The decades-old “satellite-IoT” race, in which Internet of Things devices connect to satellites in orbit, has reached an inflection point in 2026. Satellite-IoT is growing in response to a rising need for connected devices in applications including livestock tracking, wildfire detection, global supply-chain monitoring, pipeline and grid sensing, and other industries where network connections can be sparse or expensive.

Many anticipated satellite-IoT use cases will require two-way signaling, carrier roaming, or continuous availability—all things that are common features for cellular networks. That’s why the telecom standards body that created 4G and 5G has, as part of the development process for 6G, already settled on a satellite-IoT protocol that will make use of the upcoming generation of cellular tech, to be available sometime around 2030.

But 6G won’t work (or work well) for some IoT devices, because they won’t use SIM cards, or they’ll have tiny sensors that need years of battery life, or they’ll operate on networks that need to stay strictly private.

That means that a window currently exists for alternative technologies to stake their claim in the growing space. That’s exactly what two aerospace companies, Kinéis and Hubble Networks, have done in recent months, in their efforts to lock up enough hardware, customers, and infrastructure to stave off the oncoming challenger.

LoRa Satellite IoT Deployment

At the IEEE International Conference on Communications in Glasgow last week, the Toulouse, France–based satellite operator Kinéis presented the results of its early satellite-IoT commercial deployment—25 microsatellites in low Earth orbit, opened to customers in June 2025. A team of company representatives and university researchers made the case that LoRa—a radio protocol developed for long-range, low-power IoT—fits a world in which millions of cheap sensors are all communicating with orbiting network hubs.

“LoRa is explicitly designed to address terrestrial and satellite IoT use cases without requiring additional firmware,” said Vincent Deslandes, strategic product manager at Kinéis. He added that the version of LoRa that the company uses, one that continuously hops across carrier frequencies to reduce signal collisions, will span a coverage area “thousands of kilometers of diameter” per satellite, while serving thousands of users simultaneously.

Deslandes said that while 6G’s satellite-IoT market “will expand with a more exponential curve,” the niche will remain in place for low-power alternatives to 6G and its precursor standards today.

“There is room for both [6G] and LoRa-based satellite-IoT, as they answer to different needs,” Deslandes said.

Researchers at ground stations in France and Switzerland in 2024 tested a new, ultraefficient protocol for satellite-based Internet of Things (IoT) signals. Satellites overhead successfully received the test transmissions. Kinéis

In the International Conference on Communications paper, a team of researchers from French and Swiss universities, along with two Kinéis collaborators, described the results of a 2024 experiment involving test signals transmitted using comparatively lower frequencies, in a band long associated with wildlife tracking and ocean buoys.

The group experimented with an ultraefficient protocol that transmits only data packets and error correction bits. (Most signals contain preambles and reference sequences. For an energy-constrained chip like a tiny IoT device, that means wasting battery on unnecessary overhead.) The researchers found that a low Earth orbiting satellite overhead could pick up 100-milliwatt pings sent from the ground. Signals using the experimental protocol, the researchers found, could be deciphered even when ambient noise outpowered the signal—by a factor of nearly 27 to 1.

Hubble Network Bluetooth Satellites

While LoRa squeezes every efficiency from purpose-built radio hardware, the Seattle-based startup Hubble Network is promoting a different approach to satellite-IoT. Using a low-energy standard developed by the Bluetooth consortium, Hubble Network’s seven satellites can pick up signals from any device with a Bluetooth chip.

“The receive sensitivity that we have with our satellites is roughly the same receive sensitivity as devices have with the GPS network,” says Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro. “So anywhere a GPS device could get a lock, it could send a Hubble packet and be received by our satellite.”

In April, the company announced a new partnership with the Irvine, Calif.–based sensor startup InPlay. The companies are developing technology around a range of supply-chain and logistics applications.

“The use cases that we’re focused on are what IoT was meant to be,” Haro says, “which is, how do we connect everything and eventually get everything an IP address? How do we do things like track every package ever shipped, so that we can help solve the porch pirate problem and the massive insurance liabilities in shipping? Or how do we keep track of every pallet to make moving of materials and food much more efficient?”

Some Bluetooth chips, whose pings Hubble Network’s satellites can receive from orbit, are approaching the price of RFID tags—which require cumbersome RFID reader devices as well. Whereas Bluetooth chips using the Hubble Network, Haro says, talk directly to satellites overhead.

“If you could have a global network that works with a 10-cent Bluetooth chip, you can really start to solve these interesting problems, like how do we keep track of every package that UPS has shipped?” Haro says.

Haro notes that, unlike anticipated 6G satellite-IoT standards, Hubble Network is uplink only. “And our users find a lot of value in that,” he says.

According to Petar Popovski, professor of connectivity at Aalborg University in Denmark, Bluetooth seems “quite limited as a standalone satellite-IoT contender.” Without a viable downlink, he says, a Bluetooth device on the ground can whisper messages to low-Earth orbit. But two-way, standalone communications require both a receiver and a transmitter.

Popovski adds that while LoRa wide-area networks were designed to send and receive long-distance signals, LoRa assumes “predominantly uplink-dominated traffic, which is well-suited to sensor reading but creates structural limitations for bidirectional applications.”

Both LoRa and Bluetooth, in other words, will ultimately struggle to compete with 6G for applications that demand steady, two-way connections between IoT devices below and satellites above. Such higher-bandwidth, bidirectional satellite-IoT connections are expected to underpin future tech innovations in smart cities, autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, digital twins, and remote surgery.

NB-IoT NTN and 6G Satellite IoT

Strictly speaking, the anticipated 6G satellite-IoT protocol is currently called Narrowband Internet-of-Things Non-Terrestrial Networks (or NB-IoT NTN). While a version of NB-IoT NTN was ratified in 2024, it will become far more useful for more applications when it is rolled into broader 6G standards in the coming years. And for all the name’s unwieldiness, the standard itself remains the frontrunner for many anticipated satellite-IoT markets in the coming decade.

Which still leaves plenty of room for competition, as Kinéis’ and Hubble Networks’ recent product developments and announcements reveal. Meanwhile, Kinéis and Hubble Networks are themselves far from the only companies working today to connect remote devices to the sky.

Legacy satellite-IoT operators Iridium (located in McLean, Va.) and Globalstar (located in Covington, La.) have served industrial customers for years using proprietary protocols. Myriota, a startup based in Adelaide, Australia, recently developed a satellite-IoT payload designed for lunar deployment that pushes the technology’s frontier deep into cislunar space. And the Mountain View, Calif.–based Skylo is already offering commercial NB-IoT NTN service via geostationary satellites. The same standard that’s now on the pathway to 6G, that is, is also a player in the current satellite-IoT race.

And it’s expected to be a tight and competitive race for at least a few more years. According to industry analyst Johan Fagerberg at the Gothenburg, Sweden–based Berg Insight, satellite-IoT built on cellular standards “will probably win the narrative after 2030, especially once 6G specifications are ready.”

He adds, however, that unlicensed technologies like LoRa and low-energy Bluetooth “will not disappear and will be relevant for ultralow-cost, low-payload, long-battery-life devices where users value simple modules and private/hybrid networks.”

Which is why, Popovski says, the clock is now ticking. “The window for building durable lock-in is real but likely time-limited,” he says.

Kinéis, Hubble Network, and every other contender in satellite-IoT are running hard against each other today. But the real finish line ahead is 2030, when the rules of the whole contest change.

Direct-to-cell technology uses LEO satellites as spaceborne cell towers. It delivers LTE services to existing smartphones without hardware changes, bridging global coverage gaps.

What Attendees will Learn

1. How DTC works as a spaceborne cell tower — LEO satellites carry LTE eNodeB payloads in regenerative mode. How they serve unmodified phones using quasi-earth-fixed multi-beam antennas. How the satellite compensates for Doppler shift and time delay on thenetwork side.
2. Why Doppler shift and round-trip time are critical challenges — A LEO satellite’s high velocity causes carrier frequency offsets in OFDMA systems. Pre-compensation at a reference point helps, but cell-edge users still face residual Doppler.
3. How spectrum sharing and regulation shape DTC deployment — DTC has no dedicated spectrum allocation. It relies on spectrum sharing between terrestrial and satellite operators or re-farmed MSS bands. How national regulations like the FCC SCS framework govern access.
4. Where DTC fits in the evolution toward 5G NTN and 6G — DTC is an interim technology offering fast time-to-market satellite services. It bridges the gap until 3GPP NR-NTN matures. How NR-NTN will bring purpose-built NTN features and international spectrum frameworks.

A practical introduction to phase noise concepts, explaining how oscillator instability affects RF systems and how phase noise is measured, analyzed, and reported.

What Attendees will Learn

1. What phase noise is and why it matters — Learn how real-world oscillators differ from ideal ones, why short-term frequency instability arises, and why phase variations typically have a much greater impact than amplitude variations on system performance.
2. How phase noise degrades system performance — Understand the most common effects of excessive phase noise: spectral regrowth, reciprocal mixing, and constellation rotation in digital communications.
3. How phase noise is measured and reported — Explore the spectrum analyzer method and the cross-correlation technique, understand single sideband (SSB) phase noise plots and spot noise tables.
4. What advanced phase noise measurements look like in practice — Discover additional measurement types including integrated phase noise, additive (residual) phase noise, pulsed signal phase noise, and amplitude noise.

The IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc)’s Research Collaboration Pitch Session initiative is proving to be a catalyst for meaningful engagement between academic researchers and industry innovators. Launched last year, the program connects promising researchers with industry leaders who can offer them funding, mentorship, and connections to bring interesting ideas closer to real-world deployment.

Rather than relying on chance encounters at conferences, the pitch sessions create a focused environment. Five academic presenters share their work with five industry representatives, known as “innovation scouts”: senior leaders primarily chosen from ComSoc’s Corporate Program partner companies such as Ericsson, Intel, Keysight, and Nokia. The curated format ensures that each idea receives dedicated attention from professionals who are seeking new concepts aligned with their organization’s priorities.

The initiative was launched in November at the IEEE Middle East Conference on Communications and Networking (MECOM) in Cairo and appeared in December at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) in Taipei, Taiwan.

AI-driven communication network

One of the most compelling outcomes came from the inaugural session in Cairo. Angela Waithaka, a student member and biomedical engineering student at Kenyatta University, in Nairobi, Kenya, presented her “AI-Driven Predictive Communication Networks for Enhanced Performance in Resource-Constrained Environments” paper. You can view her presentation along with others on IEEE.tv.

Waithaka’s research tackles a critical challenge: Next-generation communication systems increasingly rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning, yet most existing architectures consume abundant computational and energy resources, which are not always present in developing regions.

Waithaka proposed lightweight, adaptive AI/machine learning models capable of delivering predictive, reliable communication performance even under tight resource constraints.

Her vision resonated with Ruiqi “Richie” Liu, a master researcher at ZTE in China. ZTE is a global leader in integrated information and communication technology solutions. Liu says he recognized the relevance Waithaka’s proposal had to his company’s work with the International Telecommunication Union. He invited her to establish an ITU account so she could participate in the organization’s meetings discussing global telecommunications standardization projects—which would elevate her work to an international stage.

Simplifying data center protocols

The momentum continued at GLOBECOM. Among the presenters was Nirmala Shenoy, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York. Shenoy, an IEEE member, spoke on the topic of simplifying data center network protocols. She highlighted the growing complexity of the critical networks, which underpin cloud services, enterprise IT, and emerging AI workloads.

Shenoy’s focus on reducing protocol complexity while maintaining scalability, resilience, and low latency caught the attention of an innovation scout from Nokia, who heads its eXtended Reality Lab in Madrid. He found the key person at Nokia for Shenoy to connect with to discuss her research, and it led her to record a video for the company detailing her approach and its potential applications.

A model for accelerating innovation

The early success stories demonstrate the power of intentional, structured engagement. By bringing researchers and industry leaders together in a format designed for discovery, ComSoc is helping accelerate innovation and expand opportunities for collaboration. The pitch sessions are not merely conference events; they are becoming a bridge between academic creativity and industry implementation.

This year sessions will be held during the IEEE International Conference on Communications in Glasgow from 24 to 28 May, and more are scheduled during the IEEE International Mediterranean Conference on Communications and Networking in Sardinia from 6 to 9 July, and at GLOBECOM in Macau from 7 to 11 December.

As the program continues to grow, it could become a signature ComSoc initiative, one that strengthens the research ecosystem, supports emerging talent, and ensures that promising ideas find pathways to real-world impact.

A comprehensive review of how spectrum congestion, dynamic sharing, and cognitive radio systems are reshaping RF coexistence testing for military and commercial applications.

What Attendees will Learn

1. Why spectrum congestion threatens wireless reliability — Explore how over 30 billion connected devices, more than 4,000 allocation changes worldwide, and the expansion from 11 to over 80 cellular bands are intensifying contention for finite RF spectrum resources.
   
2. How real-world coexistence failures affect safety-critical systems — Understand the interference risks between 5G C band transmitters and aircraft radar altimeters, and between terrestrial L band networks and GPS receivers that were not designed for adjacent high-power signals.
3. Why tiered spectrum sharing frameworks are essential — Examine how CBRS uses a cloud-based Spectrum Access System (SAS) and environmental sensing to dynamically protect incumbent Navy radar while enabling commercial cellular services across three priority tiers.
4. What coexistence test architectures look like in practice — Learn how controlled environment testing with anechoic chambers, over-the-air signal generation, and standards such as ANSI C63.27 enable repeatable evaluation of RF device performance under real-world interference conditions.

For 10 days last month, Artemis II astronauts sent live HD video back to Earth using experimental laser links that cost a fraction of what ground stations might normally run. The connection ran through a telescope on a hillside near Canberra, Australia, which complemented two traditional receiving telescopes in the United States.

Compared with radio communications, infrared laser light packs up to a thousand times as much data, because of its higher frequency. Laser communications tech provides broadband connectivity from deep space, where previous missions had to make do with tenuous radio links of a few megabits per second. The Artemis II mission, among its many other accomplishments, served as a proof of concept for reliable and inexpensive space communications.

And NASA’s latest moonshot is hardly alone in that technological distinction. SpaceX, for example, uses laser links to haul large amounts of data between satellites of the Starlink constellation. Other companies have plans to build laser-based space relay networks around Earth that could replace undersea high-throughput fiber-optic cables in the future. But laser comms have an Achilles’ heel when trying to deliver data to Earth, said former NASA astronaut Josh Cassada. Once clouds intervene, data links break. Radio waves, despite their considerably lower bandwidth, can pierce through clouds with no difficulty.

Cassada, who retired from his astronaut career in 2024, is a cofounder and head of R&D at Quantum Opus, a Michigan-based startup developing ultrasensitive photon detectors, which helped NASA secure Artemis II’s laser links against inclement weather.

“If you’ve got clouds, the 1,550-nanometer wavelength that we’re using will scatter and never make it to the telescope,” Cassada said. “You need geographic diversity to immediately switch to another site that has good weather.”

During the 10-day journey to the moon and back, Artemis II’s Optical Communications System (O2O) laser terminal mounted on the Orion spaceship transmitted 450 gigabytes of data. Two ground stations in the U.S. (in Las Cruces, N.M. and on Table Mountain in Southern California) and one on Mount Stromlo near Canberra, Australia, served as Artemis’s terrestrial downlink sites. The Australian site tested a low-cost ground-terminal system developed by Quantum Opus, Los Angeles–based telescope manufacturer Observable Space, and Australian National University, in Canberra.

“In prior systems, you were looking at ground stations that cost tens of millions of dollars,” said Connor Poole, chief technology officer at Observable Space. “Our systems are in the single-digit millions.”

That fact alone could resolve the reliability problem. It means a network of ground stations worldwide can be built affordably, ensuring clear skies over an available ground terminal somewhere on the planet.

The Australian telescope helped reduce “a large portion of the ‘blind spot’ created by only using U.S. ground stations,” according to a press release from Observable Space. It noted that a network of 15 to 20 ground stations could provide round-the-clock connectivity for future missions to the moon and Mars.

During the Artemis II tests, the Australian ground station performed as well as the two American telescopes, transmitting 260 megabits of data per second, enough to stream 4K video and run multiple conference calls in parallel.

“The [Mount Stromlo] site was officially a demonstration to see if this would work,” said Cassada. “But about two or three days into the mission, NASA had transitioned it to [routine] operations. It was a mid-mission upgrade, which was really exciting to see.”

How Single Photons Carry Streaming Data From the Moon

The ground station relies on a 0.7-meter telescope from Observable Space fitted with a fast-steering mirror that focuses the incoming stream of photons onto a deformable mirror, controlled by actuators, which counteracts distortions to the signal from Earth’s atmosphere.

“You’re getting multiple orders of magnitude higher bandwidth at almost an order of magnitude lower size, weight, and power on the spacecraft with this technology,” said Poole.

At the heart of the system sits a single photon detector developed by Quantum Opus that intercepts the faint signal that traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers on its way from the moon.

Quantum Opus CEO Aaron Miller describes the cryogenic detector as “the world’s most sensitive.” Cooled to near absolute-zero temperatures, the superconducting nanowire single-photon detector catches over nine in 10 arriving photons. When a particle of light strikes the wire, the energy released makes the material briefly transition from a superconducting to a normal state, creating a sudden voltage pulse, Miller said.

“By exploiting this discrete electronic trigger, [the detector] can register the smallest possible increment of energy with nearly perfect efficiency,” he said. “The active area of these sensors is usually only about 50 micrometers across or less—less than half the width of a human hair.”

In fact, because signals from the Quantum Opus detector were arriving too brightly, researchers had to reduce the device’s sensitivity.

Artemis II Tested How Future Missions Will Communicate

Artemis II’s data-transmission rate via O2O was around 5,000 times as great as the rate that Apollo-era missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s used.

That said, Poole added, the technology could still be scaled up to support communications at several gigabits per second.

Miller said the technology could also one day pave the way for quantum communication from space—for example, for quantum cryptography–secured communications. Laser communications networks would also provide a stepping-stone for constant high-bandwidth connectivity between the Earth, moon, and Mars, he added.

Mars ranges from about 55 million kilometers at opposition to over 400 million kilometers at its most distant. Even at opposition, a signal from Mars arrives far fainter than one from the moon—and such a signal already has roughly 1/10,000 the strength of a comparable one from low Earth orbit.

NASA

“It’s a good stepping-stone for much farther things,” said Miller. “If you want to go to Mars, you really have to push the detectors, the telescopes, all the technology harder, to get this sort of data rate from farther away. But it’s a proof of principle to even go to weaker signals.”

During the mission, NASA still relied on radio signals received via the agency’s Near Space Network and the Deep Space Network of radio ground stations. The O2O laser system transmitted less critical scientific information and enabled the crew to live stream their adventure in real time and in high definition.

“During Artemis II, the O2O system downlinked high-definition images from the lunar flyby shortly after they were captured,” said Jan Wittry, news chief at NASA Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland. “Because laser communications handled the high-bandwidth imagery, the mission’s radio-frequency links could remain focused on critical spacecraft telemetry and command data. Without O2O, those images would have either arrived with significant delay or at reduced quality.”

During the Artemis 2 mission, communication was lost only for about 40 minutes, when the Orion spaceship passed behind the moon. The station in Australia helped to minimize other communication blackouts caused either by clouds or by Earth’s rotation.

Given how integral the Internet has become to everyday tasks such as shopping, paying bills, and holding virtual meetings, it’s interesting that nearly 30 percent of the global population still has no access to it. More than 2 billion people are still offline, according to a report released in November by the International Telecommunication Union.

More and more people are being connected, though, thanks to IEEE Future Networks’ Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) and similar programs. Since 2021, the technical community has been working to accelerate the development, standardization, and deployment of 5G, 6G, and future generations.

Every year, CTU holds a worldwide competition to seek out innovators who are in the early stages of developing technologies or applications to provide greater access. It also holds an annual summit that brings together experts, community leaders, and other interested parties to discuss strategies to expand access and foster digital inclusion.

CTU expanded in several ways last year. It launched regional summits to focus on local connectivity issues, organized community-focused events, and established an expanded mentorship program to further support contest winners and the next generation of technological innovators impacting humanity. The program also partners with the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) to develop guidelines for some of the submitted innovations.

“IEEE Future Networks has created a community to bring all these initiatives working on digital connectivity together in a single platform and leverage the IEEE brand to help raise the visibility of their work,” says IEEE Life Fellow Sudhir Dixit, a CTU cochair and a Basic Internet Foundation cofounder, which also works to expand Internet access.

A contest for new connectivity methods

The CTU challenge, launched in 2021, typically receives 200 to 300 submissions each year, Dixit says. Last year 245 projects from 52 countries were submitted. Participants include academics, nonprofit organizations, startups, and students.

Projects can be entered into one of three categories. The Technology Applications category is for new connectivity methods or innovations that broaden broadband access. Those who improve the affordability of Internet services can enter the Business Model category. The Community Enablement category is for strategies that promote public broadband adoption.

After selecting a category, entrants choose between two tracks based on their project’s maturity. The proof-of-concept route is for early-stage but functional technology that has already produced results. The conceptual path is for projects in the theoretical phase that have not undergone full testing.

“IEEE Future Networks has created a community to bring all these initiatives working on digital connectivity together in a single platform and leverage the IEEE brand to help raise the visibility of their work.” —Sudhir Dixit, Connecting the Unconnected cochair

Last year’s challenge submission period was from March to June, with judging phases from June through November. The 20 winners presented their solutions in December at a virtual Winners Summit. Fourteen projects received prize money, ranging from US $500 to $2,500. Six finalists earned an honorable mention at the summit.

The awards amounts have varied over the years, based on the sponsorship.

Among the winners were a solar-powered community broadband network in Tanzania, a low-cost method for accessing the Internet that uses FM radio and a short message service (SMS), and a strategy for utilizing India’s rural broadband infrastructure to deliver medical services to people living in isolated, tribal, and other underserved regions.

“Our job is to help further develop the technology, look for gaps, and see if it is good enough to be applied to rural villages, like those in Africa and India,” says IEEE Fellow Ashutosh Dutta, who is a CTU cochair and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. “The idea behind the contest is to make sure the technology actually gets implemented at the grassroots level and is being used by the local community.”

This year’s challenge submission period runs until 19 June, with judging phases from July through October.

The finalists of the 2025 IEEE Connect the Unconnected challenge describe their projects.IEEE Future Networks

Local connectivity discussions

The CTU program hosted three regional summits last year. The North American event was held in September in Washington, D.C. In November, the Global/Asia-Pacific meeting took place in Bangalore, India; it was co-located with the IEEE Future Networks World Forum. The Europe, Middle East, and Africa summit also was held in November, in Abuja, Nigeria.

Topics discussed at the summits included infrastructure solutions for universal connectivity; sustainable business models; scaling homegrown technologies; and policy, regulation, and financing issues.

As of press time, the dates for this year’s regional summits had not been announced.

Community-focused events

To help bridge the gap between ideas and their deployment, the Connect a Community event was established to demonstrate how some new technologies might benefit people. The inaugural event was held in November in Bengaluru, India. During the daylong program, 10 of the challenge winners demonstrated their connectivity solutions to villagers from seven rural communities.

Dutta credits IEEE Life Fellow Rakesh Kumar with devising the event. Kumar chairs IEEE Future Directions, which was where Future Networks got its start in 2017 as the 5G Initiative.

“Kumar wants to ensure the winning technologies are going to be useful for the community,” Dutta says.

Providing entrepreneurs with business skills

Dixit says the Future Networks team believed that simply conducting a competition and distributing prizes wasn’t enough.

“We wanted to follow up with the winners, monitor their progress, and help them turn their ideas into a business,” he says.

To accomplish that, IEEE launched the Empowerment Through Mentorship program, in which budding entrepreneurs are paired with industry leaders and experienced mentors who provide them with 1,000 days of guidance, coaching them on scaling up their business.

“We launched the mentorship program to further the cause,” Dixit says. “These people may be good at developing technology, but they don’t know the marketing challenges, how to raise money, and other factors.”

The Lemelson Foundation, an organization in Portland, Ore., that partners with IEEE, collaborated on the mentorship program. The foundation’s philanthropic strategy is to cultivate a robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs in East Africa, India, and the United States. It does so by providing the entrepreneurs with tools including financing options and access to communities that share their passion.

The foundation chose to partner with IEEE “because of its powerful international network and focus on electrical engineering, which is a critical element of communications and energy infrastructure globally,” says Kory Murphy, Lemelson’s program officer for U.S. invention and entrepreneurship.

“Other factors include IEEE’s focus on nontraditional or disadvantaged areas in India,” Murphy says, “and its recognition that mentorship is critical for the successful deployment of new technologies.”

IEEE began an early pilot project in 2023 with support of a grant from the Lemelson Foundation, to determine if a sustained entrepreneurship mentorship program was valuable and necessary, he says. It then conducted a survey through 2024 to collect information to better understand the needs of stakeholders, mentors, and entrepreneurs in hard-to-reach areas in India. While the early pilot program was restricted to that country, its intent was to learn from the experience and share the findings globally, he says.

“Our job is to help further develop the technology, look for gaps, and see if it is good enough to be applied to rural villages, like those in Africa and India.” —Ashutosh Dutta, Connecting the Unconnected cochair

“The foundation’s involvement was aimed at testing certain activities, partnership strategies, and understanding the budgetary requirements for a prepilot program,” he says. “The primary goal of the foundation is to enable conditions for innovation to occur within regional systems, especially addressing the opportunity for sustained, systematic, and relational mentorship in technology innovation.”

The Empowerment Through Mentorship program is structured into three tiers. One focuses on individuals and their needs, the program/technical level focuses on the invention, and the venture level guides participants from the initial concept through product testing and validation. Within each track, participants engage in activities such as networking, securing financial support, and pitching their innovations, Murphy says.

“The 1,000-day approach reflects the belief that it requires a long period of time to coach and support those who traditionally are excluded,” he says.

CTU mentors can be IEEE members or nonmembers who are successful entrepreneurs and own small or large companies, Dixit says. They also can work in academia.

“They need to be passionate about training and mentoring other people,” Dixit says. “We have created a curriculum that covers topics such as ways to get financing from investors and how to turn ideas into a profitable business. It’s not the technology that will make the product successful; it’s everything else that goes into it.”

Rural broadband architecture standards

To determine whether any of the challenge’s submitted projects have the potential to become a standard, the CTU working group collaborates with the IEEE SA Industry Connections program’s 6G Rural Connectivity and Intelligent Village activity. Projects considered for standards do not have to be winners. Any project that has successfully passed the first phase, completed the second-phase requirements, and requested a review may be considered.

Typically, about half of the submitted projects are reviewed for possible standard implications, Dutta says.

“We selected about 60 submissions that could be potentially standardized,” he says. “Out of those, we work with IEEE SA’s rapid reactive standards activity group to narrow them down to five or 10 that can be potentially standardized.

“The CTU program is not only about developing a technology or implementing it, but also standardizing it so that people around the world can use the standard.”

One such project led to the development of IEEE P1962, “Standard for Providing Broadband Connectivity to Rural Infrastructure by Utilizing Solar Panels as Optical Communication Receivers.” It specifies an architecture for an optical receiver that uses solar panels and associated circuitry to provide energy-efficient, affordable, and high-speed optical wireless communication.

“CTU has created a platform for the world to bring their ideas to one single place where people can talk to each other about them,” Dixit says. “We are a unifying force.

We bring these many dimensions together to connect the unconnected.”

CTU Challenge Winner: Community Radio Bolo

The Connecting the Unconnected program offers contestants benefits that extend beyond the recognition and rewards. One participant who benefited is Ritu Srivastava, a telecommunications engineer and IEEE member. She placed first in the 2022 technical concept category for her project, Community Radio Bolo (CR Bolo). The verb bolo means speak in Hindi.

Internet services in India’s rural areas are either unavailable or have spotty coverage. People there rely on community radio stations to get news about local events and issues. There are about 300 such stations in India, Srivastava says.

To provide broadband Internet access in the Bhadrak district of Odisha, India, she developed a cost-effective hybrid network that uses an online and offline wireless mesh network installed on the tower of community radio station Radio Bulbul. Several transceiver locations, known as access points, are located at schools and community centers that are within a 5- to 7-kilometer radius, connecting them with Radio Bulbul.

CR Bolo includes a plug-and-play interactive voice response system that is coupled with the hybrid wireless network. The automated telephony technology routes callers using voice commands or a telephone’s keypad to the appropriate department. The system also has a direct-to-consumer platform where manufacturers sell their products through websites or mobile apps.

“CR Bolo is a unique method of leveraging rural traditional technologies and infrastructure combined with modern technology to provide meaningful access to communities,” Srivastava says, “improving livelihood opportunities and creating social and economic viability for CR stations.”

She says she plans to expand the project to other rural communities in India. She will incorporate a large language model and offer a learning management system to deliver training programs and educational courses, she says.

Winning CTU inspired her to become a more active IEEE volunteer, she says. She is working with the IEEE Standards Association to develop guidelines for the architecture of broadband technology used in rural areas.

Because of her entrepreneurial experience, CTU hired her in 2023 to assist with the challenge and the Empowerment Through Mentorship program.

Srivastava is a director at Jadeite Solutions in New Delhi. The consulting company offers nonprofit organizations that are developing socioeconomic programs with project evaluation, impact assessment, financial reviews, and similar services.

She credits CTU with giving her and her community-centered model more exposure: “The CTU challenge has given me a lot of other opportunities in terms of networking, funding resources, publishing my research in IEEE journals, and presenting at national and international conferences.”

Last month, Cisco released its State of Wireless Report, revealing Wi-Fi’s limitations for companies who are now expanding their use of AI.

The report outlined a discrepancy between companies’ ambitious AI plans and their reliance on aging Wi-Fi standards from before the current AI era. Other highlights include an uptick in AI-driven cyberattacks targeting wireless networks, while AI workloads are booming in enterprise networks—with 28 percent of respondents running AI today, forecast to increase to more than three-quarters by 2027.

Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), according to the report, is the most widely used Wi-Fi standard today (at 43 percent of respondents). But Wi-Fi 5 is also an old standard, first released in 2013. Meanwhile, the report notes, less than one-fifth of organizations have upgraded their wireless networks to any Wi-Fi standard released during the present decade. (Wi-Fi 6E was first released in 2021, while Wi-Fi 7, the current standard, came out in 2024.)

Wi-Fi 5 only offers speeds of up to 3.5 gigabits per second, which doesn’t cut it in a streaming and AI world. The 13-year-old standard often can’t handle high-bandwidth and low-latency needs, especially in device-dense environments.

“As the demands on the network increase, Wi-Fi 5 will become more costly to operate,” said Matthew MacPherson, enterprise wireless CTO at Cisco. “Administrators will spend more time reacting and troubleshooting and less time proactively applying the tools required for better experience, optimized productivity, and improved security.”

How Wi-Fi Learned to Handle AI Traffic

Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax, introduced in 2019) split its signals into lanes, letting many devices receive data simultaneously. This technology is called orthogonal frequency division multiple access, or OFDMA.

“Wi-Fi 6 was a necessary shift to improve efficiency,” said MacPherson. “But it was not originally designed for the complex, high-bandwidth traffic patterns that AI is now driving as AI workloads generate significantly more device-to-network data.”

Wi-Fi 6E (Extended) addressed some of these shortcomings. It unlocked the 6-gigahertz band, offering dozens of additional data channels. Although Wi-Fi 6 and 6E both support speeds up to 9.6 Gb/s, 6E’s use of the 6-GHz band makes it better suited for high-bandwidth tasks, especially in crowded areas.

Wi-Fi 6E’s enhancements, the report found, are especially popular with those aggressively developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Organizations already using 6 GHz show almost double the rate of AI applications and workloads (45 percent) compared to nonadopters (26 percent).

“The 6-GHz band supplies the bandwidth required by AI-powered applications and correlates with improved scalability,” said MacPherson.

With Wi-Fi 7, introduced in 2024, came a host of new expansions and improvements. The most recent Wi-Fi protocol introduced the capability for each device to use multiple Wi-Fi bands simultaneously, called Multi-Link Operation or MLO. In part because of MLO, the new standard improved efficiency and connection stability. Wider 320-megahertz channels and more efficient use of the 6-GHz spectrum also meant more stable, lower-latency performance.

“Access to uncongested 6-GHz spectrum around the world is critical to unlocking Wi-Fi 7’s potential,” said Gaurav Jain, vice president of technology at the Wi-Fi Alliance, based in Austin, Texas.

Cisco expects Wi-Fi 6 usage to continue growing as it becomes the new baseline, but Wi-Fi 7 is expected to take the lion’s share of new enterprise deployments over the next two years as the equipment ecosystem matures.

Wi-Fi 8 Will Put AI at the Radio Edge

To further address growing compute densities and complement AI’s expanding capabilities, the Wi-Fi Alliance is coordinating industry work on Wi-Fi 8. Although it won’t be broadly released until late next year or sometime in 2028, the next Wi-Fi standard promises to add additional AI-friendly features.

“While Wi-Fi 7 provides the tools to manage predictability and policy, Wi-Fi 8 will add more network-level fluidity and local processing power for AI,” MacPherson said.

Wi-Fi 8’s new features will include a dynamic capability to serve the most urgent traffic among a channel’s access points (APs). This multi-AP coordination (MAPC) capability will enable the wireless network to optimize spectrum and resources in real time.

“Wi-Fi 8 extends connection stability to the network level, enabling seamless roaming without any hit to the client,” said MacPherson. “It will bring the network-level fluidity and more local processing power.”

A major engineering shift accompanies Wi-Fi 8 as well. Silicon manufacturers are integrating AI inference engines into their chips to accommodate Wi-Fi 8. (Broadcom unveiled the first such chip in late 2025, ahead of the standard’s formal certification.)

This will allow AI inference—tasks like anomaly detection, spectrum optimization, and traffic prioritization—to run locally on the access point itself, without a round trip to the cloud.

The urgency is compounded by a dynamic the Cisco report calls the “wireless AI paradox”: the same AI transformation driving demand for better Wi-Fi is also generating cyberattacks that could exploit it. Better wireless infrastructure, in other words, is no longer just about bandwidth. It’s about building networks smart enough to defend themselves.

A comprehensive guide to error vector magnitude (EVM), the primary metric for quantifying modulation accuracy in Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G NR systems.

What Attendees will Learn

1. What error vector magnitude is and how it is calculated — Understand EVM as the distance between ideal and measured constellation points, learn the difference between peak and RMS normalization, and see how EVM is expressed in both percentage and decibel formats.
2. How digital modulation works and why it matters — Explore the fundamentals of ASK, FSK, PSK, APSK, and QAM modulation schemes, and understand why higher modulation orders increase throughput, while also demanding greater accuracy in signal transmission and reception.
3. What causes degraded EVM in real-world systems — Examine the four main categories of EVM contributors: amplitude effects (compression, noise, frequency response), phase effects (phase noise), I/Q imperfections (gain imbalance, quadrature error), and configuration issues.
4. How to diagnose modulation impairments using constellation diagrams — Learn how visual inspection of constellation diagrams can identify phase noise, amplifier compression, noise, in-band spurious signals, and I/Q modulator imperfections as root causes of degraded EVM.

When Ana Inês Inácio goes to work at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in The Hague, she thinks about signals most people never notice: radio waves moving between satellites, sensors, and future wireless networks.

The integrated circuits the research scientist designs lay the foundation for next-generation RF sensor systems critical to advancing radar technologies.

Ana Inês Inácio

EMPLOYER

Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, TNO

TITLE

Scientist

IEEE MEMBER GRADE

Senior member

ALMA MATER

University of Aveiro, in Portugal

Those invisible RF signals are only part of what earned the IEEE senior member her global recognition.

Inácio recently received the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Professional Award for “leadership in IEEE Young Professionals, fostering innovation and inclusivity, and pioneering advancements in RF sensor systems, bridging technical excellence with impactful community engagement.”

The recognition from IEEE’s honor society reflects a career built along two parallel paths: advancing RF circuit design while helping engineers worldwide build professional communities.

“I’ve always liked building things,” Inácio says. “Sometimes that means circuits; sometimes it means helping people connect and grow together.”

That blend of technical innovation and global leadership gives her work impact far beyond the laboratory.

EE lessons at the kitchen table

Inácio grew up in Vales do Rio, a rural village near Covilhã in central Portugal.

The region was known for farming and textiles, she says. Many residents worked in the textile industry, including her grandfather, who repaired machinery such as industrial looms. He became her first engineering teacher without ever holding the formal title.

Through correspondence courses delivered by mail, he taught himself electrical systems. At home, he explained electricity to his granddaughter while he repaired the household’s appliances and wiring.

“He would show me why something broke and how we could fix it,” she recalls. It sparked her curiosity.

Her mother was a tailor who later managed other tailors. Her father left his factory job to attend culinary school and now cooks at an elder-care facility. Curiosity was a trait that ran through the family.

By high school, Inácio was drawn equally to mathematics and physics and to biology and geology, she says. Encouragement from teachers and an uncle, an engineer, ultimately steered her toward electronics engineering.

Conducting research on integrated circuits

In 2008 she enrolled in an integrated master’s degree program in electrical and telecommunications engineering at the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, a five-year degree that combined undergraduate and graduate studies.

An opportunity to study abroad changed her path. In 2012 she moved to the Netherlands to study at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) through a six-month European exchange program with UAveiro.

A professor encouraged her to stay on, so she completed her final year of masters in the Netherlands. She focused on techniques to improve the linearization of RF power amplifiers at Thales. The company, based in Hengelo, Netherlands, designs and produces electronics for defense and security.

She earned her master’s degree from UAveiro in 2013. After graduating, she joined the integrated circuit design group at the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, conducting collaborative research as part of a nationally funded program on linearization techniques for RF front-end systems. The experience introduced her to international research culture and persuaded her to pursue a career abroad, she says.

Engineering the future of wireless

Inácio joined TNO in 2018 as a junior scientist and innovator: her first professional industry job. Today she designs integrated RF front-end systems—the circuits that allow devices to transmit and receive wireless signals.

The components sit at the core of modern communications, enabling sensor networks, satellite links, and emerging 6G technologies.

Her work aims to tackle a central challenge: getting greater performance from smaller chips.

“As communication evolves, we need more bandwidth to transfer more data at higher speeds,” she says. “The question is how much complexity you can integrate into one system while keeping it efficient.”

Unlike commercial lab environments, which reuse established designs, research projects often start from scratch. Each transmit-receive chain—the signal path that converts digital data to radio waves and back again—is tailored to specific requirements.

Her work focuses on improving key circuit characteristics including linearity (ensuring that the signals that go out of the antenna are not distorted) as well as noise reduction (so design blocks can be optimized). Advanced design techniques help devices communicate more reliably while consuming less energy, a critical need for large sensor networks such as the Internet of Things, she says.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to influence her field, she says: “AI is already helping us work faster. The real challenge is learning how to use it to make better designs, not just quicker ones.”

A parallel vocation with IEEE

While her technical career flourished in research labs, an additional journey unfolded through IEEE.

Inácio joined the organization in 2009 as a student after discovering UAveiro’s student branch. What began as curiosity evolved into a long-term leadership path.

She advanced through roles within Region 8—covering Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—one of the organization’s most culturally diverse regions. She was the student branch’s vice chair, and the region’s student representative for more than 22,000 IEEE members. She also served as the Young Professionals Affinity Group chair for the IEEE Benelux Section, which encompasses Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Currently, she serves as the immediate past chair of the Region 8 Young Professionals Committee, and vice chair and IEEE Member and Geographical Activities representative on the IEEE Young Professionals Committee. In those roles, she represents close to 135,000 IEEE members.

In addition, she is an active member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society, currently serving as its Young Professionals liaison.

Her involvement with IEEE has boosted her professional confidence, she says.

“IEEE didn’t directly give me promotions at my day job, but it gave me leadership skills, networking opportunities, and the ability to work with people from everywhere,” she says.

Those experiences now shape her collaborations at TNO, where international teamwork is essential.

The IEEE-HKN Outstanding Young Professional Award recognizes that combination of technical excellence and community impact, she says.

Looking back, Inácio sees a clear thread connecting her childhood curiosity, her international career, and her IEEE leadership: Engineering, she says, is ultimately about people as much as it is about technology.

Conventional semiconductor lasers are compact and efficient—but also dim and dependent on bulky, complex optics. However, a new generation of semiconductor lasers that use photonic crystals are bright enough to melt steel and require simpler optics to transmit data. And now a startup in Scotland has for the first time used the new lasers outside the lab for data transmissions capable of carrying HD video.

“We see applications for our lasers in all communications in general—data centers, telecommunications, free-space optical communications,” says Richard Taylor, CEO and founder of the University of Glasgow spinoff, laser startup Vector Photonics, in Glasgow. “And we’d like to transmit to and from satellites, or between satellites, where distances are less affected by atmospheric turbulence and absorption.”

Photonic crystals possess a lattice of features smaller than the wavelengths of light they are designed to interact with. These structures essentially behave like a hall of mirrors that control which wavelengths can pass and which are reflected.

Since the turn of the millennium, researchers have developed photonic-crystal lasers that are tiny, energy-efficient, highly controllable, and can emit very bright, narrow beams. These photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs), if used in free-space optical communications, says Taylor, “can have a much simpler lens array for transmissions, and so reduce the size, weight, and cost of systems, and transmit signals further distances.”

PCSELs Delivering on Their Free-Space Communications Promise

Previously, using PCSELs for optical communications systems across free space was limited to lab experiments. Now, using a system designed and built by the Fraunhofer Center for Applied Photonics in Glasgow, Vector Photonics’ PCSELs transmitted data through open air at the near-infrared wavelength of 1,310 nanometers—in telecom’s O-band, a familiar wavelength for fiber-optic communications.

Vector Photonics has developed PCSELs made of indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide phosphide that a commercial fab could reproduce and manufacture reliably. The semiconductor lasers were then incorporated into a system in a university clean room, using off-the-shelf electronics to drive the system, Taylor says.

The startup achieved data-transmission rates of 50 million bits per second (Mb/s) over 300 meters across the River Clyde from the Glasgow Science Centre to the Clydeside Distillery. “It is encouraging to see PCSEL technology transition from the laboratory to a real-world setting,” says Susumu Noda at Kyoto University, who with his team built the first PCSELs in 1998. “Demonstrating a stable link across the River Clyde is a positive milestone for the photonics community, validating the technology’s performance outside of controlled environments,” he adds.

Vector Photonics also transmitted data at 50 Mb/s over 500 meters across a field, Taylor says. “This demonstration proves that PCSELs can function under fluctuating environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, and atmospheric turbulence,” says Noda, who did not take part in the current work. “It confirms that PCSELs are a viable candidate for free-space optical communication in practical applications.”

However, the 50 Mb/s transmission rate “is remarkably low,” Noda says. “In our own laboratory experiments, we have already demonstrated that PCSEL technology can achieve speeds of 16 gigabits per second.”

Transforming a newly discovered software vulnerability into a cyberattack used to take months. Today—as the recent headlines over Anthropic’s Project Glasswing have shown—generative AI can do the job in minutes, often for less than a dollar of cloud-computing time.

But while large language models present a real cyberthreat, they also provide an opportunity to reinforce cyberdefenses. Anthropic reports its Claude Mythos preview model has already helped defenders preemptively discover over a thousand zero-day vulnerabilities, including flaws in every major operating system and web browser, with Anthropic coordinating disclosure and its efforts to patch the revealed flaws.

It is not yet clear whether AI-driven bug finding will ultimately favor attackers or defenders. But to understand how defenders can increase their odds, and perhaps hold the advantage, it helps to look at an earlier wave of automated vulnerability discovery.

In the early 2010s, a new category of software appeared that could attack programs with millions of random, malformed inputs—a proverbial monkey at a typewriter, tapping on the keys until it finds a vulnerability. When such “fuzzers” like American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) hit the scene, they found critical flaws in every major browser and operating system.

The security community’s response was instructive. Rather than panic, organizations industrialized the defense. For instance, Google built a system called OSS-Fuzz that runs fuzzers continuously, around the clock, on thousands of software projects. So software providers could catch bugs before they shipped, not after attackers found them. The expectation is that AI-driven vulnerability discovery will follow the same arc. Organizations will integrate the tools into standard development practice, run them continuously, and establish a new baseline for security.

But the analogy has a limit. Fuzzing requires significant technical expertise to set up and operate. It was a tool for specialists. An LLM, meanwhile, finds vulnerabilities with just a prompt—resulting in a troubling asymmetry. Attackers no longer need to be technically sophisticated to exploit code, while robust defenses still require engineers to read, evaluate, and act on what the AI models surface. The human cost of finding and exploiting bugs may approach zero, but fixing them won’t.

Is AI Better at Finding Bugs Than Fixing Them?

In the opening to his book Engineering Security (2014), Peter Gutmann observed that “a great many of today’s security technologies are ‘secure’ only because no one has ever bothered to look at them.” That observation was made before AI made looking for bugs dramatically cheaper. Most present-day code—including the open source infrastructure that commercial software depends on—is maintained by small teams, part-time contributors, or individual volunteers with no dedicated security resources. A bug in any open source project can have significant downstream impact, too.

In 2021, a critical vulnerability in Log4j—a logging library maintained by a handful of volunteers—exposed hundreds of millions of devices. Log4j’s widespread use meant that a vulnerability in a single volunteer-maintained library became one of the most widespread software vulnerabilities ever recorded. The popular code library is just one example of the broader problem of critical software dependencies that have never been seriously audited. For better or worse, AI-driven vulnerability discovery will likely perform a lot of auditing, at low cost and at scale.

An attacker targeting an under-resourced project requires little manual effort. AI tools can scan an unaudited codebase, identify critical vulnerabilities, and assist in building a working exploit with minimal human expertise.

Research on LLM-assisted exploit generation has shown that capable models can autonomously and rapidly exploit cyber weaknesses, compressing the time between disclosure of the bug and working exploit of that bug from weeks down to mere hours. Generative AI-based attacks launched from cloud servers operate staggeringly cheaply as well. In August 2025, researchers at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering demonstrated that an LLM-based system could autonomously complete the major phases of a ransomware campaign for some $0.70 per run, with no human intervention.

And the attacker’s job ends there. The defender’s job, on the other hand, is only getting underway. While an AI tool can find vulnerabilities and potentially assist with bug triaging, a dedicated security engineer still has to review any potential patches, evaluate the AI’s analysis of the root cause, and understand the bug well enough to approve and deploy a fully functional fix without breaking anything. For a small team maintaining a widely-depended-upon library in their spare time, that remediation burden may be difficult to manage even if the discovery cost drops to zero.

Why AI Guardrails and Automated Patching Aren’t the Answer

The natural policy response to the problem is to go after AI at the source: holding AI companies responsible for spotting misuse, putting guardrails in their products, and pulling the plug on anyone using LLMs to mount cyberattacks. There is evidence that pre-emptive defenses like this have some effect. Anthropic has published data showing that automated misuse detection can derail some cyberattacks. However, blocking a few bad actors does not make for a satisfying and comprehensive solution.

At a root level, there are two reasons why policy does not solve the whole problem.

The first is technical. LLMs judge whether a request is malicious by reading the request itself. But a sufficiently creative prompt can frame any harmful action as a legitimate one. Security researchers know this as the problem of the persuasive prompt injection. Consider, for example, the difference between “Attack website A to steal users’ credit card info” and “I am a security researcher and would like secure website A. Run a simulation there to see if it’s possible to steal users’ credit card info.” No one’s yet discovered how to root out the source of subtle cyberattacks, like in the latter example, with 100 percent accuracy.

The second reason is jurisdictional. Any regulation confined to U.S.-based providers (or that of any other single country or region) still leaves the problem largely unsolved worldwide. Strong, open-source LLMs are already available anywhere the internet reaches. A policy aimed at handful of American technology companies is not a comprehensive defense.

Another tempting fix is to automate the defensive side entirely—let AI autonomously identify, patch, and deploy fixes without waiting for an overworked volunteer maintainer to review them.

Tools like GitHub Copilot Autofix generate patches for flagged vulnerabilities directly with proposed code changes. Several open-source security initiatives are also experimenting with autonomous AI maintainers for under-resourced projects. It is becoming much easier to have the same AI system find bugs, generate a patch, and update the code with no human intervention.

But LLM-generated patches can be unreliable in ways that are difficult to detect. For example, even if they pass muster with popular code-testing software suites, they may still introduce subtle logic errors. LLM-generated code, even from the most powerful generative AI models out there, is still subject to a range of cyber-vulnerabilities. A coding agent with write access to a repository and no human in the loop is, in so many words, an easy target. Misleading bug reports, malicious instructions hidden in project files, or untrusted code pulled in from outside the project can turn an automated AI codebase maintainer into a cyber-vulnerability generator.

Guardrails and automated patching are useful tools, but they share a common limitation. Both are ad hoc and incomplete. Neither addresses the deeper question of whether the software was built securely from the start. The more lasting solution is to prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced at all. No matter how deeply an AI system can inspect a project, it cannot find flaws that don’t exist.

Memory-Safe Code Creates More Robust Defenses

The most accessible starting point is the adoption of memory-safe languages. Simply by changing the programming language their coders use, organizations can have a large positive impact on their security.

Both Google and Microsoft have found that roughly 70 percent of serious security flaws come down to the ways in which software manages memory. Languages like C and C++ leave every memory decision to the developer. And when something slips, even briefly, attackers can exploit that gap to run their own code, siphon data, or bring systems down. Languages like Rust go further; they make the most dangerous class of memory errors structurally impossible, not just harder to make.

Memory-safe languages address the problem at the source, but legacy codebases written in C and C++ will remain a reality for decades. Software sandboxing techniques complement memory-safe languages by addressing what they cannot—containing the blast radius of vulnerabilities that do exist. Tools like WebAssembly and RLBox already demonstrate this in practice in web browsers and cloud service providers like Fastly and Cloudflare. However, while sandboxes dramatically raise the bar for attackers, they are only as strong as their implementation. Moreover, Anthropic reports that Claude Mythos has demonstrated that it can breach software sandboxes.

For the most security-critical components, where implementation complexity is highest and the cost of failure greatest, a stronger guarantee still is available.

Formal verification proves, mathematically, that certain bugs cannot exist. It treats code like a mathematical theorem. Instead of testing whether bugs appear, it proves that specific categories of flaw cannot exist under any conditions.

AWS, Cloudflare, and Google already use formal verification to protect their most sensitive infrastructure—cryptographic code, network protocols, and storage systems where failure isn’t an option. Tools like Flux now bring that same rigor to everyday production Rust code, without requiring a dedicated team of specialists. That matters when your attacker is a powerful generative-AI system that can rapidly scan millions of lines of code for weaknesses. Formally verified code doesn’t just put up some fences and firewalls—it provably has no weaknesses to find.

The defenses described above are asymmetric. Code written in memory-safe languages—separated by strong sandboxing boundaries and selectively formally verified—presents a smaller and much more constrained target. When applied correctly, these techniques can prevent LLM-powered exploitation, regardless of how capable an attacker’s bug-scanning tools become.

Generative AI can support this more foundational shift by accelerating the translation of legacy code into safer languages like Rust, and making formal verification more practical at every stage. Which helps engineers write specifications, generate proofs, and keep those proofs current as code evolves.

For organizations, the lasting solution is not just better scanning but stronger foundations: memory-safe languages where possible, sandboxing where not, and formal verification where the cost of being wrong is highest. For researchers, the bottleneck is making those foundations practical—and using generative AI to accelerate the migration. But instead of automated, ad hoc vulnerability patching, generative AI in this mode of defense can help translate legacy code to memory-safe alternatives. It also assists in verification proofs and lowers the expertise barrier to a safer and less vulnerable codebase.

The latest wave of smarter AI bug scanners can still be useful for cyberdefense—not just as another overhyped AI threat. But AI bug scanners treat the symptom, not the cause. The lasting solution is software that doesn’t produce vulnerabilities in the first place.

A practical guide to designing log-periodic dipole array fed parabolic reflector antennas using advanced 3D MoM simulation — from parametric modeling to electrically large structures.

What Attendees will Learn

1. How to set design requirements for LPDA-fed reflector antennas — Understand the key specifications including bandwidth ratio, gain targets, and VSWR matching constraints across the full operating range from 100 MHz to 1 GHz.
2. Why advanced 3D EM solvers enable simulation of electrically large multiscale structures — Learn how higher order basis functions, quadrilateral meshing, geometrical symmetry, and CPU/GPU parallelization extend MoM simulation capability by an order of magnitude.
3. How to apply a systematic three-step design strategy with proven workflow starting with first optimizing the stand-alone LPDA for VSWR and gain, then integrating the reflector, and finally tuning parameters to satisfy all performance requests including gain and impedance matching.
4. How parametric CAD modeling accelerates LPDA design — Discover how self-scaling geometry, automated wire-to-solid conversion, and multiple-copy-with-scaling features enable fully parametrized antenna models that streamline optimization across dozens of design variants.

On 8 January 2026, the Iranian government imposed a near-total communications shutdown. It was the country’s first full information blackout: For weeks, the internet was off across all provinces while services including the government-run intranet, VPNs, text messaging, mobile calls, and even landlines were severely throttled. It was an unprecedented lockdown that left more than 90 million people cut off not only from the world, but from one another.

Since then, connectivity has never fully returned. Following U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in late February, Iran again imposed near-total restrictions, and people inside the country again saw global information flows dry up.

The original January shutdown came amid nationwide protests over the deepening economic crisis and political repression, in which millions of people chanted antigovernment slogans in the streets. While Iranian protests have become frequent in recent years, this was one of the most significant uprisings since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The government responded quickly and brutally. One report put the death toll at more than 7,000 confirmed deaths and more than 11,000 under investigation. Many sources believe the death toll could exceed 30,000.

Thirteen days into the January shutdown, we at NetFreedom Pioneers (NFP) turned to a system we had built for exactly this kind of moment—one that sends files over ordinary satellite TV signals. During the national information vacuum, our technology, called Toosheh, delivered real-time updates into Iran, offering a lifeline to millions starved of trusted information.

How Iran Censors the Internet

I joined NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit focused on anticensorship technology, in 2014. Censorship in Iran was a defining feature of my youth in the 1990s. After the Islamic Revolution, most Iranians began to lead double lives—one at home, where they could drink, dance, and choose their clothing, and another in public, where everyone had to comply with stifling government laws.

Iran’s internet infrastructure is more centralized than in other parts of the world, making it easier for the government to restrict the flow of information. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

That openness didn’t last. As internet use spread in the early 2000s, the Iranian government began reshaping the network itself. Unlike the highly distributed networks in the United States or Europe, where thousands of providers exchange traffic across many independent routes, Iran’s connection to the global internet is relatively centralized. Most international traffic passes through a small number of gateways controlled by state-linked telecom operators. That architecture gives authorities unusual leverage: By restricting or withdrawing those connections, they can sharply reduce the country’s access to the outside world.

Over the past decade, Iran has expanded this control through what it calls the National Information Network, a domestically routed system designed to keep data inside the country whenever possible. Many government services, banking systems, and local platforms are hosted on this internal network. During periods of unrest, access to the global internet can be throttled or cut off while portions of this domestic network continue to function.

The government began its censorship campaign by redirecting or blocking websites. As internet use grew, it adopted more sophisticated approaches. For example, the Telecommunication Company of Iran uses a technique called deep packet inspection to analyze the content of data packets in real time. This method enables it to identify and block specific types of traffic, such as VPN connections, messaging apps, social media platforms, and banned websites.

The Stealth of Satellite Transmissions

Toosheh’s communication workaround builds on a history of satellite TV adoption in Middle Eastern and North African countries. By the early 2000s, satellite dishes were common in Iran; today the majority of households in Iran have access to satellite TV despite its official prohibition.

Unlike subscription services such as DirecTV and Dish Network, “free-to-air” satellite TV broadcasts are unencrypted and can be received by anyone with a dish and receiver—no subscription required. Because the signals are open, users can also capture and store the data they carry, rather than simply watching it live. Tech-savvy people learned that they could use a digital video broadcasting (DVB) card—a piece of hardware that connects to a computer and tunes into satellite frequencies—to transform a personal computer into a satellite receiver. This way, they could watch and store media locally as well as download data from dedicated channels.

Many Iranian citizens have free-to-air satellite dishes, like the ones on this apartment building in Tehran, and can thus download Toosheh transmissions, giving them a lifeline during internet blackouts.Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Toosheh, a Persian word that translates to “knapsack,” is the brainchild of Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian-American technologist and entrepreneur. Yahyanejad cofounded NetFreedom Pioneers in 2012. He proposed that the satellite-computer connections enabled by a DVB card could be re-created in software, eliminating the need for specialized hardware. He added a simple digital interface to the software to make it easy for anyone to use. The next breakthrough came when the NFP team developed a new transfer protocol that tricks ordinary satellite receivers into downloading data alongside audio and video content. Thus, Toosheh was born.

Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file. When you tune in to a satellite channel and select an audio option or closed captions, you’re accessing data stored in different parts of this stream. The NFP team’s insight was that, by piggybacking on one of these layers, Toosheh could send an MPEG stream that included documents, videos, and more.

HOW TOOSHEH WORKS: At NetFreedom Pioneers, content curators pull together files—news articles, videos, audio, and software [1]. Toosheh’s encoder software [2] compresses the files into a bundle, in .ts format, creating an MPEG transport stream [3]. From there, it’s uploaded to a server for transmission [4] via a free-to-air TV channel on a Yahsat satellite that’s positioned over the Middle East to provide regional coverage [5]. Satellite receivers [6] directly capture the data streams, which are downloaded to computers, smartphones, and other devices, and decoded by Toosheh software [8].Chris Philpot

A satellite receiver can’t tell the difference between our data and normal satellite audio and video data since it only “sees” the MPEG streams, not what’s encoded on them. This means the data can be downloaded and read, watched, and saved on local devices such as computers, smartphones, or storage devices. What’s more, the system is entirely private: No one can detect whether someone has received data through Toosheh; there are no traceable logs of user activity.

Toosheh doesn’t provide internet access, but rather delivers curated data through satellite technology. The fundamental distinction lies in the way users interact with the system. Unlike traditional internet services, where you type a request into your browser and receive data in response, Toosheh operates more like a combination of radio and television, presenting information in a magazine-like format. Users don’t make requests; instead, they receive 1 to 5 gigabytes of prepackaged, carefully selected data.

Access to information is not only about news or politics, but about exposure to possibilities.

During this year’s internet blackout, we distributed official statements from Iranian opposition leader Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and the U.S. government. We provided first-aid tutorials for medics and injured protesters. We sent uncensored news reports from BBC Persian, Iran International, IranWire, VOA Farsi, and others. We also shared critical software packages including anticensorship and antisurveillance tools, along with how-to guides to help people securely connect to Starlink satellite terminals, allowing them to stay protected and anonymous as they sent their own communications.

How to Combat Signal Interference

Because Toosheh relies on one-way satellite broadcasts, it evades the usual tactics governments use to block internet access. However, it remains vulnerable to satellite signal jamming.

The Iranian government is notorious for deploying signal jamming, especially in larger cities. In 2009, the government used uplink interference, which attacks the satellite in orbit by beaming strong noise in the frequency of the satellite’s receiver. This makes it impossible for the satellite to distinguish the information it’s supposed to receive. However, because this type of attack temporarily disables the entire satellite, Iran was threatened with international sanctions and in 2012 stopped using the method .

A graph of network connectivity in Iran shows that on 9 January 2026, internet access dropped from nearly 100 percent to 0. Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The current method, called terrestrial jamming, uses antennas installed at higher elevations than the surrounding buildings to beam strong noise over a specific area in the frequency range of household receivers. This attack is effective in keeping some of the packets from arriving and damaging others, effectively jamming the transmission. But it’s short-range and requires significant power, so it’s impossible to implement nationwide. There are always people somewhere who can still watch TV, download from Toosheh, or tune into a satellite radio despite the jamming. Even so, we wanted a workaround that would keep our transmissions broadly accessible.

NFP’s solution was to add redundancy, similar in principle to a data-storage technique called RAID (redundant array of independent disks). Instead of sending each piece of data once, we send extra information that allows missing or corrupted packets to be reconstructed. Under normal circumstances, we often use 5 percent of our bandwidth for this redundancy. During periods of active jamming, we increase that to as much as 25 to 30 percent, improving the chances that users can recover complete files despite interference.

From Crisis Response to Public Access

Toosheh initially came online in 2015 in Iran and Afghanistan. Its full potential, however, was first realized during the 2019 protests in Iran, which saw the most widespread internet shutdown prior to the blackout this year. Wired called the 2019 shutdown “the most severe disconnection” tracked by NetBlocks in any country in terms of its “technical complexity and breadth.” Our technology helped thousands of people stay informed. We sent crucial local updates, legal-aid guides, digital security tools, and independent news to satellite receivers all over the country, seeing a sixfold increase in our user base.

When that wave of protests subsided, the government allowed some communication services to return. People were again able to access the free internet using VPNs and other antifilter software that allowed them to bypass restrictions. Toosheh then became a public access point for news, educational material, and entertainment beyond government filtering.

Toosheh’s impact is often personal. A traveling teacher in western Iran told NFP that he regularly distributed Toosheh files to students in remote villages. One package included footage of female athletes competing in the Olympic Games, something never broadcast in Iran. For one young girl, it was the first time she realized women could compete professionally in sports. That moment underscores a broader truth: Access to information is not only about news or politics, but about exposure to possibilities.

The Cost of Toosheh

Unlike internet-based systems, Toosheh’s operational cost remains constant regardless of the number of users. A single TV satellite in geostationary earth orbit, deployed and maintained by an international company such as Eutelsat, can broadcast to an entire continent with no increase in cost to audiences. What’s more, the startup cost for users isn’t high: A satellite dish and receiver in Iran costs less than US $50, which is affordable to many. And it costs nothing for people to use Toosheh’s service and receive its files.

We aim not just to build a tool for censorship circumvention, but to redefine access itself.

However, operating the service is costly: NetFreedom Pioneers pays tens of thousands of dollars a month for satellite bandwidth. We had received funding from the U.S. State Department, but in August of 2025, that funding ended, forcing us to suspend services in Iran.

Then the December protests happened, and broadcasting to Iran became an urgent priority. To turn Toosheh back on, we needed roughly $50,000 a month. With the support of a handful of private donors, we were able to meet these costs and sustain operations in Iran for a few months, though our future there and elsewhere is uncertain.

Satellites Against Censorship

Toosheh’s revival in Iran came alongside NFP’s ongoing support for deployments of Starlink, a satellite internet service that allows users to connect directly to satellites rather than relying on domestic networks, which the government can shut down. Unlike Toosheh’s one-way broadcasts, Starlink provides full two-way internet access, enabling users to send messages, upload videos, and communicate with the outside world.

In 2022, we started gathering donations to buy Starlink terminals for Iran. We have delivered more than 300 of the roughly 50,000 there, enabling citizens to send encrypted updates and videos to us from inside the country. Because the technology is banned by the government, access remains limited and carries risk; Iranian authorities have recently arrested Starlink users and sellers. And unlike Toosheh’s receive-only broadcasts, Starlink terminals transmit signals back to orbit, creating a radio footprint that can potentially be detected.

The internet shutdown in Iran continued after the attacks by Israel and the United States began in late February, preventing Iranians from communicating with the outside world and with one another.Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu/Getty Images

Looking ahead, we envision Toosheh becoming a foundational part of global digital resilience. It is uncensored, untraceable, and resistant to government shutdowns. Because Toosheh is downlink only, it can sometimes feel hard to explain the value of this technology to those living in the free world, those accustomed to open internet access. Yet, people living under censorship have few other choices when there’s a digital blackout.

Currently, NFP is developing new features like intelligent content curation and automatically prioritizing data packages based on geographic or situational needs. And we’re experimenting with local sharing tools that allow users who receive Toosheh broadcasts to redistribute those files via Wi-Fi hotspots or other offline networks, which could extend the system’s reach to disaster zones, conflict areas, and climate-impacted regions where infrastructure may be destroyed.

We’re also looking at other use cases. Following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, NetFreedom Pioneers designed a satellite-based system to deliver educational materials. Our goal is to enable private, large-scale distribution of coursework to anyone—including the girls who are banned from Afghanistan’s schools. The system is technically ready but has yet to secure funding for deployment.

We aim not just to build a tool for censorship circumvention, but to redefine access itself. Whether in an Iranian city under surveillance, a Guatemalan village without internet, or a refugee camp in East Africa, Toosheh offers a powerful and practical model for delivering vital information without relying on vulnerable or expensive networks.

Toosheh is a reminder that innovation doesn’t have to mean complexity. Sometimes, the most transformative ideas are the simplest, like delivering data through the sky, quietly and affordably, into the hands of those who need it most.

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “The Stealth Signals Bypassing Iran’s Internet Blackout.”

Picture a highway with networked autonomous cars driving along it. On a serene, cloudless day, these cars need only exchange thimblefuls of data with one another. Now picture the same stretch in a sudden snow squall: The cars rapidly need to share vast amounts of essential new data about slippery roads, emergency braking, and changing conditions.

These two very different scenarios involve vehicle networks with very different computational loads. Eavesdropping on network traffic using a ham radio, you wouldn’t hear much static on the line on a clear, calm day. On the other hand, sudden whiteout conditions on a wintry day would sound like a cacophony of sensor readings and network chatter.

Normally this cacophony would mean two simultaneous problems: congested communications and a rising demand for computing power to handle all the data. But what if the network itself could expand its processing capabilities with every rising decibel of chatter and with every sensor’s chirp?

Traditional wireless networks treat communication as separate from computation. First you move data, then you process it. However, an emerging new paradigm called over-the-air computation (OAC) could fundamentally change the game. First proposed in 2005 and recently developed and prototyped by a number of teams around the world, including ours, OAC combines communication and computation into a single framework. This means that an OAC sensor network—whether shared among autonomous vehicles, Internet-of-Things sensors, smart-home devices, or smart-city infrastructure—can carry some of the network’s computing burden as conditions demand.

The idea takes advantage of a basic physical fact of electromagnetic radiation: When multiple devices transmit simultaneously, their wireless signals naturally combine in the air. Normally, such cross talk is seen as interference, which radios are designed to suppress—especially digital radios with their error-correcting schemes and inherent resistance to low-level noise.

But if we carefully design the transmissions, cross talk can enable a wireless network to directly perform some calculations, such as a sum or an average. Some prototypes today do this with analog-style signaling on otherwise digital radios—so that the superimposed waveforms represent numbers that have been added before digital signal processing takes place.

Researchers are also beginning to explore digital, over-the-air computation schemes, which embed the same ideas into digital formats, ultimately allowing the prototype schemes to coexist with today’s digital radio protocols. These various over-the-air computation techniques can help networks scale gracefully, enabling new classes of real-time, data-intensive services while making more efficient use of wireless spectrum.

OAC, in other words, turns signal interference from a problem into a feature, one that can help wireless systems support massive growth.

Reimagining radio interference as infrastructure

For decades, engineers designed radio communications protocols with one overriding goal: to isolate each signal and recover each message cleanly. Today’s networks face a different set of pressures. They must coordinate large groups of devices on shared tasks—such as AI model training or combining disparate sensor readings, also known as sensor fusion—while exchanging as little raw data as possible, to improve both efficiency and privacy. For these reasons, a new approach to transmitting and receiving data may be worth considering, one that doesn’t rely on collecting and storing every individual device’s contributions.

By turning interference into computation, OAC transforms the wireless medium from a contested battlefield into a collaborative workspace. This paradigm shift has far-reaching consequences: Signals no longer compete for isolation; they cooperate to achieve shared outcomes. OAC cuts through layers of digital processing, reduces latency, and lowers energy consumption.

Even very simple operations, such as addition, can be the building blocks of surprisingly powerful computations. Many complex processes can be broken down into combinations of simpler pieces, much like how a rich sound can be re-created by combining a few basic tones. By carefully shaping what devices transmit and how the result is interpreted at the receiver, the wireless channel running OAC can carry out other calculations beyond addition. In practice, this means that with the right design, wireless signals can compute a number of key functions that modern algorithms rely on.

THE PROBLEM (TRADITIONAL APPROACH) 

For instance, many key tasks in modern networks don’t require the logging and storage of every individual network transmission. Rather, the goal is instead to infer properties about aggregate patterns of network traffic—reaching agreement or identifying what matters most about the traffic. Consensus algorithms rely on majority voting to ensure reliable decisions, even when some devices fail. Artificial intelligence systems depend on matrix reduction and simplification operations such as “max pooling” (keeping only peak values) to extract the most useful signals from noisy data.

In smart cities and smart grids, what matters most is often not individual readings but distribution. How many devices report each traffic condition? What is the range of demand across neighborhoods? These are histogram questions—summaries of the device counts per category.

With type-based multiple access (TBMA), an over-the-air computation method we use, devices reporting a given condition transmit together over a shared channel. Their signals add up, and the receiver sees only the total signal strength per category. In a single transmission, the entire histogram emerges without ever identifying individual devices. And the more devices there are, the better the estimate. The result is greater spectrum efficiency, with lower latency and scalable, privacy-friendly operations—all from letting the wireless medium do the aggregating and counting.

It’s easy to imagine how analog values transmitted over the air could be summed via superposition. The amplitudes from different signals add together, so the values those amplitudes represent also simply add together. The more challenging question concerns preserving that additive magic, but with digital signals.

Here’s how OAC does it. Consider, for instance, one TBMA approach for a network of sensors that gives each possible sensor reading its own dedicated frequency channel. Every sensor on the network that reads “4” transmits on frequency four; every sensor that reads “7” transmits on frequency seven. When multiple devices share the same reading, their amplitudes combine. The stronger the combined signal at a given frequency, the more devices there are reporting that particular value.

A receiver equipped with a bank of filters tuned to each frequency reads out a count of votes for every possible sensor value. In a single, simultaneous transmission, the whole network has reported its state.

It might seem paradoxical—digital computation riding atop what appears to be an analog physical effect. But this is also true of all “digital” radio. A Wi-Fi transmitter does not launch ones and zeroes into the air; it modulates electromagnetic waves whose amplitudes and phases encode digital data. The “digital” label ultimately refers to the information layer, not the physics. What makes OAC digital, in the same sense, is that the values being computed—each sensor reading, each frequency-bin count—are discrete and quantized from the start. And because they are discrete, the same error-correction machinery that has made digital communications robust for decades can be applied here too.

Synchronization is where OAC’s demands diverge most sharply from digital wireless conventions. Many OAC variants today require something akin to a shared clock at nanosecond precision: Every signal’s phase must be synchronized, or the superposition runs the risk of collapsing into destructive interference. While TBMA relaxes this burden a bit—devices need only share a time window—real engineering challenges lie ahead regardless, before over-the-air computation is ready for the mobile world.

How will over-the-air computation work in the field?

Over-the-air computation has in recent years moved from theory to initial proofs-of-concept and network test runs. Our research teams in South Carolina and Spain have built working prototypes that deliver repeatable results—with no cables and no external timing sources such as GPS-locked references. All synchronization is handled within the radios themselves.

Our team at the University of South Carolina (led by Sahin) started with off-the-shelf software-defined radios—Analog Devices’ Adalm-Pluto. We modified the devices’ field-programmable gate array hardware inside each radio so it can respond to a trigger signal transmitted from another radio. This simple hack enabled simultaneous transmission, a core requirement for OAC. Our setup used five radios acting as edge devices and one acting as a base station. The task involved training a neural network to perform image recognition over the air. Our system, whose results we first reported in 2022, achieved a 95 percent accuracy in image recognition without ever moving raw data across the network.

THE OVER-THE-AIR COMPUTATION (OAC) APPROACH

We also demonstrated our initial OAC setup at a March 2025 IEEE 802.11 working group meeting, where an IEEE committee was studying AI and machine learning capabilities for future Wi-Fi standards. As we showed, OAC’s road ahead doesn’t necessarily require reinventing wireless technology. Rather, it can also build on and repurpose existing protocols already in Wi-Fi and 5G.

However, before OAC can become a routine feature of commercial wireless systems, networks must provide finer-tuned coordination of timing and signal power levels. Mobility is a difficult problem, too. When mobile devices move around, phase synchronization degrades quickly, and computational accuracy can suffer. Present-day OAC tests work in controlled lab environments. But making them robust in dynamic, real-world settings—vehicles on highways, sensors scattered across cities—remains a new frontier for this emerging technology.

Both of our teams are now scaling up our prototypes and demonstrations. We are together aiming to understand how over-the-air computation performs as the number of devices increases beyond lab-bench scales. Turning prototypes and test-beds into production systems for autonomous vehicles and smart cities will require anticipating tomorrow’s mobility and synchronization problems—and no doubt a range of other challenges down the road.

Where OAC goes from here

To realize the technological ambitions of over-the-air computation, nanosecond timing and exquisite RF signal design will be crucial. Fortunately, recent engineering advances have made substantial progress in both of these fields.

Because OAC demands waveform superposition, it benefits from tight coordination in time, frequency, phase, and amplitude among RF transmitters. Such requirements build naturally on decades of work in wireless communication systems designed for shared access. Modern networks already synchronize large numbers of devices using high-precision timing and uplink coordination.

OAC uses the same synchronization techniques already in cellular and Wi-Fi systems. But to actually run over-the-air computations, more precision still will be needed. Power control, gain adjustment, and timing calibration are standard tools today. We expect that engineers will further refine these existing methods to begin to meet OAC’s more stringent accuracy demands.

THE OAC RESULT 

In some cases, in fact, imperfect timing standards may be all that’s needed. Designs and emerging standards in 5G and 6G wireless systems today use clever encoding that tolerates imperfect synchronization. Minor timing errors, frequency drift, and signal overlap can in some cases still work capably within an OAC protocol, we anticipate. Instead of fighting messiness, over-the-air computation may sometimes simply be able to roll with it.

Another challenge ahead concerns shifting processing to the transmitter. Instead of the receiver trying to clean up overlapping signals, a better and more efficient approach would involve each transmitter fixing its own signal before sending. Such “pre-compensation” techniques are already used in MIMO technology (multi-antenna systems in modern Wi-Fi and cellular networks). OAC would just be repurposing techniques that have already been developed for 5G and 6G technologies.

Materials science can also help OAC efforts ahead. New generations of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces shape signals via tiny adjustable elements in the antenna. The surfaces catch radio signals and reshape them as they bounce around. Reconfigurable surfaces can strengthen useful signals, eliminate interference, and synchronize wavefront arrivals that would otherwise be out of sync. OAC stands to benefit from these and other emerging capabilities that intelligent surfaces will provide.

At the system level, OAC will represent a fundamental shift in wireless network system design. Wireless engineers have traditionally tried to avoid designing devices that transmit at the same time. But over-the-air systems will flip the old, familiar design standards on their head.

One might object that OAC stands to upend decades of existing wireless signal standards that have always presumed data pipes to be data pipes only—not microcomputers as well. Yet we do not anticipate much difficulty merging OAC with existing wireless standards. In a sense, in fact, the IEEE 802.11 and 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards bodies have already shown the way.

A network can set aside certain brief time windows or narrow slices of bandwidth for over‑the‑air computation, and use the rest for ordinary data. From the radio’s point of view, OAC just becomes another operating mode that is turned on when needed and left off the rest of the time.

Over the past decade, both the IEEE and 3GPP have integrated once-experimental technologies into their wireless standards—for example, millimeter-wave mobile communications, multiuser MIMO, beamforming, and network slicing—by defining each new technological advance as an optional feature. OAC, we suggest, can also operate alongside conventional wireless data traffic as an optional service. Because OAC places high demands on timing and accuracy, networks will need the ability to enable or disable over‑the‑air computation on a per‑application basis.

With continued progress, OAC will evolve from lab prototype to standardized wireless capability through the 2020s and into the decade ahead. In the process, the wireless medium will transform from a passive data carrier into an active computational partner—providing essential infrastructure for the real-time intelligent systems that future wireless technologies will demand.

So on that snowy highway sometime in the 2030s, vehicles and sensors won’t wait for permission to think together. Using the emerging over-the-air computation protocols that we’re helping to pioneer, simultaneous computation will be the new default. The networks will work as one.

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “Teaching Radio Waves to Compute.”

Researchers have made a Wi-Fi receiver that’s tough enough to work inside a nuclear reactor. They hope the receiver might be part of a wireless communications system for robotics used to decommission reactors.

Yasuto Narukiyo, a graduate student at the Institute of Science Tokyo, presented the wireless receiver at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), in San Francisco in February. The receiver endured a total radiation dose of 500 kilograys, orders of magnitude higher than the doses typically tolerated by electronics in outer space.

After the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, engineers began using robots to help characterize and clean up the site. Most of these require local area network (LAN) cables that can get tangled, says Narukiyo. His team, which includes his advisor Atsushi Shirane and Masaya Miyahara of Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), is aiming to develop a wireless system for controlling robots in this harsh environment.

Even under less dramatic circumstances, nuclear plants don’t last forever, and they need to be safely dismantled and decontaminated so the sites can be reused, a process called decommissioning. The process is lengthy, and risks exposing people to radiation, which is why engineers hope robots can come to the rescue.

The need for such robots is only growing. According to a 2024 study, of 204 reactors that have been closed, only 11 plants with a capacity over 100 megawatts have been fully decommissioned, and 200 more reactors will reach the end of their lifetimes in the next 20 years.

While electronics for space exploration are typically required to endure radiation doses of 100 to 300 grays over three years, a robot operating in a nuclear reactor needs to endure more than 500 kGy over the course of six months, says Narukiyo—at least 1,000 times the dosage. A robotic arm made by KUKA was able to withstand just 164.55 Gy of damage before failing. For comparison, the lens of the eye absorbs just 60 milligrays during a CT scan of the brain.

Radiation Hardening

To “harden” the 2.4-gigahertz Wi-Fi receiver against intense levels of radiation, Narukiyo and his team changed its mix of components, minimized the total number of transistors, and tinkered with the geometry of the transistors that were left.

The transistors, silicon MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors), contain an oxide layer that’s particularly vulnerable to radiation damage. Blasts of gamma rays can trap positive charges in the oxide, degrading the device’s performance and causing errors. So using fewer of them minimizes the problem. The researchers also made each transistor’s gate longer and wider. The gate controls the flow of current—longer, wider gates perform better under exposure to radiation.

Researchers tested the Wi-Fi receiver by placing it on top of a radiation source.Yasuto Narukiyo, Sena Kato, et al.

The group also considered the differences in how radiation affects PMOS transistors, MOSFETs in which current is carried primarily by positive charges, and NMOS, in which it is carried by electrons. PMOS transistors are more vulnerable to radiation damage because positive charge gets trapped in both the oxide and at the interface between the oxide and the rest of the semiconductor. These add up and shift the transistor towards the “off” state, says Narukiyo. To compensate, the new receiver design minimizes the use of PMOS, replacing these transistors with other elements such as inductors that don’t have an oxide layer. NMOS transistors are more resilient, says Narukiyo, because positive charges trapped in the oxide are to some extent canceled out by negative charges that get trapped at the interface.

Narukiyo and his team measured the performance of the receiver before exposure to radiation, and again after blasting it with a total dose of 300 kGy and then 500 kGy. Before being irradiated, it showed comparable performance to typical Wi-Fi receivers. After reaching the highest radiation dose, the gain of the receiver had decreased by about 1.5 decibel.

Narukiyo says the receiver is hardened enough, and now he hopes to improve its performance. He’s also working on a transmitter, which would allow for two-way communications. This is more challenging due to the need to produce high levels of current to generate the Wi-Fi signal. He says an earlier version he tried was broken by a 300 kGy dose. The group is exploring using other semiconductors, such as diamond, to toughen the transmitter.

This article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Wi-Fi Receiver Can Survive Inside a Nuclear Reactor.”

To stay competitive, many small businesses need advanced wireless communication networks, not only to communicate but also to leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and robotics. Often, however, the businesses lack the technical expertise needed to install, configure, and maintain the systems.

Bhaskara Rallabandi, who spent more than two decades working for major telecom companies, decided to use his expertise to help small businesses. Rallabandi, an IEEE senior member, is an expert certified by the International Council on Systems Engineering.

Invences

Cofounder

Bhaskara Rallabandi

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Frisco, Texas

Employees

100

In 2023 he helped found Invences, a telecommunications automation company headquartered in Frisco, Texas.

Invences services include designing, building, and installing data centers, as well as cost-effective and secure wireless, private, IoT, and virtual communications networks.

The company has set up systems for farms, factories, and universities in rural and urban areas including underserved communities. Its mission, Rallabandi says, is to “build autonomous, ethical, and sustainable networks that connect communities intelligently.”

For his work, he was recognized last year for “entrepreneurial leadership in founding and scaling a U.S.-based technology company, advancing innovation in 5G/6G and Open RAN [radio access network], shaping global standards, and inspiring future leaders through mentorship and community impact” with the IEEE-USA Entrepreneur Achievement Award for Leadership in Entrepreneurial Spirit.

Building a telecommunications career

He began his telecommunications career in 2009 as a manager and principal network engineer at Verizon’s Innovation Labs in Waltham, Mass. He and his team ran some of the earliest long-term evolution and evolved packet core performance trials. (LTE is the 4G wireless broadband standard for mobile devices. EPC is the IP-based, high-performance core network architecture for 4G LTE networks.)

That work at Innovation Labs, he says, was key to the development of the first 4G systems. It set the stage for scalable, interoperable broadband architectures that underpin today’s 5G and 6G designs.

“We built the first bridge between legacy and cloud-native networks,” he says.

He left in 2011 to join AT&T Labs in Redmond, Wash. As senior manager and principal solutions architect, he oversaw the design, integration, and testing of the company’s next-generation wireless systems. He also led projects that redefined automation of networks and set up cloud computing systems including FirstNet, the nationwide broadband network for first responders, and VoLTE, the first voice-over-video LTE for conducting video calls.

In 2018 Rallabandi was hired as a principal and a senior manager of engineering at Samsung Networks Division’s Technology Solutions Division, in Plano, Texas. He led the development of 5G virtualization and Open RAN initiatives, which enable more flexible, scalable, and efficient large network deployments and interoperability among vendors.

Designing networks for small businesses

Feeling that he wasn’t reaching his full potential in the corporate world, and to help small businesses, he opted to start his own venture in 2023 with his wife, Lakshmi Rallabandi, a computer science engineer. She is Invences’s CEO, and he is its founding principal and chief technology advisor.

Invences, which is self-funded and employs about 100 people, has more than 50 customers from around the world.

“I wanted to do something more interesting where I could use the knowledge I gained working for these big companies to fill the gaps they overlooked in terms of automation” for small businesses, he says. “I have a team of people who, combined, have 200 years of technology experience.”

The startup builds networks that simplify its clients’ operations and reduce their costs, he says.

Instead of duplicating how major telecom carriers build networks for dense urban areas, he says, his designs reimagine the network architecture to lower its complexity, costs, and operational overhead.

“Connectivity should not be a luxury. Rural communities deserve an infrastructure that fits their needs.”

The systems integrate new technologies such as Open RAN, virtualized RAN, digital twins, telemetry, and advanced analytics. Some networks also incorporate agentic AI, an autonomous system that runs independently of humans and uses AI agents that plan and act across the network. Digital twins evaluate the agent’s decisions before releasing them.

“Autonomy is not about removing humans from the loop,” Rallabandi says. “It is about giving systems the ability to manage complexity so humans can focus on intent and outcomes.”

Rallabandi also has worked on AI-driven telecom observability technologies designed to allow networks to detect anomalies and optimize performance automatically.

He has developed a virtual O-RAN innovation lab, where clients can test the interoperability of their 5G systems, try out their enhancements, run trials of future functions, and experiment with updates.

Invences partnered with Trilogy Networks to build the FarmGrid platform for farms in Fargo, N.D., and Yuma, Ariz. FarmGrid used private 5G networks, edge-computing AI, and digital twins to make the operations more efficient.

“The project connects farms with sensors, analytics platforms, and autonomous equipment to enable precision agriculture, water optimization, and real-time decision-making,” Rallabandi says.

IEEE Senior Member Bhaskara Rallabandi talks about partnering with Trilogy Networks to build the FarmGrid platform for farms in Fargo, N.D., and Yuma, Ariz.TECKNEXUS

Paying it forward through IEEE programs

Rallabandi says he believes staying involved with IEEE is important to his career development and a way to give back to the profession. He is a frequent invited speaker at IEEE conferences.

He is active with IEEE Future Networks and its Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) initiative. Members of the Future Networks technical community work to develop, standardize, and deploy 5G and 6G networks as well as successive generations.

CTU aims to bridge the digital divide by bringing Internet service to underserved communities. During itsannual challenge, Rallabandi works with the winning students, researchers, and innovators to help them turn their concepts into affordable, cost-effective options.

“CTU represents the best of IEEE,” he says. “It is about taking innovation out of conferences and into communities that need it the most.

“Connectivity should not be a luxury. Rural communities deserve an infrastructure that fits their needs.”

He participates in the recently launched IEEE Future Networks Empowerment Through Mentorship initiative, which helps innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups expand their companies by educating them about finance, marketing, and related concepts.

“IEEE gives me both a voice and a responsibility,” Rallabandi says. “We’re not just developing technology; we are shaping how humanity connects.”

For decades, satellites have been beaming data from Earth to space and back via radio waves. But with the growing number of spacecraft in orbit and the increasing quantities of data beaming back to Earth, radio spectrum is hitting its physical limits. For about a decade, companies and research institutions have been working on higher-bandwidth, optical technologies that would remove current data transmission bottlenecks. Perhaps the most ambitious among those companies is Singapore-based deep-tech startup Transcelestial, which has been testing its commercial-grade Earth-to-space laser communication terminal in trials in space over the past few weeks.

The company, which has sold hundreds of ground-to-ground internet-beaming laser terminals, launched its demonstration payload to space in November aboard the 6GStarLab satellite developed by UK-headquartered Open Cosmos, and has further satellite launches scheduled for later this year. The satellites, Transcelestial says, will form the backbone of a future constellation that will provide fiber-grade-level connectivity from orbit to the world’s unconnected by the end of this decade.

Other companies have been using laser terminals to beam data between satellites. SpaceX Starlink has been relying on space-to-space laser terminals since 2021, forming an orbital mesh network that can route vast amounts of data through space in real time without needing a ground station. The constellation, however, still requires conventional radio waves to beam connectivity to users on Earth, meaning there is only so much data that can pass through the overall network at any given moment.

But using lasers to beam data to Earth comes with challenges that so far have been difficult to solve. Transcelestial and other companies, however, believe they’ve finally cracked the problem.

High-Speed Laser Internet Technology

Laser light transmits at higher frequencies than radio waves, and can therefore pack more data by orders of magnitude. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation offers a peak user bandwidth of 200 megabits per second—which gets diluted as the number of users in an area grows. By comparison, Transcelestial’s test satellite can beam data to Earth at rates up to 1 gigabit per second. The company’s upcoming satellites will provide an even greater bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps. In the future, Transcelestial’s CEO and co-founder, Rohit Jha, estimates that every satellite could beam 100 Gbps or more to Earth.

“Scaling for an optical system is actually quite easy,” Jha says. “Ultimately, we can deliver 100 Gbps just by putting more terminals on the satellite. It will be like undersea cables from space.”

Other Earth-to-space laser data transmission experiments have been conducted, says Mohammad Danesh, Transcelestial’s co-founder and chief technology officer, but they required bespoke science-grade equipment costing millions of dollars. In 2023, NASA tested a record-breaking 200 Gbps laser link between a ground station and NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 satellite in low Earth orbit. That same year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a more modest demo with a 10 Gbps laser connection between low Earth orbit and the ground.

Transcelestial believes it can take the technology mainstream by reducing costs through a combination of supply chain management and manufacturing experience that the company has acquired over the years developing its point-to-point laser communication systems for internet distribution in hard-to-reach areas on Earth.

“The biggest challenge is building a reliable and scalable optical ground station network,” Danesh said, referring to the stations that communicate with satellites in orbit. “The optical ground stations that people are building today cost millions of dollars, and that’s not scalable. You need to be able to manufacture these at scale at a commercial rate, where you can have dozens of these all around the world. And that’s the approach we’ve been taking.”

The multiple ground stations, Danesh adds, will help overcome the difficulty laser light has to get through clouds by providing alternative downlink and uplink locations all over the world.

“If location A is cloudy or rainy or for whatever reason is not working really well, then you start relaying information and find another location where you can download the data,” Danesh says. “This will be a game-changer in space because even with RF, this capability doesn’t fully exist yet, and it can sometimes take days to access your data.”

Secure Laser Communication in Space

Transcelestial is just one of a constellation of companies developing laser communication technologies for space. Lasers, in addition to higher bandwidth, are also much narrower and more focused compared to radio waves. This means they are far more resilient to jamming and interception. This inherent security has come to the fore since the war in Ukraine exposed the vulnerabilities of radio frequency communications to jamming and spoofing.

“In case of laser communications, you have to be literally within the line of sight of the communication beam to be able to disrupt it,” says Laurynas Mačiulis, the CEO of Astrolight. “It’s practically very difficult.”

Astrolight, based in Lithuania, has also developed a space-to-ground laser communications terminal, which it plans to launch to space later this month aboard two small satellites developed by the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. The company has a more modest goal than Transcelestial, hoping to enable operators of Earth-observing satellites to get their data down faster and provide back-up communications for users needing extra security.

The company previously tested secure laser communication links to transmit data between two ships on the sea and between two ground stations as part of NATO’s REPMUS and DiBax exercises. In both cases, the terminals passed the tests with flying colors, providing reliable high-bandwidth communications even in rainy and foggy weather, 24 hours a day, for two weeks.

According to media reports, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hinted that his company is also looking at ground-to-space laser communication technology to overcome the bandwidth bottleneck that currently plagues Starlink users in more densely populated areas.

Transcelestial launched this demo version of its laser communications terminal into space on board the 6G Starlab mission.Transcelestial

Jha thinks that laser communications is the future as the technology can deliver a cost per transmitted bit orders of magnitude better compared to radio frequency systems, despite the initially higher price tag. He believes Transcelestial could even leapfrog Starlink, offering fiber-grade connectivity across the equatorial band (where billions of the world’s least connected people live) with a constellation of only 40 satellites—compared to more than 10,000 for Starlink.

Instead of beaming internet directly to individual users on Earth like Starlink does, Transcelestial envisions delivering tens to hundreds of gigabits to local telecom companies, who would further distribute connectivity to users via local ground-based infrastructure. In the future, Jha envisions orbital lasers replacing even undersea cables, offering a cheaper, more reliable service that could not be easily disrupted by adversaries or natural disasters.

Joachim Horwath, the chief technology officer of Germany-based laser communications developer Mynaric, cautions that the challenges presented by the atmospheric interference might be more difficult to surmount than some think.

“Laser communications offer clear advantages for space-to-ground links, particularly when it comes to very high data throughput, inherent security, and the ability to deploy the technology without relying on scarce RF spectrum,” says Horwath. “However, atmospheric conditions remain a key technical challenge. Clouds, turbulence, and weather variability can affect optical link performance, which means these systems require strategies like site diversity or hybrid architectures to ensure reliability. Because of this, we don’t expect laser communications to replace RF entirely.”

This article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Can Lasers Replace Radio for Space-to-Ground Comms?”

5G covers under 40% of landmass. This Whitepaper details how 3GPP Release 17 addresses six satellite challenges: delay, Doppler, path loss, polarization, spectrum, and architecture.

What Attendees will Learn

1. Why non-terrestrial networks are now integral to the 5G roadmap — Understand how the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 17 incorporates satellite-based connectivity into the 5G system, targeting ubiquitous coverage across maritime, remote, and polar regions where terrestrial networks reach less than 40% of the world’s landmass. Learn the distinction between New Radio non-terrestrial networks for mobile broadband and Internet of Things non-terrestrial networks for low-power machine-type communications.
2. How satellite constellation design shapes coverage, capacity, and latency — Examine how orbit altitude (low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary earth orbit), beam footprint geometry, elevation angle, and inclination determine coverage area, round-trip time, and differential delay across user equipment within a single beam. Explore the trade-offs between transparent bent-pipe and regenerative onboard-processing payload architectures.
3. What radio frequency challenges distinguish satellite links from terrestrial propagation — Explore the six major technical challenges: high free-space path loss, time-variant Doppler, differential delay across large beam footprints, Faraday rotation of polarization through the ionosphere, and spectrum coexistence between terrestrial and non-terrestrial bands in the S-band and L-band.
4. How 5G protocols must adapt to support non-terrestrial connectivity — Learn the specific amendments to hybrid automatic repeat request operation, timing advance control (split into common and user-equipment-specific components), random access procedure timing extensions, discontinuous reception power saving adaptations, earth-fixed tracking area management, conditional handover mechanisms, and feeder link switching for service continuity in a unique propagation environment.

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Later this year, a certain airship will lift off from New Mexico to embark on a Pacific crossing for its longest flight yet. But the real test won’t begin until it arrives in Japan. There, the airship’s builder, New Mexico–based Sceye, and its funder and partner, the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Corp., plan to test the craft’s mettle as a floating cell tower 20 kilometers in the sky.

They are not alone in planning base stations in the stratosphere. In theory, floating platforms can provide better line-of-sight coverage than ground towers, with less latency and more capacity than satellites in low Earth orbit. So, some engineers think the stratosphere will be a crucial piece of future mobile networks—if they can get the craft working.

“There is still, in my view, some work to be done on the aerospace part to perfect the aircraft, but this technology is coming,” says Halim Yanikomeroglu of Carleton University, in Ottawa, who is unaffiliated with Sceye.

How to build a base station in the sky

Sceye’s craft is an example of a high-altitude platform station (HAPS), delivering Internet access from Earth’s stratosphere. HAPS come in many different designs. Sceye’s choice is an autonomously piloted, helium-filled airship that is solar-powered during the day and battery-powered at night.

In past tests, Sceye showed that its airship can ascend into the stratosphere, then keep position through day and night with electric fans. Although a 20-km altitude is above most ground weather, staying in place is still an engineering feat due to the stratosphere’s fierce winds. Now, the company is testing longer-duration flights, ramping up to multimonth-long runs like its planned Pacific crossing.

A HAPS base station may need to stay in one place for months, if not even longer to be useful for networking. The record belongs to a fixed-wing aircraft from Airbus-owned Zephyr, which last year reportedly stayed aloft for 67 days.

Sceye can’t match that mark yet, but Sceye’s CEO Mikkel Frandsen believes his company’s lighter-than-air design has a different advantage: payload capacity. Where craft like Zephyr’s can carry just a few kilograms, Frandsen says, Sceye is testing payloads as heavy as 250 kg.

The extra capacity translates to more capable networking equipment. In Japan, Sceye will test an antenna the company calls SceyeCELL, a module of MIMO panels designed for use in the stratosphere.

Why telecom companies want HAPS

In total, Frandsen says Sceye is planning “two, likely three” commercial tests with multinational telecom companies this year.

One reason for this interest may be that, unlike the satellites of Starlink, SceyeCELL transmits data at frequencies that mobile phones already use. Sceye’s antenna also operates with the same 3GPP standards as terrestrial base stations, called eNodeB for 4G and gNodeB for 5G. This means a smartphone on the ground shouldn’t tell the difference between a terrestrial base station and Sceye’s floating one. HAPS researchers say this sort of seamless connectivity is crucial.

What else, according to researchers, must a HAPS network demonstrate to show it’s ready for the real world? The HAPS itself must stay in position; then, its antenna must show its quality.

Devices on the ground must maintain a reliable link with low latency and stable throughput. HAPS promises to float above the weather with better line-of-sight coverage, but those promises are no good if its coverage falters in storms below, or among the high densities of urban high-rises. If multiple HAPS are to serve the same city, they need to communicate with each other. And an aerial network must not interfere with traditional cell signals.

“’For HAPS to work…in areas where terrestrial base stations do exist, it is really essential to have proper interference management,” Yanikomeroglu says.

Sceye isn’t testing inter-HAPS communication yet, but Frandsen says they are working on other requirements: “We intend to show that we can backhaul into the customer’s core network. We intend to show that we can beam on the front end, direct-to-device, with expected speeds, with minimum levels of interference.”

A bridge through the stratosphere?

Past HAPS concepts, like the balloons of Google’s now-shuttered Loon, largely aimed to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas. “These projects have proven not to be very sustainable from an economic perspective, especially in comparison with satellite systems,” says Marco Giordani of the University of Padova, in Italy, who is unaffiliated with Sceye.

Because of those headwinds, HAPS proponents are now thinking about using HAPS for permanent use in more populated areas. “HAPS has a wide coverage,” says Animesh Yadav of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, also unaffiliated with Sceye. “If you are just using it for rural areas, you are just underusing it.”

For example, according to Frandsen, SoftBank is interested in using HAPS to densify satellite coverage. Most phones today lack the required antenna for a good connection to low Earth orbit. SoftBank is not alone in trusting HAPS to bridge this gap.

“In this case, the HAPS can act as a relay station, to receive the traffic from ground users and then relay and forward the traffic up to the satellites and back,” says Giordani. “This, I think, it’s very promising.”

HAPS proponents envision a network of the future—if not 6G, then 7G or beyond—that meshes Earth, sky, and space, with HAPS as a floating middle layer. Some researchers have proposed more ambitious ideas, like mounting HAPS with the equipment for tasks like edge computing and federated learning.

Of course, engineers must first prove that HAPS are capable of the basics.

In a landmark case, a jury found this week that Meta and YouTube negligently designed their platforms and harmed the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman referred to as Kaley G.M. The jury agreed with the plaintiff that social media is addictive and harmful and was deliberately designed to be that way. This finding aligns with my view as a clinical psychologist: that social media addiction is not a failure of users, but a feature of the platforms themselves. I believe that accountability must extend beyond individuals to the systems and incentives that shape their behavior.

In my clinical practice, I regularly see patients struggling with compulsive social media use. Many describe a pattern of “doomscrolling,” often using social media to numb themselves after a long day. Afterwards, they feel guilty and stressed about the time lost yet have had limited success changing this pattern on their own.

It’s easy to understand why scrolling can be so addictive. Social media interfaces are built around a powerful behavioral mechanism known as intermittent reinforcement, says Judson Brewer, an addiction researcher at Brown University, which is the strongest and most effective type of reinforcement learning. This is the same mechanism that slot machines rely on: Users never know when the next reward—a shower of quarters, or a slew of likes and comments—will appear. Not all the videos in our feeds captivate us, but if we scroll long enough, we are bound to arrive at one that does. The ongoing search for rewards ensnares us and reinforces itself.

Why Social Media Feels Addictive

Individuals typically struggle on their own to address compulsive social media use. This should be no surprise, as habits are not typically broken through sheer discipline but rather by altering the reinforcement loops that sustain them. Brewer argues that “there’s actually no neuroscientific evidence for the presence of willpower.” Placing the burden to self-regulate solely on users misses the deeper issue: These platforms are engineered to override individual control.

A growing body of research identifies social media use and constant digital connectivity as important influences on the growing incidence of adolescent mental health problems. Brewer notes that adolescents are particularly vulnerable, as they are in a “developmental phase” in which reinforcement learning processes are especially strong. This vulnerability can be exploited by the design features of large social media platforms.

How Platforms Are Designed to Maximize Engagement

NPR uncovered records from a recent lawsuit filed by Kentucky’s attorney general against TikTok. According to these documents, TikTok implemented interface mechanisms such as autoplay, infinite scrolling, and a highly personalized recommendation algorithm that were systematically optimized to maximize user engagement.

TikTok’s algorithmically tailored “For You” content continuously tracks user behaviors, such as how long a video is watched, whether it is replayed, or quickly skipped. The feed then curates short videos, or reels, for the user based on past scrolling behavior and what is most likely to hold attention.

These documents show one example of a tech company knowingly designing products to maximize attention. I believe social media companies also have the capacity to reduce addictiveness through intentional design choices.

How Governments Are Regulating Social Media

The good news is we are not helpless. There are multiple levers for change: how we collectively talk about social media, how our governments regulate its design and access, and how we hold companies accountable for practices that shape user behavior.

Some countries are moving quickly to set policy around social media use. Australia has imposed a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts, with similar bans pending in Denmark, France, and Malaysia.

These bans typically rely on age verification. Users without verified accounts can still passively watch videos on platforms like YouTube, but this approach removes many of the most addictive features, including infinite scroll, personalized feeds, notifications, and systems for followers and likes. At the same time, age verification may cause different problems in the online ecosystem.

Other countries are targeting social media use in specific contexts. South Korea, for example, banned smartphone use in classrooms. And the United Kingdom is taking a different approach; its Age Appropriate Design Code instructs platforms to prioritize children’s safety while designing products. The code includes strong privacy defaults, limits on data collection, and constraints on features that nudge users toward greater engagement.

How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned

A report called Breaking the Algorithm, from Mental Health America, argues that social media platforms should shift from maximizing engagement to supporting well-being. It calls for revamping recommendation systems to spot patterns of unhealthy use and adjusting feeds accordingly—for example, by limiting extreme or distressing content.

The report also argues that users should not have to intentionally opt out of harmful design features. Instead, the safest settings should be the default. The report supports regulatory measures aimed at limiting features such as autoplay and infinite scroll while enforcing privacy and safety settings.

Platforms could also give users more control by adding natural speed bumps, such as stopping points or break reminders during scrolling. Research shows that interrupting infinite scroll with prompts such as “Do you want to keep going?” substantially reduces mindless scrolling and improves memory of content.

Some social media platforms are already experimenting with more ethical engagement. Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized platform, displays posts chronologically rather than ranking them for engagement, and does not offer algorithmically generated feeds like “For You.” Bluesky gives users control by letting them customize their own algorithms and toggle between different feed types, such as chronological or topic-based filters.

In light of the recent verdict, it is time for a national conversation about accountability for social media companies. Individual responsibility will always be important, but so are the mechanisms employed by big tech to shape user behavior. If social media platforms are currently designed to capture attention, they can also be designed to give some of it back.

This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Within a 6 mile radius of New York University’s (NYU) campus, there are more than 500 tech industry giants, banks, and hospitals. This isn’t just a fact about real estate, it’s the foundation for advancing quantum discovery and application.

While the world races to harness quantum technology, NYU is betting that the ultimate advantage lies not solely in a lab, but in the dense, demanding, and hyper-connected urban ecosystem that surrounds it. With the launch of its NYU Quantum Institute (NYUQI), NYU is positioning itself as the central node in this network; a “full stack” powerhouse built on the conviction that it has found the right place, and the right time, to turn quantum science into tangible reality.

Proximity advantage is essential because quantum science demands it. Globally, the quest for practical quantum solutions — whether for computing, sensing, or secure communications — has been stalled, in part, by fragmentation. Physicists and chemical engineers invent new materials, computer scientists develop new algorithms, and electrical engineers build new devices, but all three often work in isolated academic silos.

Gregory Gabadadze, NYU’s dean for science, NYU physicist and Quantum Institute Director Javad Shabani, and Juan de Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and executive dean of the Tandon School of Engineering.Veselin Cuparić/NYU

NYUQI’s premise is that breakthroughs happen “at the interfaces between different domains,” according to Juan de Pablo, Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology at NYU and Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The Institute is built to actively force those necessary collisions — to integrate the physicists, engineers, materials scientists, computer scientists, biologists, and chemists vital to quantum research into one holistic operation. This institutional design ensures that the hardware built by one team can be immediately tested by software developed by another, accelerating progress in a way that isolated departments never could.

NYUQI’s premise is that breakthroughs happen at the interfaces between different domains. —Juan de Pablo, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

NYUQI’s integrated vision is backed by a massive physical commitment to the city. The NYUQI is not just a theoretical concept; its collaborators will be housed in a renovated, million-square-foot facility in the heart of Manhattan’s West Village, backed by a state-of-the-art Nanofabrication Cleanroom in Brooklyn serving as a high-tech foundry. This is where the theoretical meets physical devices, allowing the Institute to test and refine the process from materials science to deployment.

NYUQI will be housed in a renovated, million-square-foot facility in the heart of Manhattan’s West Village.Tracey Friedman/NYU

Leading this effort is NYUQI Director Javad Shabani, who, along with the other members, is turning the Institute into a hub for collaboration with private and public sector partners with quantum challenges that need solving. As de Pablo explains, “Anybody who wants to work on quantum with NYU, you come in through that door, and we’ll send you to the right place.” For New York’s vast ecosystem of tech giants and financial institutions, the NYUQI offers a resource they can’t build on their own: a cohesive team of experts in quantum phenomena, quantum information theory, communication, computing, materials, and optics, and a structured path to applying theoretical discoveries to advanced quantum technologies.

Solving the Challenge of Quantum Research

The NYUQI’s integrated structure is less about organizational management, and more about scientific requirement. The challenge of quantum is that the hardware, the software, and the programming are inherently interconnected — each must be designed to work with the other. To solve this, the Institute focuses on three applications of quantum science: Quantum Computing, Quantum Sensing, and Quantum Communications.

For Shabani, this means creating an integrated environment that bridges discovery with experimentation, starting with the physical components all the way to quantum algorithm centers. That will include a fabrication facility in the new building in Manhattan, as well as the NYU Nanofab in Brooklyn directed by Davood Shahjerdi. New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand recently secured $1 million in congressionally-directed spending to bring Thermal Laser Epitaxy (TLE) technology — which allows for atomic-level purity, minimal defects, and streamlined application of a diverse range of quantum materials — to NYU, marking the first time the equipment will be used in the U.S.

NYU Nanofab manager Smiti Bhattacharya and Nanofab Director Davood Shahjerdi at the nanofab ribbon-cutting in 2023. The nanofab is the first academic cleanroom in Brooklyn, and serves as a prototyping facility for the NORDTECH Microelectronics Commons consortium.NYU WIRELESS

Tight control over fabrication, and can allow researchers to pivot quickly when a breakthrough in one area — say, finding a cheaper, more reliable material like silicon carbide — can be explored for use across all three applications, and offers unique access to academics and the private sector alike to sophisticated pieces of specialty equipment whose maintenance knowledge and costs make them all-but-impossible to maintain outside of the right staffing and environment.

The NYU Nanofab is Brooklyn’s first academic cleanroom, with a strategic focus on superconducting quantum technologies, advanced semiconductor electronics, and devices built from quantum heterostructures and other next-generation materials.NYU Nanofab

That speed and adaptability is the NYUQI’s competitive edge. It turns fragmented challenges into holistic solutions, positioning the Institute to solve real-world problems for its New York neighbors—from highly secure data transmission to next-generation drug discovery.

Testing Quantum Communication in NYC

The integrated approach also makes the NYUQI a testbed for the most critical near-term applications. Take Quantum Communications, which is essential for creating an “unhackable” quantum internet. In an industry first, NYU worked with the quantum start-up Qunnect to send quantum information through standard telecom fiber in New York City between Manhattan and Brooklyn through a 10-mile quantum networking link. Instead of simulating communication challenges in a lab, the NYUQI team is already leveraging NYU’s city-wide campus by utilizing existing infrastructure to test secure quantum transmission between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The NYUQI team is already leveraging NYU’s city-wide campus by utilizing existing infrastructure to test secure quantum transmission between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

This isn’t just theory; it is building a functioning prototype in the most demanding, dense urban environment in the world. Real-time, real-world deployment is a critical component missing in other isolated institutions. When the NYUQI achieves results, the technology will be that much more readily available to the massive financial, tech, and communications organizations operating right outside their door.

NYUQI includes a state-of-the-art Nanofabrication Cleanroom in Brooklyn serving as a high-tech foundry.NYU Tandon

While the Institute has built the physical infrastructure and designed the necessary scientific architecture, its enduring contribution will be the specialized workforce it creates for the new quantum economy. This addresses the market’s greatest deficit: a lack of individuals trained not just in physics, but in the integrated, full-stack approach that quantum demands.

By creating a pipeline of 100 to 200 graduate and doctoral students who are encouraged to collaborate across Computing, Sensing, and Communications, the NYUQI is narrowing the skills gap. These will be future leaders who can speak the language of the physicist, the materials scientist, and the engineer simultaneously. This commitment to interdisciplinary talent is also fueled by the launch of the new Master of Science in Quantum Science & Technology program at NYU Tandon, positioning the university among a select group worldwide offering such a specialized degree.

Interdisciplinary education creates the shared language and understanding poised to make graduates coming from collaborations in the NYUQI extremely valuable in the current landscape. Quantum challenges are not just technical; they are managerial and philosophical as well. An engineer working with the NYUQI will understand the requirements of the nanofabrication cleanroom and the foundations of superconducting qubits for quantum computing, just as a physicist will understand the application needs of an industry partner like a large financial institution. In a field where the entire team must be able to communicate seamlessly, these are professionals truly equipped to rapidly translate discovery into deployable technology. Creating a talent pipeline at scale will provide a missing link that converts New York’s vast commercial energy into genuine quantum advantage.

NYUQI: Building Talent, Technology, and Structure

The vision for the NYUQI is an act of strategic geography that plays directly into the sheer volume of opportunity and demand right outside their new facility. By building the talent, the technology, and the structure necessary to capitalize on this dense environment, NYU is not just participating in the quantum race, it is actively steering it.

Attendees of NYU’s 2025 Quantum Summit.Tracey Friedman/NYU

The initial hypothesis for the NYUQI was simple: the ultimate advantage lies in pursuing the science in the right place at the right time. Now, the institute will ensure that the next wave of scientific discovery, capable of solving previously intractable problems in finance, medicine, and security, will be conceived, built, and tested in the heart of New York City.

A technical exploration of IEEE 802.11bn’s physical and MAC layer enhancements — including distributed resource units, enhanced long range, multi-AP coordination, and seamless roaming — that define Wi-Fi 8.

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2. How new physical layer features overcome uplink power limitations — Learn how distributed resource units spread tones across wider distribution bandwidths to boost per-tone transmit power, and how enhanced long range protocol data units use power-boosted preamble fields and frequency-domain duplication to extend uplink coverage.
3. How advanced MAC coordination reduces interference and latency — Examine multi-access point coordination schemes — coordinated beamforming, spatial reuse, time division multiple access, and restricted target wake time — alongside non-primary channel access and priority enhanced distributed channel access.
4. What seamless roaming and power management mean for next-generation deployments — Discover how seamless mobility domains eliminate reassociation delays during access point transitions, and how dynamic power save and multi-link power management let devices trade capability for battery life without sacrificing connectivity.

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Every time you unlock your smartphone or start your connected car, you are generating a trail of digital evidence that can be used to track your every move.

In Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, just published by NYU Press, law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson exposes how the Internet of Things has quietly transformed into a vast surveillance network, turning our most personal devices into digital informants. The following excerpt explores the concept of “sensorveillance,” detailing the specific mechanisms—such as Google’s Sensorvault, geofence warrants, and vehicle telemetry—that allow law enforcement to repurpose consumer technology into powerful tools for investigation and control.

A man walked into a bank in Midlothian, Va., his black bucket hat pulled low over dark sunglasses. He handed a note to the teller, brandished a gun, and walked away with US $195,000. Police had no leads—but they knew that the robber had been holding a smartphone when he entered the bank. Guessing that the smartphone, like most smartphones, had some Google-enabled service running, police ordered Google to turn over information about all the phones near the bank during the holdup. In response to a series of warrants, Google produced information about 19 phones that had been active near the bank at the time of the robbery. Further investigation directed the police to Okelle Chatrie, who was ultimately charged with the crime.

Cathy Bernstein had a tough time explaining why her own car reported an accident to police. Bernstein had been driving a Ford equipped with 911 Assist, which was automatically enabled when she struck another vehicle. Rather than stick around to trade insurance information, she sped away. But her smart car had registered the bump—and called the police dispatcher, leading to a fairly awkward conversation:

Computer-Generated Voice: Attention, a crash has occurred. Line open.

911 Operator: Hello. Can anyone hear me?

Unidentified Woman: Yes, yes.

911 Operator: Okay. This is 911. You’ve been involved in an accident.

Unidentified Woman: No.

911 Operator: Well, your car called in to us because it said you’d been involved in an accident. Are you sure everything’s okay?

Unidentified Woman: Everything’s okay.

911 Operator: Okay. Are you broke down?

Unidentified Woman: No, I’m fine. The guy that hit me—he did not turn.

911 Operator: Okay, so you have been involved in an accident.

Unidentified Woman: No, I haven’t.

911 Operator: Did you hit a car?

Unidentified Woman: No, I didn’t.

911 Operator: Did you leave the scene of an accident?

Unidentified Woman: No. I would never do anything like that.

Apparently, Bernstein did do something “like that.” She was soon caught and cited for leaving the scene of the accident. Her own car provided evidence of her guilt.

The Rise of “Sensorveillance”

Once upon a time, our things were just things. A bike was a tool for biking. It got you from one location to another, but it didn’t “know” more about your travels than any other inanimate object did. It was dumb in a comforting way, and we used it as intended. Today, a top-of-the-line bike can track your route and calculate your average speed along the way. Hop on an e-bike from a commercial bike share, and it will collect data for your trip, plus the trips of everyone else who used it that month.

These “smart” objects belong to what technologist Kevin Ashton named the Internet of Things. Ashton proposed adding radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and sensors to everyday objects, allowing them to collect data that could be fed into networked systems without human intervention. A sensor in a river could monitor the cleanliness of the water. A tag on a bottle of shampoo could trace its journey throughout the supply chain. Add enough sensors to enough objects and you can model the health of an entire ecosystem—or learn whether you’re sending too much of your inventory to Massachusetts and too little to Texas.

Ashton first theorized the Internet of Things (IoT) in the late 1990s. Today, the IoT goes well beyond his initial vision, including not only RFID tags but also sensors with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and GPS connections. These small, low-cost sensors record data about movement, heat, pressure, or location and can engage in two-way communication.

Of course, such a system is also, by necessity, a system of surveillance. “Sensorveillance”—a term I created to highlight the intersection of sensors and surveillance—is slowly becoming the default across the developed world.

Cellphone Surveillance Networks

Let’s start with phones. You’re probably not surprised that your cellphone company tracks your location; that’s how cellphones work. Both smartphones and “dumb” mobile phones use local cell towers, owned by cellphone companies, to connect you to your friends and family, which means those companies know which towers you are near at all times.

If you always carry your phone with you, your phone’s whereabouts—recorded as cell-site location information (CSLI)—reveal yours. One man, Timothy Carpenter, found this out the hard way after he and a group of associates set out to rob a series of electronics stores. Carpenter was the alleged ringleader, but he didn’t enter the stores himself. He served as the lookout, waiting in the car while his associates stuffed merchandise into bags.

It might have been hard for investigators to tie him to the crimes—if not for the fact that every minute he kept watch, his cellphone was pinging a local tower, logging his location. Using that information, the FBI was able to determine that he had been near each store during the exact moment of each robbery.

Cell signals are the tip of the proverbial data iceberg. If you have a smartphone, you’re almost certainly using something created by Google. Google makes money off advertising. The more Google knows about users, the better it can target ads to them. Google’s location services are on all Android phones, which use the company’s operating system, but they’re also on Google apps, including Google Maps and Gmail.

For years, all that location information ended up in what the company called the Sensorvault. The Sensorvault, as the name suggests, combined data from GPS, Bluetooth, cell towers, IP addresses, and Wi-Fi signals to create a powerful tracking system that could identify a phone’s location with great precision. As you might imagine, police saw it as a digital evidence miracle. In 2020, Google received more than 11,500 warrants from law enforcement seeking information from the Sensorvault.

“Sensorveillance”—a term I created to highlight the intersection of sensors and surveillance—is slowly becoming the default across the developed world.

In 2024, Google announced that it would no longer retain all of this data in the cloud. Instead, the geolocation information would be stored on individual devices, requiring police to get a warrant for a specific device. The demise of the Sensorvault came about through a change in corporate policy, which could be reversed. But at least for now, Google has made it significantly harder for police to access its data.

And while the Sensorvault was the biggest source of geolocational evidence, it is far from the only one. Even apps that have nothing to do with maps or navigation might nonetheless be collecting your location data. In one Pennsylvania case, prosecutors learned that a burglar used an iPhone flashlight app to search through a home, and they used the data from the app to prove he was in the home at the time of the break-in. These apps might be advertised as “free,” but they come with a hidden cost.

Cars, increasingly, collect almost as much information as phones. Mobile extraction devices can collect digital forensics about a car’s speed, when its airbags deployed, when its brakes were engaged, and where it was when all that happened. If you connect your phone to play Spotify or to read out your texts, then your call logs, contact lists, social media accounts, and entertainment selections can be downloaded directly from your vehicle. Because cars are involved in so many crimes (either as the instrument of the crime or as transportation), searches of this data are becoming more commonplace.

Even without physically extracting information from the car, police have other ways to get the data. After all, the car’s built-in telemetry system is sharing information with third parties. In addition to the usual personal information you give up when buying a car (name, address, phone number, email, Social Security number, driver’s license number), when you own a Stellantis-brand car, the company collects how often you use the car, your speed, and instances of acceleration or braking. Nissan asserts the right to collect information about “sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic [data]” in addition to “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.” Nissan’s privacy policy specifically reserves the right to provide this information to both data brokers and law enforcement.

The Law of Smart Things

The fact that government agents can glean so much information from our things does not mean that they should be able to do so at any time or for any reason. The U.S. Fourth Amendment—drafted in an era without electricity—protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects” against unreasonable search and seizure, but is naturally silent on the question of location data.

The first question is whether the data from our smart things should be constitutionally protected from police. In the language of the constitutional text, the smart device itself is an “effect”—a movable piece of personal property. But what about the data collected by the effect? Is the location data collected by your smartwatch considered part of the watch, or part of the person wearing the watch? Neither? Both?

To its credit, the U.S. Supreme Court has addressed some of the hard questions around digital tracking. In two cases, the first involving GPS tracking of a car and the second involving the CSLI tracking of Timothy Carpenter’s cellphone, the court has placed limits on the government’s ability to collect location data over the long term.

United States v. Jones involved GPS tracking of a car. Antoine Jones owned a nightclub in Washington, D.C. He also sold cocaine and found himself under criminal investigation for a large-scale drug distribution scheme. To prove Jones’s connection to “the stash house,” police placed a GPS device on his wife’s Jeep Cherokee. This was before GPS came standard in cars, so the device was physically attached to the undercarriage of the vehicle.

Data about Jones’s travels was recorded for 28 days, during which he visited the stash house multiple times. The prosecutors introduced the GPS data at trial, and Jones was found guilty. Jones appealed his conviction, arguing that the warrantless use of a GPS device to track his car violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

“When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance.” —the Supreme Court

In 2012, the Supreme Court held that a warrant was required, based on the reasoning that the physical placement of the GPS device on the Jeep was itself a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed regarding the physical search but went further, discussing the harms of long-term GPS tracking: “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

Timothy Carpenter’s ill-fated robbery spree gave the Supreme Court another chance to address the constitutional harms of long-term tracking. In their attempts to connect Carpenter to the six electronics stores that had been robbed, federal investigators requested 127 days of location data from two mobile phone carriers. The problem for the police, however, was that they had obtained the information on Carpenter without a judicial warrant.

Carpenter challenged the FBI’s acquisition of his CSLI, claiming that it violated his reasonable expectation of privacy. In a 5–4 opinion, the Supreme Court determined that the acquisition of long-term CSLI was a Fourth Amendment search, which required a warrant. As the Court stated in its 2018 ruling: “A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.... [W]hen the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance.”

Jones and Carpenter are helpful for setting the boundaries of location-based searches. But, in truth, the cases generate a lot more questions than answers. What about surveillance that is not long-term? At what point does the aggregation of details about a person’s location violate their reasonable expectation of privacy?

The Warrant According to Google

Okelle Chatrie’s case, in which police used Google’s location data to identify him as the mystery bank robber, offers a stark warning about the limits of Fourth Amendment protections under these circumstances. It’s also a terrific example of why “geofence” warrants, which request information within a certain geographic boundary, are appealing to police. From surveillance footage, detectives could see that the suspect had a phone to his ear when he walked into the bank. A geofence could identify who the suspect was, and likely where he came from and where he went. Google held the answer in its virtual vault. A warrant gave investigators the key.

The police cast a broad net. The geofence warrant asked for data on all the cellphones within a 150-meter radius, an area, as the court described it, “about three and a half times the footprint of a New York city block.” After receiving the police’s initial request for information on all the phones in the area, Google returned 19 anonymized numbers. Over the course of a three-step warrant process, the company narrowed those 19 phones down to three and then to one, which it revealed as belonging to Okelle Chatrie.

If the police wish to buy the data, just like an insurer or marketing firm might, how can you object? It’s not your data.

The three-step warrant process is a unique innovation in the digital evidence space. Google’s lawyers developed a procedure whereby detectives seeking targeted geolocation data had to file three separate requests, first requesting identifying numbers in an area, then narrowing the request based on other information, and finally obtaining an order to unmask the anonymous number (or numbers) by providing a name.

To be clear, Google—a private company—required the government to jump through these hoops because Google considered it important to protect its customers’ data. It was the company’s lawyers—not the courts or the government—who demanded these warrants.

Buying Data

Warrants provide at least some procedural barrier to data collection by police. If government agencies want to avoid that minor hassle, they can simply buy the data instead. By contracting with data-location services, several federal agencies have already done so.

The logic for this Fourth Amendment loophole is straightforward: You gave your data to a third-party company, and the company can use it as it wishes. If you own a car that is smart enough to collect driving analytics, you clicked some agreement saying the car company could use the data—study it, analyze it, and, if it wants, sell it. If you don’t want to give them data in the first place, that is okay (although it will likely result in less optimal functionality), but you cannot rightly complain when they use the data you gave them in ways that benefit them. If the police wish to buy the data, just like an insurer or marketing firm might, how can you object? It’s not your data.

Who Is to Blame?

Fears about the amount of personal information that could be revealed with long-term GPS surveillance have become reality. Today, police don’t need to plant a device to track your movements—they can rely on your car or phone to do it for them.

This happened because companies sold convenience and consumers bought it. So it might be tempting to blame ourselves. We’re the ones buying this technology. If we don’t want to be tracked, we can always go back to using paper maps and writing down directions by hand. If few of us are willing to make that trade, that’s on us.

But it’s not that easy. You may still be able to choose a dumb bike over a smart one, but a car that tracks you will soon be the only type of car you can buy. And while cars and data can, in theory, be separated, that’s not true for all our smart things. Without cell-signal tracking capabilities, a cellphone is just a paperweight. And in today’s world, living without a phone or a car is simply not practical for many people.

There are technological steps we can take toward protecting privacy. Companies can localize the data the sensors generate within the devices themselves, rather than in a central location like the Sensorvault. Similarly, the information that allows you to unlock your Apple iPhone via facial recognition stays localized on the phone. These are technological fixes, and positive ones. But even localized data is available to police with a warrant.

This is the puzzle of the digital age. We can’t—or don’t want to—avoid creating data, but that data, once created, becomes available for legal ends. The power to track every person is the perfect tool for authoritarianism. For every wondrous story about catching a criminal, there will be a terrifying story of tracking a political enemy or suppressing dissent. Such immense power can and will be abused.

Every generation of mobile networks, from 1G to 5G, has rewritten the rules of how the world lives and works. The coming 6G revolution, by decade’s end, will represent a new direction still, toward a universal data fabric where millions of agents collaborate in real-time across the digital and physical worlds.

The story of wireless connectivity is often told in speeds and standards—megabits per second, latency, and spectrum bands. But these generational shifts in device specs obscure a deeper pattern. Each generation, from 1G to 5G, rewrote the relationships between three elements: the Devices we carry, the Networks that connect them, and the Applications that run on them. We call this connectivity’s DNA. With 6G, that DNA of interconnection is about to change fundamentally.

As with the “7 Phases of the Internet”—an article we published with IEEE Spectrum last October—mobile networks’ six generations follow a similar arc toward system-wide intelligence. That arc traces through every generation of wireless, revealing a steady advancement of the reach and scope of connectivity itself.

1G Connected Analog Voices

Devices: Bulky, expensive, analog phones

Networks: Circuit-switched systems dedicated exlusively to voice

Applications: Telephony, and telephony only

The first-generation networks of the 1980s did precisely one thing: carry voices without wires. Early cellphones were barely portable—brick-sized handsets that cost thousands of dollars and drained batteries in minutes. Networks like the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) used circuit-switching, dedicating an entire channel to each call, which meant capacity was scarce and expensive. The only application was the phone call.

Yet 1G’s modest achievement was revolutionary. Conversations could now move with the person having it. Communication detached from location. A salesperson could close a deal from their car. A doctor could be reached on the go. The technology was clunky and expensive, and the calls were only local. Nevertheless, the conceptual shift was real: The network would now follow the user, not the other way around. Every generation since has built on that remarkable insight.

2G Merged Digital Voice with Messaging

Devices: Smaller, more affordable phones with better battery life

Networks: GSM, CDMA, and TDMA—digital networks that enabled global roaming

Applications: Texting (SMS) took off, becoming wireless’s first killer app

Wireless phones’ second generation, arriving in the 1990s, ushered in a quieter revolution: digitization. Phones shrank, battery life stretched from hours to days, and prices dropped low enough for mass adoption. Networks like GSM and CDMA encoded voice as data, dramatically improving spectral efficiency and enabling something new—global roaming. A handset purchased in Helsinki could work in Hong Kong.

But the big surprise was SMS. Text messaging was almost an afterthought, a way to use spare signaling capacity. Many users, especially younger ones, soon preferred it to voice calls. By decade’s end, billions of texts were crisscrossing the planet daily. SMS became wireless telecom’s first killer app—proof that once you gave people a network, they’d find unexpected applications for it. The lesson would repeat with every generation to come.

3G Gave Mobile Data a Platform

Devices: Early smartphones combined telephony with computing and cameras

Networks: Hundreds of kilobits-per-second bandwidth

Applications: Mobile email, browsing, and early app ecosystems

Third-generation mobile networks in the 2000s launched the mobile internet. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo’s i-Mode service showed what was possible: a handset that could browse websites, check email, and download ringtones. Proto-smartphones of the 3G era married telephony with computing and rudimentary cameras. Networks like Wideband CDMA and EV-DO delivered speeds measured in hundreds of kilobits per second—horse-and-buggy speeds by today’s standards, but enough to make mobile email usable.

The applications that emerged hinted at a future still out of reach. BlackBerry became synonymous with executive productivity. Early app stores began to pop up. But screens were small, interfaces clunky, and coverage spotty. 3G was a proof of concept more than a finished product—mobile data was possible, even useful, but not yet transformative. The infrastructure was in place. What the world needed now was a device that could exploit it.

4G Rolled Out a Completely Mobile Internet

Devices: Full-fledged smartphones became general-purpose computing platforms, with integrated GPS and app ecosystems

Networks: LTE delivered speeds up to 100x greater than 3G—making video streaming, maps, and video conferencing possible.

Applications: The app economy exploded, launching household names like Uber, Instagram, and WhatsApp

That device that could exploit the wireless network arrived with 4G. When long-term evolution (LTE) networks began rolling out around 2010, they delivered speeds an order of magnitude or more beyond 3G—fast enough to stream video, load maps instantly, and hold a video call without buffering. The network could now keep pace with what users wanted to do with it.

The smartphones that rode this wave were no longer communication tools with a few added features. 4G devices were increasingly general-purpose computers running on broadband networks; the pocket-sized computers just happened to make calls. High-resolution touchscreens, integrated GPS, accelerometers, and vast app ecosystems transformed mobile devices into something new: a platform. The phone became a remote control for daily life.

And daily life reorganized around it. Uber turned any car into a potential taxi. Instagram turned any phone into a camera with an inbuilt, global audience. WhatsApp replaced SMS texting and, in some countries, the phone call itself. Netflix moved from the living room to the subway. The app economy minted millionaires and disrupted industries.

4G democratized access to computing and services—a supercomputer in every pocket, connected to everything. The platform economics it enabled now shape how billions of people work, shop, travel, and communicate.

5G Pushed Connected Intelligence to the Edge

Devices: Smartphones with AI-specific hardware capable of trillions of operations per second

Networks: Programmable, sliceable infrastructure with low latency and edge computing capabilities

Applications: Smart factories, connected healthcare, augmented reality, and early, semi-autonomous systems

If 4G put the internet in your pocket, 5G began putting connected intelligence there too. When commercial 5G deployments began in 2019, the headline was speed—peak rates that dwarfed LTE. But the deeper shift was architectural. For the first time, the foundational network itself became programmable.

The devices reflected this ambition. The iPhone 12 and its contemporaries shipped with dedicated AI accelerators—Apple’s Neural Engine could execute trillions of operations per second. Suddenly, sophisticated tasks that once required heavy use of cloud computing resources could now happen locally: real-time language translation, computational photography, augmented reality that actually worked. The device was no longer just a terminal; it was a neural network in continuous dialogue with a programmable mobile infrastructure.

5G introduced concepts alien to earlier wireless generations. Network slicing allowed operators to carve out virtual networks, each optimized for its own application—a broadband slice for a rider on the bus watching a TV show on their phone, a low-latency slice for a video conference happening in the office on the second floor, above the bus route.

The applications followed. Smart factories deployed thousands of connected sensors. Hospitals began experimenting with remote diagnostics. AR glasses moved from novelty to tool. 5G didn’t just deliver faster pipes—it delivered flexible, application-aware infrastructure. The network had begun to sense—and react.

6G Will Usher In an Internet of AI agents

Devices: Digital and physical AI agents

Networks: AI-native fabrics fusing communication and sensing, via ground-based and non-terrestrial connections

Applications: Intelligent agents coordinating healthcare, transportation, and consumer applications globally

The transformation 6G promises is not incremental. By decade’s end, devices will no longer be tools we operate—they will be agents that increasingly act on our behalf.

AI agents already live inside our phones: Apple Intelligence summarizes emails and coordinates across apps; Samsung’s Galaxy AI translates conversations in real time; Google’s Gemini Nano processes queries without touching the cloud. These are early sketches of software that reasons, plans, and executes. Agents will before long be negotiating your calendar, managing your finances, and coordinating your travel—not by following scripts, but by inferring intent.

Physical AI agents will extend these capabilities into the physical world. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Cosmos, a foundation model trained on video and physics simulations to teach robots and vehicles how to navigate unpredictable environments. Using Cosmos, autonomous vehicles could negotiate intersections collaboratively, warehouse robots and robotic arms could coordinate with digital twins, medical devices could monitor patients and summon help before symptoms become emergencies. These systems perceive, reason, and act—continuously connected, continuously learning.

The network coordinating them will be unlike any generation previous. 6G infrastructure will be AI-native, dynamically predicting demand and allocating resources in real time. It will fuse communication with sensing (a.k.a. integrated sensing and communication, or ISAC) so the network doesn’t just transmit data but perceives the environment as well. Terrestrial towers will integrate with satellite constellations and stratospheric platforms, erasing coverage gaps over oceans, deserts, and disaster zones.

What emerges is not just faster wireless. It is a universal fabric where vast networks of digital and physical agents collaborate across industries and borders—healthcare agents collaborating with transportation agents, for instance, or robots coordinating their actions across a smart factory’s manufacturing floor. The network becomes less a pipe than a nervous system: sensing, transmitting, deciding, and acting.

Beyond Devices, Networks, and Apps

The history of wireless connectivity is a history of Devices, Networks, and Applications. Every generation from 1G through 6G redefined each of those three elements. However, 6G marks a departure point where devices, network elements, and applications begin to lose definition as discrete entities unto themselves. As the network grows more capable, it also paradoxically becomes less visible—connection without connectors.

From 1G’s brick-sized phones to 6G’s digital fabric, wireless has moved from analog voices to autonomous agents—present everywhere, noticed nowhere, continuously interconnecting digital and physical worlds.

Scientists don’t know much about how insects spend their time, but it’s well worth finding out. Insects play key roles in food webs and pollinate our crops, and social insects have a lot to teach us about the basics of friendship formation and communication. An ultralightweight radio-frequency tag designed to be worn by a paper wasp may help scientists get a glimpse at some basic behavioral information that’s long been missing: Where do the animals go when they leave the nest?

The tag is just 20 milligrams—about one third the weight of a drop of water. It was presented on 18 February at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco by doctoral student Yi Shen, who works in the lab of University of Michigan electrical engineer David Blaauw. University of Michigan computer scientist Hun-Seok Kim developed localization algorithms to help spot the tag. Their challenge was to make an ultralightweight transmitter that had sufficient range (1.45 kilometers) and accuracy (0.9 meters) to locate these tiny insects.

They’re not the only ones trying to make more accurate, less intrusive trackers for small critters. Cellular Tracking Technologies (CTT) of Cape May, N.J., sells a 60-mg tracker that’s being used to follow the migration patterns of Monarch butterflies. This tracker uses photovoltaics paired with a capacitor and transmits a Bluetooth signal. Anyone can download an app to help track the butterflies. Other versions of the tracker are designed to be worn by nocturnal bats and are fitted with batteries. To track birds that move during the night as well as during the day, CTT makes systems that combine photovoltaics with a rechargeable battery.

What Wasps Want

But even 60 mg would weigh down a wasp. “Every animal that has been tracked is much bigger than a wasp,” says Elizabeth Tibbetts, who studies their behavior and evolution at the University of Michigan. Tibbetts advised Blaauw on their design.

Honeybees and butterflies get a lot of attention, but “people forget to love wasps,” Tibbetts says. Paper wasps are a gardener’s friend. These pollinators eat nectar and prey on caterpillars. And they don’t typically sting humans.

They also have complex social lives and can even recognize each other’s faces. Tibbetts says life is different when you know that one wasp is Diana and the other is Susan, as opposed to a life where “everyone is just another wasp.” Wasps form friendships and partnerships, though some are loners. When they come out of hibernation in the spring, aggregations of about 10 wasps hang out, fight, scope each other out, and decide which others to join up with in cooperative groups. Some decide not to join a group.

Tibbetts says she and other researchers have been able to watch these complex behaviors because wasps usually return to their nests. Wasp researchers identify individuals by putting colored dots on them. “We don’t know anything about what they do when they’re not at their nests,” she says. Sometimes they don’t come back. Did Susan die, start her own nest, or join up with a different nest? With the right kind of tracker, Tibbetts hopes to find out.

Paper wasps weigh about 125 milligrams. They can carry heavy loads, ferrying caterpillars back to their nests. But Blaauw and Shen sought to keep the tag as light as possible, so that the animals can forage freely. They also had to make sure it would not interfere with the wasp’s aerodynamics, so it needed to be small in addition to lightweight.

Brendan Casey

Getting the right combination of light weight, long range, and positional accuracy was key. Jettisoning the battery was the first step. “Batteries don’t scale,” says Blaauw. A miniaturized battery can’t provide enough current to generate a strong radio signal. Capacitors, which store energy by accumulating charges on surfaces, do better at small scales, Blaauw says. “Really small capacitors can store enough charge now to send a radio pulse,” he says. The capacitor used in the wasp tag weighs just 0.86 mg. A tiny photovoltaic array slowly charges up the capacitor until it has enough energy to generate a radio signal.

The need to aggressively miniaturize the entire system created constraints on the circuit design, Shen says. During transmission, the signal can interfere with other parts of the circuit, including the controller and oscillator. So these parts are isolated from the rest of the circuit during transmission. Blaauw says designing the circuit for a specific biological application led them to come up with new design ideas that would not have occurred to them otherwise. “This problem led us to circuit innovations,” says Blaauw.

Michael Lanzone, a behavioral biologist and CEO of CTT, says the wasp tag is impressive. “A tag that weight gives the rest of us something to push for,” he says.

The 9-square-millimeter tag is attached to circuit board for programming.Yi Shen and David Blaauw

Shen says since paper wasps are active only in the warmer months, the team rushed to test their transmitter on one of the pollinators in time to submit their work to ISSCC. In addition to circuit designs, they used CT scans of a wasp to make sure the tag would fit on the insect and would be unlikely to interfere with its aerodynamics. A collaborator in the biology department put on two pairs of gloves to block the creature’s stinger and affixed the tag. The team took the animal outside, and it rapidly flew out of sight while they tracked it for about a kilometer and a half. So far, so good. This summer, they hope to conduct more tests.

Lanzone says he hopes the University of Michigan technology gets funding and further develops the tag to get it in the hands of researchers. “There’s a lot of cool tech that comes out of university labs, but then you don’t hear about it again. I’m excited to see if they can expand it to the next level.”

“I hope this thing works—it’s going to be so fun to use on wasps,” says Tibbetts.

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) using low earth orbit (LEO) satellites present unique technical challenges, from managing large satellite constellations to ensuring reliable communication links. In this webinar, we’ll explore how to address these complexities using comprehensive modeling and simulation techniques. Discover how to model and analyze satellite orbits, onboard antennas and arrays, transmitter power amplifiers (PAs), signal propagation channels, and the RF and digital receiver segments—all within an integrated workflow. Learn the importance of including every link component to achieve accurate, reliable system performance.

Highlights include:

• Modeling large satellite constellations
  
• Analyzing and visualizing time-varying visibility and link closure
• Using graphical apps for antenna analysis and RF component design
• Modeling PAs and digital predistortion
• Simulating interference effects in communication links

Taara started as a Google X moonshot spin-off aimed at connecting rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa with beams of light. Its newest product, debuting this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC), in Barcelona, aims at a different kind of connectivity problem: getting internet access into buildings in cities that already have plenty of fiber—just not where it’s needed.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.–based company transmits data via infrared lasers, the kind typically used in fiber-optic lines. However, Taara’s systems beam gigabits across kilometers over open air. “Every one of our Taara terminals is like a digital camera with a laser pointer,” says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara’s CEO. “The laser pointer is the one that’s shining the light on and off, and the digital camera is on the [receiving] side.”

Taara’s new system—Taara Beam, being demoed at MWC’s “Game Changers” platform—prioritizes efficiency and a compact size. Each Beam unit is the size of a shoebox and weighs just 8 kilograms, and can be mounted on a utility pole or the side of a building. According to the company, Beam will deliver fiber-competitive speeds of up to 25 gigabits per second with low, 50-microsecond latency.

Taara’s former parent company, Krishnaswamy says, is also these days a prominent client. Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., is near a landing point for a major submarine fiber-optic cable.

“One of the Google buildings was literally a few hundred meters away from the landing spot in California,” he says. “Yet they couldn’t connect the two points because of land rights and right-of-way issues.… Without digging and trenching into federal land, we are able to connect the two points at tens of gigabits per second. And so many Googlers are actually using our technology today.”

A Fingernail-Size Chip Shrinks Taara’s Tech

Krishnaswamy says his laser pointer and digital camera analogy doesn’t quite do justice to the engineering problems the company had to tackle to fit all the gigabit-per-second photonics into a weather-hardened, shoebox-size device.

The Taara Beam must steer its laser link across kilometers of open air so that the Beam device can receive it on the other end of the line. Effectively, that means the device’s laser can’t be off target by more than a few degrees.

Beam approaches the steering problem by physically shaping the laser pulse itself. Taara’s photonics chip splits the laser beam carrying the data into more than a thousand separate streams, delaying each one by a closely controlled amount. The result is a laser wavefront that can be pointed anywhere the system directs.

Krishnaswamy likens this to the effects of pebbles tossed into a pond. Dropping pebbles in a careful sequence, he says, can create interference patterns in the waves that ripple outward. “These thousand emitters are equivalent to a thousand stones,” he says. “And I’m able to delay the phase of each of them. That allows me to steer [the wavefront] whichever direction I want it to go.”

The idea behind this technology—called a phased array—is not new. But turning it into a commercial optical communications device, at Taara Beam’s scale and range, is where others have so far fallen short.

“Radio-frequency phased arrays like Starlink antennas are well known,” Krishaswamy says. “But to do this with optics, and in a commercial way, not just an experimental way, is hard.”

This isn’t how the company started out, however.

In 2019, when the company was still a Google X subsidiary, Krishaswamy says, Taara launched its first commercial product, the traffic-light-size Lightbridge. Like Beam, Lightbridge boasts fiberlike connection speeds, and it has to date been deployed in more than 20 countries around the world—including the Google campus.

Taara’s upgraded model, Lightbridge Pro, launched last month and is also on display this week at MWC. Lightbridge Pro adds one crucial capability Lightbridge lacked: an automatic backup. When fog or rain disrupts Lightbridge’s optical link, the system switches traffic to a paired radio connection. When conditions clear, Lightbridge Pro switches traffic back to the faster laser-data connection. The company says that combination keeps the link up 99.999 percent of the time—less than 5 minutes of downtime in a year.

Both Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro mechanically position their mirrors, achieving three degrees of pointing accuracy. An onboard tracking system inside the unit also relocks the beams automatically whenever the unit gets shifted or jostled.

The Future of Taara Beam Deployment

Krishaswamy says that while Taara continues to install and support Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro, he hopes the company can also begin installing Taara Beam units for select early customers as soon as later this year.

Mohamed-Slim Alouini, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, says the bandwidth of free-space optical (FSO) technologies like Taara Beam and Lightbridge still leaves plenty of room to grow.

“Like any physical medium, free-space optics has a capacity limit,” Alouini says. “But laboratory experiments have already demonstrated fiberlike performance with terabits-per-second data rates over FSO links. The real gap is not in raw capacity but in practical deployment.”

Atul Bhatnagar, formerly of Nortel and Cambium Networks, and currently serving as advisor to Taara, sees room for optimism even when it comes to practical deployment.

“Current Taara architecture is capable of delivering hundreds of gigabits per second over the next several years,” he says.

Krishnaswamy adds that Beam’s compact form factor makes it suitable for more than just terrestrial applications.

“We’ll continue to do the work that we’re doing on the ground. But to the extent that space solutions are taking off, we would love to be part of that,” he says. “Data center-to-data center in space is something we are really looking at using for this technology.

“Because when you have multiple servers up in space, you can’t run fiber from one to the other,” he adds. “But these photonics modules will be able to point and track and transmit gigabits and gigabits of data to each other.”

For now, Taara’s ambitions are closer to Earth—specifically to the buildings, utility poles, and city blocks where fiber still hasn’t arrived. Which is, after all, where the company’s story began.

UPDATE 4 March 2026: The weight of the Taara Beam (8 kg) and the launch year of the Taara Lightbridge (2019) were both corrected.

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Audio Precision.

Bluetooth started as a simple wireless connection between a phone and a headset. Since its inception, it has become the invisible scaffolding for music, calls, gaming, and hearing assistance across consumer and professional devices alike. Bluetooth’s evolution to support more use cases has been driven not by a single breakthrough but by a steady accumulation of radio innovations, codecs, transport schemes, and power management strategies that together enhance the user experience with wireless audio. Today, a new architectural baseline—Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio—promises low-power, high quality, and scalable audio delivery to open up the standard for an even wider range of applications [1][2].

Evolution of Bluetooth Radio Technologies

The original Basic Rate (BR) radio introduced with Bluetooth 1.0 in 1999 used a Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) at 1 Msym/s, hopping through 79 channels in the 2.4 GHz band with alternating transmission directions in a tight time-division duplex rhythm. The short-range robustness and reliability afforded by this technology helped gain performance at par with traditional cable-based devices.

In 2003, the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) arrived as the enabling standard for stereo audio streaming over Bluetooth Classic, marking the technology’s expansion beyond voice into music playback. A2DP uses the Audio/Video Distribution Transport Protocol (AVDTP) for stream management and mandates the Sub-Band Codec (SBC) as its baseline audio compression format. The SBC codec employs 4- or 8-band analysis/synthesis filter banks with adaptive bit allocation, spanning bitrates from 128 to 345 kbps for stereo content. Embedded DSP work showed how to optimize SBC implementation—Weighted Overlap Add (WOLA) filter banks, fixed-point pipelines, and real-time decoding that is audibly indistinguishable from floating point reference implementations while consuming fewer MIPS and milliwatts [3].

In 2004, Bluetooth 2.0 introduced Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) that moved payloads to π/4 DQPSK or 8 DPSK modulation to boost gross throughput to 2–3 Mb/s, while retaining the GFSK for packet headers. This innovation boosted stereo streaming quality and adoption during the decade.

Around 2010, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 1 M PHY technology was introduced via Bluetooth 4.0. This new radio technology continued to use GFSK but tuned for low duty cycles and intermittent bursts. This fundamental difference with BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate) led to common usage of the term “Bluetooth Classic” for Bluetooth 1.0 to distinguish it from BLE.

Isochronous Transport Architecture

In late 2016, Bluetooth 5.0 introduced the LE 2M PHY, doubling the symbol rate to 2 Msym/s. For a healthy link margin, halving a packet’s airtime was found to reduce collision exposure and lower the energy delivered/bit. By 2020, Bluetooth 5.2 or Bluetooth LE Audio radically shifted the focus from continuous streaming to a transport designed explicitly around deadlines. LE (Low Energy) Audio leverages the existing LE 1M and LE 2M PHYs but carries audio over isochronous channels—slots with timing commitments. The isochronous channel architecture comes in two forms. Connected Isochronous Streams (CIS) are unicast flows whose parameters (intervals, subevents, retransmissions) can be tuned to meet frame deadlines with bounded jitter, enabling the radio to sleep predictably between bursts while the application knows precisely when a frame will arrive. A systematic review of BLE performance corroborates that output and latency in the real world are bounded as much by connection interval, event length, and retransmissions as by the raw symbol rate; under the right parameters, faster PHYs reduce radioactive time and improve energy efficiency, while coded long-range modes trade airtime for robustness in harsher channels [1].

Broadcast Isochronous Streams (BIS)—commercially branded as Auracast—extend that scheduling to one-to-many transmissions, enabling connectionless audio delivery to unlimited receivers [2][7].

This difference in architecture over continuous streams requires careful selection of intervals, packetization, codec forming and appropriate models to determine parameters that meet deadlines without wasting airtime. Markov chain analyses of CIS—validated via simulation—translate developer choices (intervals, subevents, retransmission counts) into quantitative predictions for packet loss rate (PLR), backlog, delay, throughput, and average power consumption. [7]

The LC3 Codec Advantage

LE Audio’s Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3) fundamentally shifts the bitrate-quality-complexity balance. Peer-reviewed listening tests across speech and music demonstrate that LC3 delivers superior perceived quality compared with SBC and mSBC at roughly half the bitrate; it also provides robust packet loss concealment and flexible frame sizes, including low-latency modes that make the encoding delay a smaller slice of the end‑to-end budget [2]. The benefits are practical: lower bitrate shrinks airtime, which reduces collision risk; shorter frames pair cleanly with CIS scheduling so deadlines are easier to meet; the codec’s computational footprint is modest enough for miniature devices [2].

Audio Precision provides high-performance audio analyzers, accessories, and applications that have helped engineers worldwide design, validate, characterize, and manufacture audio products for over 40 years.

Hearing Aids: Power-Constrained Wireless Audio

Modern hearing devices are a complex assembly of multiple microphones, digital signal processors, and miniature power sources. Except for Completely-in-Canal (CIC) and Invisible-in-Canal (IIC) designs, which are so small they fit entirely within the ear canal, most hearing aids incorporate two or more microphones to support directional processing, beamforming, and noise reduction. Audio output is provided by a single electro-acoustic transducer. The compact form factor severely limits battery capacity, making energy efficiency critical.

Compared to Bluetooth Classic (A2DP/HFP), LE Audio improves energy efficiency through three broad mechanisms: the LC3 codec achieves equivalent perceived audio quality at significantly lower bitrates than the SBC codec used in Bluetooth Classic; the LE 1M and 2M PHYs reduce on-air time per packet relative to BR/EDR; and Connected Isochronous Streams (CIS) enable precise scheduling, allowing the radio to sleep between transmissions, whereas BR/EDR audio requires longer active radio periods.

BLE‑compliant wake‑up receivers (WuRx) monitor the air with micro/nano-watt sensitivity and trigger the main radio with packet preambles. Reported designs demonstrate sensitivity to extremely weak radio signals (down to −80 dBm), with within‑bit duty cycling that trades latency for power from hundreds of microseconds to seconds [4]. Sleep scheduling techniques primarily apply heuristics for periodic check‑ins, event‑driven wake-ups, clustering, and time division to stretch lifetime while meeting QoS targets [5][6].

From True Wireless Stereo to Coordinated Sets

Bluetooth Classic’s A2DP supports only a single audio stream. In Bluetooth Classic’s True Wireless Stereo (TWS) devices, one earbud acts as the primary, receiving the stereo stream from the phone and relaying audio to the secondary earbud—a forwarding or relay architecture. The additional transmission hop adds latency to the secondary earbud, while increasing power consumption in the primary.

LE Audio eliminates this limitation entirely. The technology’s dual CIS capability lets the phone send synchronized left and right streams directly to both earbuds. This architectural shift enables independent CIS connections from the phone to the left and right earbuds or hearing aids, enabling synchronized stereo delivery without relaying.

Discovery and pairing have evolved to match multi‑device use. The Coordinated Set Identification Service (CSIS) allows two earbuds—or two hearing aids—to be discovered and managed as a coordinated set rather than independently, with resolvable identifiers and set‑level locks. While peer‑reviewed empirical literature on CSIS is thin, timing and carrier synchronization theory is mature: clock‑offset estimation, jitter control, phase‑locked loops, buffer alignment, and recovery strategies hold binaural timing within tens of milliseconds for lip‑sync and spatial imaging [9].

Gaming Headsets: Low Latency With Bidirectional Stereo

Gaming represents a demanding stress test for wireless audio. Bluetooth Classic’s Headset Profile (HSP) and Hands-Free Profile (HFP) support bidirectional audio for voice communication but are fundamentally limited: they transmit only in mono with a maximum sampling rate of 16 kHz, restricting both spatial audio quality and voice fidelity.

LE Audio Unicast Voice transforms this scenario by supporting stereo audio with sampling rates up to 32 kHz, significantly improving spatial audio and speech quality for gaming while maintaining voice communication with other players. End‑to‑end latency often must stay under a few tens of milliseconds for responsive play and coherent spatial sound. LC3’s shorter frames and lower bitrates shrink codec delay; tuned CIS parameters preserve deadlines while limiting retransmissions to useful values; beamforming improves capture quality for bidirectional voice without ballooning computational cost [2][7].

Audio Precision’s new Bluetooth® 5 module provides an interface to audio devices using the latest version of the Bluetooth specification, including LE Audio devices utilizing Unicast and Auracast™. Adobe Stock

Public Broadcast Audio: Auracast

Bluetooth Classic supports only one active audio connection and typically provides a range of approximately 10 meters, making it fundamentally unsuitable for broadcast scenarios such as lecture halls, churches, gyms, and airports.

LE Audio introduces the Broadcast Isochronous Stream (BIS), commercially branded as Auracast, enabling true one-to-many audio transmission. Multiple hearing aids, headphones, and earbuds can receive the same broadcast, which may be public (e.g., airport announcements) or private (encrypted, non-discoverable, optional password protection). Typical Auracast ranges extend up to 30 meters indoors and 100 meters outdoors, depending on environment and configuration.

BIS’s connectionless nature scales easily to unlimited receivers without pairing overhead; isochronous delivery tolerates packet loss well through forward error correction and interleaving; and the unidirectional transmission eliminates return traffic, reducing radio congestion. Assistive listening studies report that bypassing room acoustics and delivering audio directly can improve signal‑to‑noise ratios by 15–20 dB, making announcements comprehensible and lectures clearer [8].

Ensuring It Sounds Good in, on or Over the Listener’s Ear

LE Audio delivers the music or voice signal more efficiently than its predecessor, Bluetooth Classic. Audio engineers still need to verify their devices’ audio performance as experienced by the end user.

The listener’s pinna, the external part of the ear, and ear canal are a critical part of the playback system. For example, the low-frequency response and the effectiveness of active noise-cancellation are highly dependent on the seal between the device and the listener’s ear canal. Similarly, on-ear and over-ear headphones interact with the listener’s pinnas.

Anthropomorphic test fixtures—most notably GRAS KEMAR (Knowles Electronics Manikin for Acoustic Research) head and torso simulators—incorporate soft, deformable anthropomorphic pinnas that replicate realistic insertion and sealing conditions. These allow accurate replication of insertion depth, sealing, low-frequency response, and ANC performance [10][12].

Gaming headsets both receive and send audio. Just like music headphones, gaming headset testing benefits from fixtures with a human-like pinna to ensure repeatable measurement of ear-pad interaction. The headset’s microphone can be either a traditional boom microphone positioned close to the mouth or an array of microphones located farther away on the ear cups incorporating beamforming to isolate the wearer’s voice from any background noise. Test fixtures use an artificial mouth and a microphone positioned at the Mouth Reference Point (MRP) according to ITU-T standards to evaluate microphone performance under realistic speech and background noise conditions [10].

For testing of devices intended as broadcast receivers, an integrated test system with Auracast broadcast capability—like the Audio Precision Bluetooth 5 module—proves invaluable.

Conclusion

Bluetooth audio is no longer defined by a single radio or a single profile. It is defined by a timed pipeline—a codec that makes better sound with fewer bits, a transport that guarantees when those bits arrive, a radio that can sleep most of the time, and front‑end processing that gives the codec an easier job.

Hearing aids illustrate the payoff: arrays and beamformers improve intelligibility first; LC3 compresses with low delay; CIS schedules delivery; the radio sleeps; batteries last. Enhancements in other applications, such as gaming and public broadcast, further strengthen the case for adoption of this cutting-edge technology.

While Bluetooth audio began as a low-bandwidth, mono voice technology over Basic Rate (BR) radio in 1999, more than 25 years of evolution has produced a fundamental architectural shift. LE Audio replaces continuous point-to-point streams with scheduled, low-power, scalable audio delivery, enabling new classes of devices and use cases. The standards are ready, and audio test systems like Audio Precision’s Bluetooth 5 module are updated to incorporate the new transmission technology; the rest is execution—deploying LE Audio broadly so audio becomes instant, clear, and inclusive [2][7].

References

[1] Tosi, J., Taffoni, F., Santacatterina, M., Sannino, R., & Formica, D. (2017). Performance evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: A systematic review. Sensors, 17(12), Article 2898. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17122898

[2] Schnell, M., Riedl, M., Löllmann, H., & Multrus, M. (2021). LC3 and LC3plus: The new audio transmission standards for wireless communication. Proceedings of the AES 150th Convention, Online.

[3] Hermann, D., Herre, J., & Teichmann, R. (2004). Low-power implementation of the Bluetooth subband audio codec. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Montreal, QC, Canada.

[4] Abdelhamid, M. R., Chen, R., Cho, J., Chandrakasan, A. P., & Wentzloff, D. D. (2018). A −80 dBm BLE-compliant, FSK wake-up receiver with system and within-bit duty-cycling for scalable power and latency. Proceedings of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), San Diego, CA, USA.

[5] Mutar, M. S., Mohammed, A. H., & Abdulkareem, M. B. (2024). A survey of sleep scheduling techniques in wireless sensor networks for maximizing energy efficiency. AIP Conference Proceedings.

[6] Mikhaylov, K., & Karvonen, H. (2020). Wake-up radio enabled BLE wearables: Empirical and analytical evaluation of energy efficiency. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT).

[7] Yan, Z., Xu, H., & Shen, Z. (2024). Modeling and analysis of the performance for CIS-based Bluetooth LE Audio [Preprint].

[8] Kaufmann, T. B., Weller, T., Stiefelhagen, R., & Adiloglu, K. (2023). Requirements for mass adoption of assistive listening technology by the general public. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02523

[9] Nasir, A. A., Durrani, S., Mehrpouyan, H., Blostein, S. D., & Kennedy, R. A. (2015). Timing and carrier synchronization in wireless communication systems: A survey and classification of research in the last five years. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02032

[10] Okorn, E., & Wulf-Andersen, P. (2019). Acoustic test fixtures: From KEMAR and beyond! The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(4), 2815. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5136656

[11] An analytical model of Bluetooth performance considering physical and link-layer effects. (2021). IEEE Xplore.

[12] IEC/ITU acoustic standards literature for headphone and earbud testing. (n.d.). Indexed in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and AIP Conference Proceedings.

Disclosure: AI tools were used by Wiley, which produced this sponsored article, to skim through research literature for technical insights on the evolution and state of the art of Bluetooth technology. AI was also used to polish the text for conciseness and technical accuracy.

Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16.

In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law.

This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.

How Does Age Enforcement Actually Work?

Most age-restriction laws follow a familiar pattern. They set a minimum age and require platforms to take “reasonable steps” or “effective measures” to prevent underage access. What these laws rarely spell out is how platforms are supposed to tell who is actually over the line. At the technical level, companies have only two tools.

The first is identity-based verification. Companies ask users to upload a government ID, link a digital identity, or provide documents that prove their age. Yet in many jurisdictions, 16-year-olds do not have IDs. In others, IDs exist but are not digital, not widely held, or not trustworthy. Storing copies of identity documents also creates security and misuse risks.

The second option is inference. Platforms try to guess age based on behavior, device signals, or biometric analysis, most commonly facial age estimation from selfies or videos. This avoids formal ID collection, but it replaces certainty with probability and error.

In practice, companies combine both. Self-declared ages are backed by inference systems. When confidence drops, or regulators ask for proof of effort, inference escalates to ID checks. What starts as a light-touch checkpoint turns into layered verification that follows users over time.

What Are Platforms Doing Now?

This pattern is already visible on major platforms.

Meta has deployed facial age estimation on Instagram in multiple markets, using video-selfie checks through third-party partners. When the system flags users as possibly underaged, it prompts them to record a short selfie video. An AI system estimates their age and, if it decides they are under the threshold, restricts or locks the account. Appeals often trigger additional checks, and misclassifications are common.

TikTok has confirmed that it also scans public videos to infer users’ ages. Google and YouTube rely heavily on behavioral signals tied to viewing history and account activity to infer age, then ask for government ID or a credit card when the system is unsure. A credit card functions as a proxy for adulthood, even though it says nothing about who is actually using the account. The Roblox games site, which recently launched a new age-estimate system, is already suffering from users selling child-aged accounts to adult predators seeking entry to age-restricted areas, Wired reports.

For a typical user, age is no longer a one-time declaration. It becomes a recurring test. A new phone, a change in behavior, or a false signal can trigger another check. Passing once does not end the process.

How Do Age-Verification Systems Fail?

These systems fail in predictable ways.

False positives are common. Platforms identify minors as adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage. They lock accounts, sometimes for days. False negatives also persist. Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs.

The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks. Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators. So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID. Each retained record becomes a potential breach target.

Scale that experience across millions of users, and you bake the privacy risk into how platforms work.

Is Age Verification Compatible With Privacy Law?

This is where emerging age-restriction policy collides with existing privacy law.

Modern data-protection regimes all rest on similar ideas: Collect only what you need, use it only for a defined purpose, and keep it only as long as necessary.

Age enforcement undermines all three.

To prove they are following age-verification rules, platforms must log verification attempts, retain evidence, and monitor users over time. When regulators or courts ask whether a platform took reasonable steps, “We collected less data” is rarely persuasive. For companies, defending themselves against accusations of neglecting to properly verify age supersedes defending themselves against accusations of inappropriate data collection.

It is not an explicit choice by voters or policymakers, but instead a reaction to enforcement pressure and how companies perceive their litigation risk.

Less Developed Countries, Deeper Surveillance

Outside wealthy democracies, the trade-off is even starker.

Brazil’s Statute of Child-rearing and Adolescents (ECA in Portuguese) imposes strong child-protection duties online, while its data-protection law restricts data collection and processing. Now providers operating in Brazil must adopt effective age-verification mechanisms and can no longer rely on self-declaration alone for high-risk services. Yet they also face uneven identity infrastructure and widespread device sharing. To compensate, they rely more heavily on facial estimation and third-party verification vendors.

In Nigeria many users lack formal IDs. Digital service providers fill the gap with behavioral analysis, biometric inference, and offshore verification services, often with limited oversight. Audit logs grow, data flows expand, and the practical ability of users to understand or contest how companies infer their age shrinks accordingly. Where identity systems are weak, companies do not protect privacy. They bypass it.

The paradox is clear. In countries with less administrative capacity, age enforcement often produces more surveillance, not less, because inference fills the void of missing documents.

How Do Enforcement Priorities Change Expectations?

Some policymakers assume that vague standards preserve flexibility. In the U.K., then–Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan, argued in 2023 that requiring certain online safety outcomes without specifying the means would avoid mandating particular technologies. Experience suggests the opposite.

When disputes reach regulators or courts, the question is simple: Can minors still access the platform easily? If the answer is yes, authorities tell companies to do more. Over time, “reasonable steps” become more invasive.

Repeated facial scans, escalating ID checks, and long-term logging become the norm. Platforms that collect less data start to look reckless by comparison. Privacy-preserving designs lose out to defensible ones.

This pattern is familiar, including online sales-tax enforcement. After courts settled that large platforms had an obligation to collect and remit sales taxes, companies began continuous tracking and storage of transaction destinations and customer location signals. That tracking is not abusive, but once enforcement requires proof over time, companies build systems to log, retain, and correlate more data. Age verification is moving the same way. What begins as a one-time check becomes an ongoing evidentiary system, with pressure to monitor, retain, and justify user-level data.

The Choice We Are Avoiding

None of this is an argument against protecting children online. It is an argument against pretending there is no trade-off.

Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving a third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they inherit the same structural flaw: Many users who are legally old enough to use a platform do not have government ID. In countries where the minimum age for social media is lower than the age at which ID is issued, platforms face a choice between excluding lawful users and monitoring everyone. Right now, companies are making that choice quietly, after building systems and normalizing behavior that protects them from the greater legal risks. Age-restriction laws are not just about kids and screens. They are reshaping how identity, privacy, and access work on the Internet for everyone.

The age-verification trap is not a glitch. It is what you get when regulators treat age enforcement as mandatory and privacy as optional.