It's virtualized RAN. So right now, cell towers have equipment at the base running vendor specific software to talk to the radios. This will be moved to vendor agnostic software running in a datacenter. It will then talk to the radios at the towers presumably over an IPsec tunnel, and tell them what to broadcast. So all the LTE/NR signaling, authentication, etc, etc will happen in a datacenter rather than at the cell site itself.

Respirators (such as a P100) are banned most places, because they don't filter exhaled breath. I got one at the start of the pandemic and haven't been able to use it. The purpose of mask mandating is to prevent the mask wearer from spreading droplets everywhere. The cloth masks don't do much to protect the wearer. So the mask mandate is more about protecting others than yourself, which is why respirators are prohibited. N95 (and KN95, etc) filter in both directions, which is why they're preferred since they also give the wearer some protection.

The problem with bookmarks is that I will never go back through them again. I use tabs almost as a reminder, or a note. When they get too full, it forces me to go back through them and either determine if I still need the tab, or to do whatever it was a reminder to do.

it's sort of the same reason that I use /tmp so much. Basically any download goes to /tmp. Most things that I need to disk only need to be kept for less than an hour. Rather than continually cleaning up a work folder, I just let the OS clean it up whenever I reboot every few months. It also helps that /tmp is exempt from my hourly btrfs snapshots, so avoids consuming disk space for a while for files I don't need or care about.

It actually does have an effect, even while moving in a car. There are even different transmission modes that are more optimized for moving or stationary traffic (transmission mode 3 vs 4). Your phone will have more trouble attaching to LTE while moving, but usually once attached it won't have a problem (data speed can be affected a bit by movement though). There's many cases I've seen where I'll drop to 3G, and it will not switch back to LTE until I stop (even passing multiple towers with LTE). It will hold 3G sometimes for 20 minutes on the highway. But as soon as I stop it switches to LTE immediately. I'm not sure why the attach part seems to be disproportionately affected by it.

I got an Ecobee 4 that has it built in. I couldn't figure out how to disable Alexa (this was when the Ecobee 4 had just come out), and if you muted the microphone it had a giant red light on constantly. I eventually setup pfblocker to download Amazon's list of AWS IPs and blocked them all from the Ecobee. Worked to disable Alexa. Eventually they added the ability to disable it to the Ecobee app and I was able to remove it.

There are ways to get unmetered LTE through Sprint and AT&T. And T-Mobile too I think, but it's trickier... The Sprint plan is/was better if you can pick up band 41 (used to be a public, routable IP, but I heard that T-Mobile is now NATing it....), and is ToS compliant. The AT&T plan is not really, and could get shut off (there are ways around this though with the right LTE modem).

My parents are in the same situation basically, and they've used both of those options. Due to changes with Sprint service and no longer getting a good enough signal, they're now using AT&T and get around 20-40 Mbps down, and 2-5 Mbps up. Typically use 200-350 GB / month. The AT&T plan is deprioritized after 22 GB, but they've never noticed any slowdowns (tower is lightly loaded I guess). The Sprint plan is not deprioritized. The Sprint one is through Calyx https://calyxinstitute.org/mem... and they send you a hotspot, but you can SIM swap it to an LTE modem as long as it's running generic (ie, not Sprint) firmware.

You can also check to see if Verizon offers their home internet at your address. It's unthrottled supposedly. All the zipcodes around my parents have it, but not theirs.... The AT&T plan is cheaper though ($25/month), so they'll likely stick with that until Starlink becomes available.

Happened to me. I got a package from Amazon with a pair of bluetooth earbuds, some tea candles, about 10 iPhone charging cables (I don't have an iPhone), and some other crap. I actually started using the bluetooth earbuds occasionally (mostly for podcasts around the house, and I may only put in one of them so I can still hear other things), and they work surprisingly well. No nicer features like ANC and such, but they stay in, get long battery life (I haven't worn them out yet), and sound good enough. I tried to find them on Amazon just to see how much they were selling for, and I couldn't find the listing...

No, it's a full Linux based OS. You can enable developer mode and install a chroot of whatever distro you want. Or use their Crostini VM infrastructure to run whatever Linux based VMs you want (technically it launches a VM, then distros are run as containers under that VM). The default distro is their own debian based one, but you can run others (Ubuntu, Arch, CentOS, etc). This is how Android Studio runs on Chromebooks. The built in Wayland compositor communicates with ChromeOS to make the applications appear native. You also get full GPU acceleration for Linux. There is an sshfs mount setup to allow accessing files inside and outside of the VM environment. It works very well, other than USB support is pretty bare at the moment (only Android devices). You have to use the developer mode chroot if you want full USB access.

Likewise, Android apps run through similar means. There is basically an isolated android environment, and they have an interface with ChromeOS to make the applications appear native.

You can get decently spec'd ChromeOS devices (Pixelbook is several years old now, but can have 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB NVMe drive). Other than Google tracking everything you do in Chrome, they're fantastic portable Linux laptops.

That's a LOT of effort for the average person unless you really have something you're trying to hide. Basically no one will do it otherwise. Just power off your phone and set an actual password on it instead of a 4 digit PIN. The data is encrypted at rest, and the US courts have ruled that they can't force you to give your password.

If you buy your phone unlocked or pay it off, then it works fine with a local SIM in other countries. For US providers, Sprint and T-Mobile both have standard, included unlimited international roaming for free. It's very slow, but it works for messaging and light usage.

You're better of just actually powering off your phone and laptop when entering another countries. They should be encrypted at rest (hopefully your laptop uses full disk encryption), so there's nothing useful they can copy off. In the US at least, the courts have ruled that they can't make you divulge your password.

You can configure unbound to sort of do this. You can tell it to serve expired records (with a 0 TTL). Then it goes and fetches the current record in the background so that the next request will have a fresh record. I'm not sure though how it would handle being unable to refresh the record, and if it would keep serving 0 TTL records. Cloudflare DNS actually does this, and serves 0 TTL records and refreshes it for the next query.

T-Mobile bought Sprint specifically for band 41. It's what they're using to launch 5G / NR, since T-Mobile didn't have the spectrum for a real deployment. Sprint was using most of it between LTE and NR, which was why they had to shut down Sprint NR to re-purpose that spectrum for T-Mobile NR. In many markets Sprint (now T-Mobile) has about 160 Mhz of band 41.

They've also started consolidating LTE in band 41. Sprint was pretty.... loose with allocations. For example, femtos used 20 Mhz at the bottom of the band, then their small cells used 20-40 Mhz right above that. The middle sat unused (except 40 Mhz allocated to NR in some markets), then macros had 3 20 Mhz carriers near the top. Within the past week, they shifted the macros to the very top of the band, and moved the small cells to use the same earfcn as the femtos, freeing up another 20-40Mhz and making the middle section more open. They're deploying NR in the middle. Some markets reverse this, with macros at the bottom and femtos/small cells at the top, but the middle was basically always unused (licensing reasons). T-Mobile initially launched with a 40 Mhz N41 carrier, but it has expanded to 60 Mhz in many places. NR allows up to 100 Mhz carriers, whereas LTE maxed out at 20 Mhz.

By the way, N41 is also TDD, since the band is unpaired in the US (it's paired spectrum as band 7 in Canada and other parts of the world). The nice thing about NR is that the timing configs can be dynamic, so the upload:download ratio can change dynamically depending on demand. For LTE, an entire region had to be on the same timing configs or the network would basically have massive interference. Sprint kept the whole country on the same timing configs. They originally launched with config 1, and then later moved to config 2, which allocated a higher percentage of the time slots to download than upload compared to config 1 http://www.techplayon.com/expl....

It also depends how heavy the dumbbells are. If they only go up to like 40 or 50 lbs per dumbbell, sure you can get them for under $100. I got a set around Christmas in the $300 range, but they go up to 105 lbs per dumbbell. 2 5 lbs and 2 2.5 lb plates per dumbbell, and the rest as 10 lb plates. No name brand. Metal weights are expensive.

It's not so much for speed, but for capacity. The airlink is more spectral efficient (a bit more so than the shift from HSPA to LTE), and you can have larger carrier sizes. HSPA maxed out at 5 Mhz carriers. LTE maxes out at 20 Mhz carriers. NR (5G) is I believe 100 Mhz carriers. LTE also begins losing efficiency from inter cell interference as you density the network (think of it like putting a bunch of wifi APs in the same room on the same channel. It won't scale and will have more interference the more APs you add), and NR is better at handling that, allowing greater cell density. Mobile data usage keeps increasing, so you need to build the capacity to handle it.

mmWave 5G (what Verizon is deploying for example) is fast with huge blocks of spectrum, but it can't penetrate anything really (a single wall will block it). Honestly, I don't see much use for it on mobile devices outside of stadiums, venues, and other high density places. Rather, it's being used as a last mile solution in place of fios / ftth. So instead of running a fiber to every house, they put a 5G base station on each block and install a small outdoor antenna to receive the signal. Cheaper deployment, and solves a lot of cost and headache in neighborhoods with underground utilities.

The impact would be on the wifi side. To my knowledge, Comcast routers don't have a separate wifi radio for the Xfinity Wifi SSID. So you'd be sharing your wifi bandwidth with whoever else was using it. If we assume that whoever is using it is not in your house or apartment, then chances are that they have a weak wifi signal. This will degrade your wifi performance as a result, unless Comcast implements something along the lines of what Ubiquiti calls airtime fairness (which I doubt that they do).

I'm not arguing for or against Comcast opening the hotspots up. I'm merely stating that it does in fact have an impact if you're using the comcast router for wifi.