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Analysts project seven-figure growth for in-building wireless market – RCR Wireless News

Enterprise demand represents huge opportunity for in-building wireless solution providers

Right up there with electricity and water, in-building wireless connectivity is now expected, leading to its common description as the fourth utility. As carriers scale back investment on connecting anything but marquee venues like sports stadiums, enterprises of all sizes and focuses are realizing the importance of ubiquitous cellular access.

To quantify this trend, let’s take a look at two research reports that project the market value of in-building wireless.

MarketsandMarkets pegged the value of the in-building wireless market at $4.83 billion in 2015, and expects a compound annual growth rate of 28.1%; that means the market will be worth $16.71 billion in 2020. “In terms of regions, North America is expected to be the largest market in terms of revenue contribution, while [Asia Pacific] is expected to experience increased market traction during the forecast period,” the authors wrote.

ABI Research agrees that North America will lead the spend on in-building wireless, but projected a more conservative value of $9 billion by 2020. That still represents a doubling of revenue, the authors point out.

“North America will continue to be the region with the most distributed antenna system spend,” said Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research, calling out sports venues, transport hubs and health care facilities as the leading investors in DAS, followed by retail and hospitality.

Marshall said the APAC region will be “the fastest growing region,” going from one-fifth of the total market in 2016 to one-third by 2020, adding China would dominate spending.

These market trends are in lock-step with industry discussions with vendors looking to better serve enterprise customers, which often starts with market education and need identification.

Tony Eigen, an ExteNet marketing manager, said on the sidelines of the recent HetNet Expo in Houston, “I think there’s this whole kind of level of education that’s needed. What does wireless really mean? Then, ultimately, the discussions are around how does that get paid for.”

In terms of verticals, commercial real estate, including retail, is seen as a major growth area.

Paula Ramey, Simon Property Group director of field technology operations, says wireless infrastructure plays a big role in supporting the company’s goal of creating destination shopping venues.

“The thing that we’ve been challenged with, obviously, over the years with the increase in technology customers carry around around on a regular basis, is how do we make sure they’re fully connected when they visit our properties?” Ramey said. “The combination of both 4G LTE, cellular and Wi-Fi is a very important amenity to us for our customers. We’re also in a situation where it’s also become a business delivery vehicle for us.”

This article originally appeared at: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20161110/hetnet-news/in-building-wireless-market-tag17.

Find My AirPods: Apple Now Helps You Locate Your Little Lost Earphone

Apple’s AirPods free you from the tyranny and tangle of corded headphones. They also trap you in a constant fear that you’ll lose them and have to pony up $69 to replace one.

On Tuesday, however, Apple announced a feature that uses the earphones’ wireless technology to track their whereabouts when you inevitably misplace the tiny things. It’s integrated into the Find My iPhone app in iOS 10.3, which reaches software developers…

Machine learning could finally crack the 4,000-year-old Indus script

Pitch Decks Galore: A Curated List of Public Startup Pitch Decks

What Is Docker Swarm?

As more and more people jump on the Docker bandwagon, more and more people are wondering just exactly how we scale this thing. Some will have heard of Docker-Compose, some will have heard of Docker Swarm, and then there’s some folks out there with their Kubernetes and Mesos clusters.

Docker Swarm became native to Docker in v1.12 and makes container orchestration super simple. Not only that, but each node is accessible via the hostname due to the built in DNS and Service Discovery. With it’s overlay network and inbuilt routing mesh, all the nodes can accept connections on the published ports for any of the services running in the Swarm. This basically gives you the access to multiple-nodes and treat them as one.

Just to top it off, Docker Swarm has built-in load balancing. Send a request to any of the nodes and it will send the request in a round-robin fashion to all the containers running the requested service. Simply amazing, and I’m going to show you how you can get started with this great technology.

For my example, I’ve chosen a PHP application (cue the flames), it’s a great way to show how a real-world app may be scaled using Terraform, Packer & Docker Swarm on Openstack.

Check out the link below to carry on reading!

http://bobbyjason.co.uk/blog/252/what-is-docker-swarm-and-how-to-use-it-to-scale-a-simple-php-app-along-with-terraform-packer-on-cloud-native-infrastructure-powered-by-openstack/

Cost of offshore wind power in UK has dropped 32 percent in four years

The cost of offshore wind power in Britain has fallen to £97 ($121) per MWh. According to an industry report (PDF), this represents a 32 percent drop from £142 ($178) four years ago.

The Offshore Wind Programme Board (OWPB), a part of The Crown Estate, which manages the UK seabed, released its report on Tuesday. The report noted that cost reductions had come primarily through the development of advanced technology and the adoption of larger turbines, as well as increased competition and, to a lesser extent, decreased cost of capital. “7MW and 8MW turbines have become standard for new projects,” the report stated. That’s consistent with a paper published two months ago in Nature Energy showing that the cost of wind power could be reduced by 24 to 30 percent by 2030 due to the installation of bigger turbines.

The new numbers mean that offshore wind energy has reached a government target—beneath £100 per MWh by 2020—four years earlier than was expected.

OWPB noted that it expects the cost of offshore wind energy to “continue to fall over the next decade.”

Notably, the cost per MWh is now within striking distance of nuclear energy in the UK. According to Reuters, the UK government awarded a contract to French energy company EDF to build the Hinkley C reactor project in southwest England at £92.50 per MWh. Britain has ambitious goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels by 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.

Reuters also notes that the UK has invested more than £9.5 billion ($11.8 billion) in offshore wind since 2010. The UK will nearly double that investment over the next five years.

Compared to onshore wind installations, offshore wind benefits from steadier winds and, generally, sites offer close proximity to major metropolitan areas. Offshore turbines can also be built bigger than onshore turbines. The downside is that installation of offshore turbines is generally much more expensive, given the submarine cables that need to be installed to get all that power to land.

Offshore wind farms have been built in Europe for years now, while the US has fallen behind on that front. But that could be changing. Block Island’s offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island came online at the end of last year, and other projects along the Atlantic coast are currently in the works.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/cost-of-offshore-wind-power-in-uk-has-dropped-32-percent-in-four-years/

Can a powerful new quantum computer convince skeptics of its worth?

The quantum computing company D-Wave Systems has announced that its latest device features twice the computing capacity of its previous model, which it claims makes it incredibly fast compared to conventional hardware. But even so, the company still faces a struggle in convincing parts of the scientific community of its worth.

D-Wave’s new 2000Q quantum computer contains, appropriately, 2,000 qubits, the quantum equivalent of binary bits. That’s twice as many as the previous generation of its hardware, which has already found a home in labs at Lockheed Martin and a collaborative venture between NASA and Google, among others.

The new model is, according to D-Wave, no slouch. The company has tested its performance on specialized problems that are well-suited to quantum devices—such as optimization—and compared them to results achieved by similar algorithms running on CPU- and GPU-based devices. It claims to beat a single CPU and a 2,500-core GPU system by a factor of at least 1,000 in terms of computation time.

Some members of the quantum computing community will be skeptical of the claims. When D-Wave unveiled its first device, some scientists questioned whether it was true quantum computing. Google researchers last year claimed to have demonstrated that the device really works, but, as our own Tom Simonite pointed out at the time, the algorithms used during that demonstration may have favored D-Wave over the conventional computer it was competing against.

And as Nature explains, the relatively simple qubits used by D-Wave—which have allowed it to build the first commercially available quantum computers—are fragile, and lose their quantum states more easily than those being developed in other labs. That leads some scientists to doubt that the D-Wave devices will ever provide the exponential leap in computational power promised by quantum computing.

Even so, the new computer already has a buyer. D-Wave says that a company called Temporal Defense Systems has purchased a 2000Q device, valued at $15 million, and intends to use it for cybersecurity applications. And numerous research groups are using the company’s older devices.

Meanwhile, other researchers—at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and many universities—are working hard to develop their own quantum computers, but have yet to produce a commercial product. For its part, D-Wave says that it plans to keep doubling the number of its qubits in its devices every two years—whatever researchers have to say.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603438/can-a-powerful-new-quantum-computer-convince-the-skeptics/?set=603427

Why Google Killed 1.7 Billion Ads Last Year – And Kicked 200 Publishers Off Its Network

It might seem strange for a web company that makes virtually all its money from advertising to be blocking more and more ads from its site, but that’s exactly what Google Inc. is doing.

Last year, the search giant killed some 1.7 billion ads that violated its advertising policies, the company said today, more than double the number in 2015–and far more than the 130 million in spiked in 2011. The reason, once you think a minute about it, makes sense: Fraudulent, malware-carrying or even just plain annoying ads drive people way, and then they don’t see the ads that are legitimate. If that happens, Google really loses.

Scott Spencer, Google’s director of product management for sustainable ads–that’s really his title–said Google did two main things last year to rid its search engine of bad ads. First, it expanded the kinds of ads it won’t allow. In July, for instance, it banned payday loan ads, disabling more than 5 million of them by year’s end.

Second, it improved its technology to discover and disable unwanted ads faster. For instance, Google is catching more “trick to click” ads that try to fool people into downloading malware, catching and stopping 112 million of them, six times as many as in 2015.

And in a move that addresses the recent concern about “fake news,” Google also tightened its policies on the 2 million or so publishers in its AdSense ad network to ban website owners who deceive people into thinking they’re real news sites. From November to December 2016, Spencer said, Google reviewed 550 sites “suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations, and kicked out nearly 200 publishers permanently.

In a blog post, Google outlined a number of other ads it targeted for removal last year:

Ads for illegal products

Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we’ve long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

Misleading ads

We don’t want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2017/01/25/why-google-killed-1-7-billion-ads-last-year/#5df9a0824d06.

Elon Musk plans to start digging tunnels to beat traffic

Musk raised eyebrows in mid-December when he announced plans via Twitter to buy a tunnel boring machine and “just start digging.” He promised to call the effort The Boring Company.

“Traffic is driving me nuts,” he tweeted.

Since then it’s been unclear whether Musk was momentarily frustrated with Los Angeles traffic, or would actually follow through on the project.

Musk is already busy at the helm of two companies, SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA). He’s also the co-chair of OpenAI, a business adviser to President Trump and the father of five children.

But early Wednesday morning on Twitter, Musk called his tunnel progress exciting, and said he planned to start digging in a month or so.

Musk has had a long standing interest in tunnels. A year ago at a Hyperloop event at Texas A&M, Musk described tunnels as a way to alleviate congestion in cities.

“This is really a very simple and obvious idea,” Musk said. “You could have tunnels at all different levels. You could probably have 30 levels of tunnels and completely fix the congestion problem.”

Traditionally, tunneling has been very expensive. It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. However, Musk has shown that he can dramatically reduce the costs needed to pull off complex engineering challenges. His rocket company SpaceX has earned praise for its low prices.

Musk’s interest in tunnels also sets up another potential battleground with rival Jeff Bezos. The two have dueling rocket companies, and have at times sparred on Twitter over their accomplishments in space.

Earlier this month, Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) received a patent for a system of delivering packages via tunnels. While it’s unclear if Amazon will actually follow on the plans, Musk isn’t the only billionaire with tunnels on his mind.

CNNMoney (Washington) First published January 25, 2017: 10:56 AM ET