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.:
Unbelievable. #Irma has snapped all the cell towers on #Barbuda. That's reinforced steel – photo: ABS pic.twitter.com/NF5v698XJa
— Jonny Hallam (@Jonny_Hallam) September 6, 2017
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.
Tropical storm winds are likely to arrive in the FL Keys and south FL Saturday. Preparations should be rushed to completion. #Irma pic.twitter.com/eto2KVWtgP
— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) September 8, 2017
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.
Cust. have unltd texts/data/calls in affected area codes in FL & calls/texts from US to Bahamas, Turks&Caicos til 9/15. Stay safe, everyone!
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) September 8, 2017
We’re waiving fees for calls/texts to these Caribbean areas affected by #Irma thru 9/9. Stay safe: https://t.co/DABQlPPRTW
— Boost Mobile (@boostmobile) September 7, 2017
Cable companies are doing the same with Wi-Fi:
Comcast offers free wireless Internet access in Charleston area ahead of Irma @postandcourier https://t.co/wOfcrzP8sg
— Liz Foster (@TheDizzyLizzieB) September 8, 2017
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.
In case you missed the coolest thing since…well, @Netflix itself! We'll just leave this right here. https://t.co/aWuPA0rE5e
— T-Mobile (@TMobile) September 6, 2017
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.
Google’s Street View cars are now giant, mobile 3D scanners https://t.co/4uX0qYIwfU by @RonAmadeo
— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) September 6, 2017
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.
The @NOAA's hurricane hunters flew through the eye of #HurricaneIrma, capturing the storm's huge eye wall on camera https://t.co/K8KqDWSKSC pic.twitter.com/IGtxXrhqjc
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 7, 2017
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.
Delta flight beats Hurricane Irma
