Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has threatened a pair of local telcos with expropriation if they don’t improve services.

Duterte’s threats came over two days. On Monday his annual State of the Nation address [PDF] saw him call on the nation’s telcos to “improve their services lest we be forced to take drastic steps to address the less-than-ideal service that the public is getting from you.”

The next day he popped out a presidential press release in which he named local carriers Smart Communications and Globe Telecom and gave them a December deadline to improve their services or face the possibility

Cloud and ads behemoth Google is building a subsea internet cable linking the US to the UK and Spain.

The cable, which it named for compsci pioneer and mother of COBOL Grace Hopper, aims to provide better internet reliability and recovery from outages, the $1trn Alphabet giant said.

Google has already made investments in other private subsea cables: Curie, linking the US to Panama and Chile; Dunant between the US and France, and Equiano, linking Portugal, Nigeria and South Africa.

"Private subsea cables allow us to plan effectively for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the

Worldwide spending on 5G is set to double in 2020, according to analyst house Gartner, in stark contrast to the wider cellular infrastructure sector, which will see revenues plummet overall.

Spending on 5G kit is expected to hit $8.12bn, up 96 per cent from 2019's $4.14bn. Meanwhile, infrastructure as a whole is set to decline 4.4 per cent to $38.1bn, compared to 2019's $39.8bn.

The biggest revenue drops are to be found in so-called legacy networks, like 3G and 4G, which the analyst predicts will drop by 37.1 per cent and 20.8 per cent respectively for the year. Gartner's Kosei

The argument over opening up the 6GHz spectrum range, allowing it to be used for things like private indoor Wi-Fi, is heating up with TV broadcasters now suing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In a petition [PDF] to the Washington DC Court of Appeals, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has challenged the FCC's decision in April to open up the space to unlicensed operators in the United States, claiming the move “unlawfully fails to protect the myriad existing licensed users in the band from potential interference arising from such unlicensed use.”

As the use of wireless data has exploded,

Over the past few months we’ve heard a lot about contact tracers which are designed to inform users if they’ve potentially come into close proximity with someone who has the virus. Generally these systems have been based on smartphone applications, but there are also hardware solutions that can operate independently …read more