You probably don’t stop to think about it when you send an e-mail to Australia, do some shopping on AliExpress, go online to book a hotel in Amsterdam or check the web for tourist attractions in Florida, but there are vast stretches of water between those locations. So how does the Internet cross the ocean? The answer is, mostly, through a network of cables running along the ocean floor.

Motherboard published a great video that gives you a closer look a this critical infrastructure at the bottom of the sea.

Today is women’s day and in the wake of the many horrifying stories we’ve been hearing from the #MeToo movement, it seems like a good time to reflect on our implicit or explicit assumptions about gender, and how they are affecting our work, life and relationships.

As this blog is mostly about networking (and just very slightly about gender dynamics), I’d like to take the opportunity to share the story of the 1940s Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. In her days, she was mostly appreciated for looking incredibly sexy, while her scientific achievements attracted little attention.

Meanwhile, she was in fact one of the people that pioneered frequency hopping spread spectrum technology: a way to transmit a wireless signal while rapidly switching between frequency channels. This makes it harder to intercept the signal and also reduces interference with other sources.

The idea, during World War II, was intended to help allied submarines launch radio-controlled missiles, in a way the Germans wouldn’t be able to detect or jam. Still, Hedy was told she’d best help the war effort as a pin-up girl, cheering on the troops.

Eventually, her invention turned out to be a foundational building block, upon which modern communication technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth are constructed.

Bombshell is the documentary about Hedy Lamarr’s life. I’m hoping to catch it one of these days.

 

Falcon 9 rocket
Image: NASA HQ photo

Elon Musk! Okay, that should have gotten your attention… SpaceX, one of his many ventures, has been busy developing technology for launching Falcon rockets into space, working with reusable components.  The ultimate goal: a human settlement on Mars. As part of that grand mission, they are now working on a new approach to connect you to the Internet: Starlink, a network of satellites in orbit over our planet that would provide you with broadband access to the Internet and would pass data along.

With the first prototype satellites set to launch, it’s still hard to see what the exact impact will be. The plan may eventually involve launching as much as 12.000 cheap, mass-produced satellites into space. To connect to them from earth, you would need to install some sort of receiver, pointed to the skies.

Given how all of that’s a considerable effort, what are the benefits? As you’re reading this article, using your rapid 4G, cable internet, or even fiber optics connection, you might be tempted to take a fast connection to the Internet for granted. However, there are large parts of the world that are much less densely populated and where it’s just not economical or even possible to install all the cables, network equipment, and cell towers required to bring another remote village online. Other companies have been working on solutions for this issue as well. Google for example, has been providing Internet using balloons. Using satellites may be an interesting alternative – one that could eventually even reach Mars.

Update: just to show that the idea of Internet from the skies isn’t just hot air, another startup is planning to provide connectivity using high-tech blimps.

Image: Severin Höin on Unsplash

The idea of using flashes of light to signal a message isn’t quite new (see picture), but like with any technology, there’s always people trying to take it to the next level. The Dutch Telecom Agency has recently indicated that LiFi could become a useful supplement to existing WiFi technology.

So, do we really need an alternative to WiFi? After all, WiFi is a pretty popular way to connect to the net. It’s working well and as time passes, it’s only getting quicker and more secure. Unless, maybe, you live in a crowded apartment block in the big city and your neighbours’ routers are drowning out your signal… There’s only so many WiFi channels to choose from, and for some of us, that’s becoming a real problem.

Okay then, what is LiFi? The idea is to use a small light or laser and turn it on and off extremely rapidly to transmit a signal. This technology has achieved speeds of up to 1 Gigabit/s, at least in the lab. For LiFi to work, you will need a direct line of sight. Unlike a WiFi signal, light will not pass through walls or other obstacles. You could even consider that an advantage, if you don’t like the idea of people standing outside your home or office, listening in on your communications.

If you’re worried about protecting your data, though, it’s not all good news… Of course hackers have been thinking about ways to exploit similar concepts. For instance: even if you disconnected your computer, holding all your secrets, from the net, the bad guys could still steal data from it. If they somehow manage to infect your machine with malware, maybe carried on an USB stick, they could make your hard drive led flash on and off, or even blink the leds on your connected printer to send out information. Then they’d just have to launch a camera drone and have it hover outside your window, ready to capture your files.

Will LiFi really catch on? Time will tell!

Image: Wi-Fi Alliance

Wi-Fi alliance introduced a new version of Wi-Fi security that should become available in 2018, called WPA3.

A little bit of history: wireless signals are particularly vulnerable to people who want to listen in on your communication, or even manipulate it. As the signal travels freely through the air, anyone in the general vicinity can pick it up, really.

The first attempt at securing Wi-Fi was called WEP.  It didn’t last long. WEP encryption was implemented in such a way that encryption codes were reused periodically. A hacker could just eavesdrop for a while, record the conversation and then crunch the numbers, looking for similarities. As the guys in this video show, getting the password can be done in minutes.

New security measures were introduced: first WPA, then WPA2. You may have been told to configure your home router to use WPA2 and that’s still solid advice! Some vulnerabilities in WPA2 have popped up, but unless your password is 12345 or secret, WPA2 can still be considered secure for all practical purposes.

However: a large group of Internet users were left out in the cold! What if you happen to run a restaurant, cafe, bus service or airport and want to provide free Wi-Fi as a service to your customers?  You could either protect your network with WPA2, and be bothered constantly by people asking you for the Wi-Fi password. Or, you could just make it an open hotspot. People could connect a lot more easily, but the downside is that their communication will not be protected against those with bad intentions. If your customers get hacked on your network… well, that’s not a good show.

WPA3 promises improvement by offering individualized data encryption in open networks. Furthermore, it should make it easier to connect IoT devices to your network and finally it will even help you out if you did, in fact, choose 12345 to be your password!

Most of us are still pretty happy with the fast 4G connection on our cellphones. But of course, it’s never fast enough and preparations are well underway for the next generation of wireless connectivity: 5G. Samsung just completed a test where they managed to achieve speeds of up to 1.7 Gigabits per second. That’s even more impressive because they did so on board a train speeding through Japan.

So, how did they do this and what is 5G? In fact, 5G is not just a faster version of 4G. It’s a range of technologies, not only aimed at faster speeds, but also at connecting more and more devices to the Internet of Things. Think of self driving cars that don’t have to send lots of data, but have to respond quickly to conditions on the road, making a low latency connection a must. Or think of a a sensor in your street, monitoring and transmitting the local air quality. You don’t want to be changing the batteries frequently, so low power consumption would be an important requirement.

In other words, 5G is not just faster browsing on your cellphone. The technology could develop into a serious competitor to a variety of ways we now connect devices wirelessly: not just 3/4G, but also WiFi, Bluetooth, Long Range Radio or Zigbee.

To accomplish all that, 5G will need to make use of new parts of the frequency spectrum, sometimes even using multiple frequencies at once to manage high speeds. That’s also one of the reasons it may still take a few years before we’ll be able to benefit from all that’s promised. Not only does the technology need to mature, but also governments need to approve (or auction) the rights to use the required parts of the frequency spectrum.

Pigeon
Image: Genaro Servín on Pexels

One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it works, no matter what system or technology you’re using to connect. There’s even an official Internet standard, as specified in RFC 1149, for communication over Avian Carriers. That’s pigeons, and yes, it was an April’s fools joke.

Does that sound crazy? In 2009, Australia’s TV program Hungry Beast organised a race to see what’s the fastest way to get 700 Megabytes of data across Australia. Margaret the pigeon, carrying the data on a SD card, was faster -a lot faster- than uploading the file over the Internet. Similar experiments have taken place in other places, with pigeons beating technology.

Now it may be premature to cancel your Internet subscription and set up a pigeon roost in your yard, but there is something to this idea: if you have LOTS of data to transfer, there may be better ways to do this than over the Internet. Even Amazon have picked up on this and have taken the idea to the extreme: the Amazon snowmobile is a truck crammed full of storage. You can rent it to transfer petabytes of data from your data center across the country.

Do you have cable internet at home? That’s a pretty fast connection, but you may have noticed that your upload speed is a lot slower than your downloads. Ten times as slow, typically. CableLabs just published a Full Duplex update to their DOCSIS 3.1 standard, allowing cable internet to reach speeds up to 10 Gbit per second for both uploads and downloads. They have more information and a cool video explaining the benefits of Full Duplex on their site.

It may take a few years for this technology to actually reach your corner of the street, but with speeds like these, people may not be very much inclined to switch over to fiber optics technology for their Internet connection for quite a while to come. Even the good old phone line can provide speeds of over 300 Mbit per second nowadays. I still remember learning at university that, by phone, we would never ever go faster than 56kb/s. They had maths to prove it, too. Good old times…