During the Aug 2–3 predawn hours under dark skies at mid-northern latitudes, observers could see about 20 meteors per hour as the Perseids rise. The Moon is in first-quarter and will set in the early morning, washing out fainter Perseids and potentially reducing observed rates by about 75% near the maximum. Delta Aquariids are tapering…
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NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 1, 2025 at 11:43 a.m. EDT aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov to the International Space Station. Dragon Endeavour, on its record sixth flight, is set to dock at the ISS early Aug. 2 for a…
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Intel announced layoffs of about 24,000 employees (roughly one-quarter of its workforce) as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan cuts projects and halts planned mega-fab factories in Germany and Poland. AMD released the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, a Zen 5-based CPU with 64 cores and 128 threads that reaches up to 5.4 GHz and costs $4,999, with shipping…
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OpenAI plans to launch GPT-5 this month (August 2025), integrating the ‘o3’ model and using multiple specialized models instead of a single system. Google DeepMind released Gemini 2.5 “Deep Think” as its most advanced reasoning AI, available August 1, 2025 to subscribers of Google’s AI Ultra plan at $250 per month, and it achieved a…
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Madagascar is connected to four major submarine cables—EASSy, LION/LION2, METISS, and 2Africa—with the 2Africa landing at Mahajanga in February 2023 and becoming operational in late 2023. Fixed broadband penetration is extremely low, at about 0.11 per 100 people in 2023, forcing most of the population to rely on mobile networks. Market shares are Telma about…
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By 2025 Starlink had surpassed 8,000 satellites launched and served over 5 million users in 125+ countries, operating at about 550 km altitude with speeds of 50–200 Mbps and latencies of 20–40 ms. Ama zon’s Project Kuiper began launching its 3,236-satellite Ka-band LEO network, with its first 27 satellites launched in April 2025 on an…
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Since mid-2022, 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) has effectively absorbed all U.S. broadband subscriber growth, shifting demand away from traditional wired providers. In 2024, Comcast Xfinity and Charter Spectrum together lost nearly 1 million broadband subscribers, while Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T gained about 3.7 million fixed wireless home internet customers. As of early 2024, T-Mobile…
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In 2024 the median U.S. household paid about $85 per month for broadband, up from roughly $76 two years earlier. The United States is among the most expensive internet countries, with the average broadband bill around $65–$70 per month while the UK averages about $39 and South Korea about $26. The average cost per Mbps…
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By 2024, whole-home mesh systems were expected to account for about 47.6% of all home router sales. Netgear’s Orbi 970 (late 2024) and Orbi 870 (early 2025) mesh systems use Wi‑Fi 7 tri‑/quad‑band designs to deliver 20–27 Gbps and support 150–200 devices. Wi‑Fi 7 (802.11be) can reach up to about 23 Gbps on a single…
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The United States has committed over $42.5 billion through the BEAD program to accelerate fiber deployment to unserved areas. South Korea now delivers fiber to about 89% of broadband subscribers, the highest share worldwide. India’s BharatNet project has extended fiber internet to over 214,000 villages, bringing Wi‑Fi connectivity to remote areas. In China, 95% of…
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