Wednesday, September 2, 2026
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Opinion

Telecom Tweets of the Week: On to Irma

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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Another week, another potentially catastrophic hurricane — is this what the rest of the 2017 hurricane season is going to look like? Let’s hope not (stay away, Jose!).

Irma has reportedly taken out all of the cellular towers on some Caribbean islands, on its path toward the U.S.:

U.S. national operators, fresh off of Harvey, now have to deal with a major storm that as of this morning, is expected to make a direct hit on south Florida and track northward up the state to Georgia and South Carolina.

Carriesr are already declaring free usage for people trying to reach the island countries that have been affected as well as some Florida zip codes.

Cable companies are doing the same with Wi-Fi:

Stay safe this weekend if you’re in Florida.

There are a few non-storm-related tidbits of note this week. T-Mobile US is embracing over-the-top with a new deal to provide free Netflix streaming for its unlimited family plan customers who have at least two lines. Full story here, complete with CEO John Legere’s usual side-swipes at AT&T and Verizon.

Meanwhile, Google has Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) capabilities on its new Street View mapping cars, which basically makes them into enormous 3D scanning devices, per Ars Technica. Why? Only Google knows for sure, but that amount of street-level details seems ripe for use in autonomous vehicles. Not to mention that the upgraded high-definition cameras for reading street signs and posted information about local businesses is going to give Google even more hyper-local info for search.

Ultra-low latency is one of the key criteria for 5G — and also one of the most challenging pieces of the 5G puzzle. So I was interested to see that Nokia and SK Telecom achieved a demo with 2 millisecond latency between an LTE handset and base station, compared to what they said is typical LTE latency of around 25 ms. That’s a significant reduction — more details on how they achieved it via the tweet below.

https://twitter.com/alanhadden/status/904635934511071232

In other interesting things to read on your Friday: if you haven’t had quite enough hurricane coverage, watch NOAA’s hurricane hunters’ video from Irma’s eye.

And if you haven’t seen this Twitter moment, it’s worth the scroll: a complication of live tweets following in real-time a nail-biter of a trip by a Delta flight to get one last planeload of people out of Puerto Rico’s San Juan airport ahead of Irma.

https://twitter.com/i/moments/905487561182908416

 

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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