovens, and refrigerators and built apps for them—and yet only 50 percent or fewer of their owners have connected them. What gives?

The issue, according to manufacturers, is that customers just don't know all the things a manufacturer can do if users connect the device that spins their clothes or keeps their food cold—things like "providing manufacturers with data and insights about how customers are using their products" and allowing companies to "send over-the-air updates" and "sell relevant replacement parts or subscription services."

“The challenge is that a consumer doesn’t see the true value that manufacturers see in terms of how that data can help them in the long run. So they don’t really care for spending time to just connect it,” Henry Kim, US director of LG's smart device division ThinQ, told the Journal.

Whirlpool told the Journal that customers "have the opportunity to opt in or opt out" of sharing data with the company. LG doesn't offer that option, but Kim told the Journal that "all data is anonymized."

While the manufacturers blame technical constraints, some customers may simply not want to provide companies with vague privacy policies or bad histories with security access to their networks.

Continue reading.
Article by KEVIN PURDY

The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office in US’s California shared an interesting incident about how they received a call that left them baffled. In a Facebook post, the law enforcement agency wrote that their deputies have seen a fair share of “monkey business” in the county but nothing quite like this.

The Saturday night the Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call that got disconnected. The dispatchers then tried to call and text back on the same number but they received no response. The deputies were sent to investigate the matter and the address took them to the offices of Zoo to You near Paso Robles. Continue reading.

SpaceX has quietly rolled out a new, more powerful “premium” tier of its Starlink satellite internet service that’s targeted at businesses and enterprise customers.

The new product, which was added to the company’s website Tuesday night, comes at five times the cost of the consumer-focused standard service. Starlink Premium requires a $500 refundable deposit, a $2,500 fee for the antenna and router, and the service costs $500 per month.

The standard Starlink service, which launched in October 2020, has a $99 refundable deposit, a $499 hardware fee and the service costs $99 per month.

Elon Musk’s company is touting improved hardware, faster service speeds and priority support in its pitch to prospective premium customers.

“Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses,” the SpaceX website said.
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The first premium deliveries will begin in the second quarter, the Starlink website notice added.

Faster speeds and improved reliability, paired with the COVID culture shift, every possible industry will shift to full or partial remote work. The only way for businesses to function virtually is through Cloud Services. Simplified Communications recommends shifting to the Cloud for:

• cloud-based phone services
• company communications and scheduling
• company file storage

Our agents are happy to chat with you about the implications, costs and logistics of using Cloud Services. Whether you make the shift now, or in the future, it will be a necessary evolution based on telecommunications trends. 

Have you noticed how it seems like your phone and online platforms are reading your mind? Every click and view is providing information to Artificial Intelligence, that's not really "mind" reading, but rather, it's reading through "mined" data to predict if you need food delivered to your office right now, or if you're ready to buy that new espresso maker. 

Technology has barely scratched the surface of what is to come in intuiting what your customers need before they even know they need it. 

Review your company's first impression online and through the phone--are you making it easy for customers to get their needs met? We can help. 

Want more details on the current and coming telecom trends? Learn more:

It is now winter in Antarctica, which means the sun won't rise until September. But those working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station can't count on Netflix to keep them entertained during the six-month-long night. 

That's because the internet is too slow to stream anything, Josiah Horneman, a physician assistant working at the station, told Insider. 
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Antarctica has not been connected to the network of underwater cables that carry data around the world. Instead, the remote station relies on satellites to get their internet, as Horneman explains in this TikTok post below: 

At Simplified Communications we tout the benefits of using cloud-based services. Today, we saw one of the major benefits of technology that operates in the ethers. It can be fixed quickly. 

Unlike the days when a service technician needed to be called, an appointment scheduled, and a series of guesses tested and tried in-person, with cloud-computing, problems can be identified from the comfort of one's pajamas, from anywhere in the world. That makes for speedy recoveries. 

Well, dam. A group of eager beavers shut down internet service in a western Canadian town over the weekend after they chewed through fiber cables and used them to build their home. 

The outage wreaked havoc on the internet, cable television and local cell phone service of about 1,000 Telus customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia — a town with only about 2,000 people total. The service provider described the 36-hour outage as a "very rare and uniquely Canadian disruption." 

"Our team immediately worked to identify the location of the damage and discovered that the cause of this fiber cut is fairly unique — beavers have chewed through our fiber cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage," Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé told CBS News on Monday. "Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit."

Inspiration for a baby name can strike anywhere at any time.

While most people browse the Internet for suggestions, one couple decided to name their child after their internet provider.

According to Fox News, the new parents made the decision in hopes of cutting down internet costs.

They responded to an advertisement from Twifi, a Swiss based internet provider, that was offering free internet for 18 years to families who named their child after the service.

The internet provider chose “Twifus” for a boy and “Twifia” for a girl.

Space exploration is hard, not least because of how difficult it is to communicate. Astronauts need to talk to mission control, ideally by video communication, and space vehicles need to send back data they gather, preferably at high speed and with little delay as possible. At first, space missions designed and carried their own distinct communications systems; that worked well enough, but it wasn’t exactly a paragon of efficiency. Then one day in 1998, the internet pioneer Vinton Cerf imagined a network that could offer a richer capacity to serve the growing number of people and vehicles in space. The dream of an interplanetary internet was born.

But extending the internet to space isn’t just a matter of installing Wi-Fi on rockets. Scientists have novel obstacles to contend with: The distances involved are astronomical, and planets move around, potentially blocking signals. Anyone on Earth who wants to send a message to someone or something on another planet must contend with often-disrupted communication paths.

CenturyLink has a new brand name and bold new purpose. As Lumen Technologies, or simply Lumen, the company will help lead enterprises through the challenges and opportunities of the 4th Industrial Revolution – a time when smart, connective devices are everywhere. Lumen® brings a new focus to how it views the marketplace and the world with the purpose to further human progress through technology.

The 4th Industrial Revolution represents the latest technological shift to change how everyone lives, works and thrives. At its core, this new age requires companies to effectively acquire, analyze and act upon their data to stay ahead of the curve and to be competitive.
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Here at Simplified, we are excited to see CenturyLink transforming to meet the increasingly data and technology driven needs of businesses, and Lumen's combination of global technology infrastructure, powerful business solutions and industry-leading services creates the platform to help our customers excel in this new industrial age and produce amazing things.

Lumen president and CEO Jeff Storey comments on new brand name, new purpose:  
"Our people are dedicated to furthering human progress through technology. Lumen is all about enabling the amazing potential of our customers, by utilizing our technology platform, our people, and our relationships with customers and partners."

​CenturyLink is asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve copper retirement in a number of states.

The retirements are due primarily to growth in the areas. CenturyLink will replace copper loops with fiber loops as customers migrate to higher speed broadband. It provides that broadband over its fiber-to-the-home overlay architecture.
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CenturyLink copper retirement will happen in parts of Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah and Washington. The company scheduled the fiber implementations for September.
Randy Clarke is CenturyLink’s vice president of federal regulatory affairs. He said his company “constantly strives” to exceed its customers’ expectations.

While the coronavirus continues to spread, 5G coverage makes its rounds around the globe on schedule. This is a crucial time to step up your company's technology to keep pace with increased demands and consumer expectations. ​

This was supposed to be the year 5G went mainstream. Huge swaths of the world would be blanketed with coverage. Every major handset maker -- including Apple -- would offer a wide variety of 5G phones. After years of hype and last year's early deployments, consumers would finally start to enjoy the benefits of the super-fast wireless technology in a real way. 

Then the novel coronavirus struck. 

The virus, which causes a pneumonia-like disease called COVID-19, quickly spread across the globe, causing cities and entire countries to issue lockdowns to slow its advance. China, where COVID-19 was first detected in late 2019, shut down first, jamming up production of iPhones and other products. The rest of the world soon followed suit, and the global economy all but ground to a halt.
"In our lifetimes we've never seen a faster economic collapse," Strategy Analytics analyst Ken Hyers said.

The result is a shattering of the buoyant optimism of just six months ago. Millions of people are out of work, and the world has recorded over 10 million COVID-19 infections. But even if the coronavirus has slowed down the rollout of 5G in heavily hit areas such as the US, it's not going to stop 5G's progress. ​