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Musk’s SpaceX Teams Up with John Deere to Revolutionize Internet Access for Farmers

Musk’s SpaceX Teams Up with John Deere to Revolutionize Internet Access for Farmers

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To help close the digital divide in rural regions, John Deere and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are teaming together to offer internet access to farmers. Even with improvements in cellular infrastructure and rural broadband, many farmers continue to have trouble getting online. In the 2023 technology use report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 15% of farms said they didn’t have internet connectivity.

Musk’s SpaceX Teams Up with John Deere to Revolutionize Internet Access for Farmers

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Deere is using satellite technology as part of its attempts to address this problem, allowing farmers in locations with poor connectivity to use the digital tools that the firm offers. For farmers, networking has a greater significance, as noted by Aaron Wetzel, vice president of production at Deere and precision agriculture production systems. He said that connectivity opens numerous possibilities that used to be limited or unavailable.

“The value of connectivity to farmers is broader than any single task or action,” said Aaron Wetzel, Deere vice president of production and precision ag production systems. “Connectivity unlocks vast opportunities that were previously limited or unavailable.”

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Deere launched the programme in 2022 and started looking for a partner or partners to use ruggedized terminals to connect both new and old equipment via satellite service. For clients who operate in places with poor connection, the objective is to increase productivity, profitability, and sustainability.

Deere has identified Starlink from SpaceX as a suitable partner for this audacious project. With a system of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit, Starlink offers lower latency speeds than standard satellite internet services. Support for many activities like as streaming, online gaming, video calls, and other high data rate applications are made possible by this. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell estimates that as of January 15, 4,620 Starlink satellites were in orbit.

Also Read: Google CEO Signals More Job Reductions in the Coming Months

SpaceX’s Alliance with Deere

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX announced the alliance with Deere on the social media site X, which was formerly known as Twitter. The company highlighted that Starlink is ideal for rural locations. The partnership is a step in the right direction towards helping farmers overcome their connectivity issues and is consistent with SpaceX’s goal of delivering internet access worldwide, particularly in underserved areas.

John Deere hopes to provide farmers with the digital tools they require for data-driven decision-making, real-time monitoring, and precision agriculture by utilising Starlink’s cutting-edge satellite technology. This project not only helps farmers with their immediate connectivity problems, but it also makes a positive contribution to the continuous efforts to close the digital gap in rural areas.

China Claims World’s Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network

China Claims World’s Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network

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China has surged ahead in the global race for lightning-fast internet, defying industry expectations by unveiling a groundbreaking next-generation service that outpaces existing routes by over tenfold. The nation proudly presents a network capable of transmitting data at a staggering 1.2 terabits per second, effectively leaping past the predicted timeline by a solid two years.

Boosting Data Speeds Beyond Imagination

This cutting-edge backbone network forms a vital data conduit linking Beijing, Wuhan in central China, and Guangzhou in the southern Guangdong province. Its unparalleled capacity sends data at a velocity equivalent to streaming a mind-boggling 150 films per second, showcasing a leap forward in digital connectivity.

China Claims World’s Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network

Image Source: firstpost.com

Despite Nigeria’s ongoing struggle with internet speeds affecting a significant portion of its 150 million users, China’s milestone marks a decisive step toward revolutionizing global internet infrastructure. Recent reports highlighted Africa’s persistent challenges, with average download speeds in Sub-Saharan Africa hovering around 12.11 Mbps, underscoring the urgent need for enhanced connectivity across the continent.

This technological marvel, spanning over 3,000 kilometers of optical fiber cabling, materialized from a collaborative effort involving Tsinghua University, China Mobile, Huawei Technologies, and Cernet Corporation. This alliance defied earlier expert projections, which anticipated such ultra-high-speed networks emerging closer to 2025.

The Beijing-Wuhan-Guangzhou connection forms a crucial segment of China’s ten-year-long Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI) project, representing the latest iteration of the national China Education and Research Network (Cernet). Wu Jianping, FITI Project Leader, hailed this achievement as not only operationally successful but also a stepping stone toward even swifter internet capabilities.

Unprecedented Speed for a Connected Future

The implications of this milestone extend beyond mere speed records. Wang Lei, Vice-President of Huawei Technologies at Tsinghua University, lauded the network’s capability to transfer the equivalent data of 150 high-definition films within a single second. Xu Mingwei from Tsinghua University likened this new backbone network to a superfast train track, effectively replacing ten regular tracks in data transmission.

Also Read: WhatsApp Introduces Secret Code for Locked Chats: A New Level of Privacy

China underlines the pivotal role of backbone networks in serving national education, research needs, and the burgeoning demand for data transfer from industrial 5G applications like connected vehicles and mining operations.

With this remarkable achievement, China not only claims the title for the world’s fastest internet but propels the global digital landscape toward an era of unprecedented connectivity and data transfer speeds.

John Cioffi

How John Cioffi Gave Life to the Internet Through the Broadband

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Most of us cannot imagine a world without the internet now. We depend on it for everything from reading this article to shopping for groceries. However, forty years ago, the internet barely existed with the World Wide Web years away. Since then we have come a long way to technology such as 5G and crypto-currency, thanks to the internet. For most of this, we have engineer John Cioffi to thank. He realized that the copper wires used as phone lines could supply fast data to homes. This move made it possible for homes to get the internet without creating new networks. Years later, Joseph Lechleider turned that dream into a reality, and modern broadband came to be. Here’s a look at how those two men singlehandedly revolutionized modern-day internet and our lives.

What John Cioffi Did

Cioffi realized while at American Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, that someday the entire world would use the internet. However, making this affordable wasn’t an easy task. To make the process affordable, he imagined using copper telephone wires which have been around since a hundred years earlier. He moved to Stanford University by the end of the ’70s and began working on this concept. He tried to fit hundreds of data channels alongside phone conversations without causing disturbances. Cioffi named the technology DMT or Discrete Multitone. However, the high interference of the lines became a problem. So he built a device to switch data between channels to prevent this, creating the first broadband modem.

Joseph Lechleider’s Contribution

Cioffi’s broadband modem lowered the interference but not for high rate data sending. By then, Joseph Lechleider was working as an engineer at Bell Labs which had become Bellcore. He discovered that sending large data in one direction and smaller in the opposite could solve this problem. Hence, this process became the basis for the Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line technology. ADSL technology works great for people who don’t need to upload much data.

Broadband becomes Universal

Cioffi founded Amati in 1992 to build broadband modems, while companies such as BT began working on ADSL technology. Meanwhile, customers began using dial-up modems to access the internet via their phone lines. Since DSL required signal processors, they were too expensive to implement early on. However, as the 2000s rolled in, microchips became more affordable and internet connections became over a hundred times faster.

Cioffi then successfully worked on Dynamic Spectrum Management to make the transmission even faster. Soon enough, John Cioffi became the Father of DSL, with over 100 patents in the field. He works on projects to improve internet speeds and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Lechleider died in 2015 becoming inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013.

Continued Success

Cioffi also served as a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, supervising over 100 Ph.D. students over two decades. He left Stanford in 1991 to found Amati Corporation, building the world’s first DSL modem. The modem soon became a gold-standard as it was 4 times faster than its competitors, also being the first to transmit live television via a phone line. He sold Amati Communications to Texas Instrument for $440 million three years after taking it public in 1995. Cioffi returned to Stanford, to research on Dynamic Spectrum Management and vectored VDSLs, which will soon be launched in the US.

In 2003, Cioffi founded ASSIA which now has over 80 million worldwide subscribers and retired from Stanford six years later. The company makes software and hardware for companies involved in providing users high-speed Internet services. His wife works as the Executive Vice President owing to her keen sense of people, and management skills. His design for the VDSL powers almost 98% of the 500 million DSL connections the world now uses.

DSL accounts for more than 70% of the world’s broadband, more than even cable and fiber combined. ASSIA controls 90% of the U.S. market with regards to DSL management software, with its product making about $100 million annually for its users. The company began with three people, and by 2011 had over 170 employees. With the DSL industry has grown to one worth over $120 billion worldwide, it goes without saying that we have a lot to thank Cioffi for.

Linksys

Live Together, Work Together : The Husband-Wife Duo Behind Success of Linksys

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Being smart, frugal and not risk-averse helped Janie and Victor Tsao transform a small idea into a multi-million-dollar empire. Any person who uses WiFi in their homes would have heard about Linksys, a leading router manufacturer which now is owned by Cisco. Here’s a look at how the dynamic duo built a $500 million powerhouse that shaped the home networking industry.

The Founders

Janie Tsao, who was born Wu Jian, in the year 1953, in Taiwan is married to Victor Tsao, and the two of them together co-founded Linksys. The Taiwanese-native is an American entrepreneur, who sold her company to Cisco for over $500 million in 2003.

Janie pursued her bachelor’s in English literature from the Tamkang University in Taiwan. It was at the university that she met and befriended her eventual companion and business associate, Victor Tsao. The two of them fell in love, and later, moved to the United States in 1975, where they got married. The husband and wife duo then moved to Chicago in 1977, where they attended graduate school together, and later settled in California. Janie taught Information Technology at Sears Roebuck for over eight years. She has also worked as a systems manager at TRW and Carter Hawley Hale.

linksys founders
Image Source: inc.com

Victor Tsao, born in 1951 in Taiwan, pursued his Bachelor’s in computer science at the Tamkang University in Tamsui. After moving to the US, he obtained his Master’s in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1980. Victor received an MBA from Pepperdine University. On completing his education, Victor worked at reputed companies, such as Kraft Foods, T.R.W., and even Taco Bell.

Founding Linksys

Victor was 37, and working at Taco Bell, while Janie was 35 and working at Carter Hawley Hale, when they chose to start their new venture. As Victor was at a higher position at his job, Janie chose to quit hers, and launch D.E.W International. One of their associates gave them the idea of marketing connection wires, and this led to them renaming their venture Linksys. The business started as a small enterprise within the couple’s garage, and by 1991, owing to the success of its first product had generated enough profit to encourage Victor too to quit his job and work on their venture full-time.

The Tsaos had initially created the company by utilising their life savings worth $7,000. By 1991, Linksys had moved offices twice, ending up finally in a small, yet comfortable 2,000-square-foot office. Each month they sold over 8,000 products and slowly, but surely, expanded from connectors to Ethernet hubs, and cords.

When they were just starting, Victor drew no salary even while working more than 100 hours a week. He would approach US dealers during the day, and then talk to Taiwanese manufacturers at night, staying up till 3 AM on most days. The family during this period survived on the $2,000 a month salary that Janie drew. But all this hard work paid off, and by 1997, Linksys was making $32.1 million, which doubled to $65.6 million by 1998. Linksys moved once again but this time, to a massive 20,000-square-foot office.

Janie Tsao handled sales and even got the retailers Fry’s Electronics and Best Buy onboard to sell their products. These deals proved to become significant breakthroughs for the company, as it helped them triple their revenue from $21.5 in a short span of two years.

The Resounding Success

The couple has often mentioned how starting such a company was a huge gamble because they had two toddlers, aged 2 and 4 at the time. Victor often pulled in over 100 hours a week when the company was in its early days. The company’s breakthrough came when in 1999, Victor designed and created a router which cost $199. As this was the first router that cost less than $300, sales grew exponentially. That particular product alone had by 2000, raked in over $206.5 million for Linksys.

Often hailed as the maker of the modern home networking system, the company had by 2004 established itself as the main player, which controlled 49% of the networking market. With sales crossing $538 million, the success of the company started attracting significant media attention. So much so, that in 2002, Cisco Systems approached the Tsaos, and on March 2003, the couple decided to sell their company.

In 2003, the couple sold Linksys to Cisco Systems for $500 million, worked there as senior vice presidents until 2007. Following this, the pair called its quit, shifting their attention to Miven Venture Partners, which is an investment agency they had established back in 2005.

The couple credit their no-nonsense attitude for the success of Linksys, as they took risky steps at the right time, always got their products out faster than their competitors, and even kept costs down. There is much we can learn from this story of trials, tribulation and success, as it is one that celebrates hard work and determination.

Fleet Space

Flavia Tata Nardini : Fleet Space Founder and a Pioneer in the Emerging Australian Space Industry

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Today, everything is about connections; not the human connection, but the connection of humans through the internet. The Internet has transformed the world in less than the world had in the past 20 centuries. People just need their smartphone, and they can accomplish most of their daily routine work in a few swipes. Despite such advancement in human life, an aerospace engineer from Australia, Flavia Tata Nardini, does not want to stop here. She wants to create a network in the space, such that there will be no earthly object without an internet connection. Whether it is the students in the classroom or the tree in the forest, everything connected. The founder of Fleet Space Technologies has been developing satellites since she was a teen, and now, she is entirely focussing on the space as well as connecting the IoT devices.

Early Life and Career

Nardini was born into an engineer’s family in Rome, Italy. With a dream of becoming an astronaut, she completed a bachelor degree in aerospace engineering from University La Sapienza, Rome. She then completed a master’s degree in space engineering from the same university. In her late teens, she bagged an internship job at European Space Agency in The Netherlands, where she worked on the rocket propulsion technology.

In July 2009, she joined another company named TNO in The Netherlands, where she worked in various roles for four years, including propulsion design and test engineer as well as a product manager. Later, she even moved to Qatar to work with another space agency, where she sent nanosatellites to space.

Flavia Nardini founder Fleet Space
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Later, she moved to Adelaide, South Australia, to live with her partner (now husband) in 2014. Qualified with a lot of experience in space activities, it became tough for Nardini to find a job, as there was only one space startup back then. And having kids, she could not work in the defence, either. So, along with one of her future Fleet Space partner, Matt Pearson, she founded an educational startup named Launchbox. Under this startup, the two of the co-founders started teaching little kids about space and nanosatellites. Under the program, they even built CubeSat satellite using 3D printed components and launched them to the stratosphere.

Founding Fleet Space

While working for Launchbox, the two of the co-founders realised that they could also build a new space startup for connecting the IoT devices. Since no space agencies were working in Australia, founding one seemed a good idea to them. Hence in 2015, they, along with another aerospace engineer, Dr Matthew Tetlow, co-founded Fleet Space.

Fleet Space aims to create a network of nanosatellites around the earth, such that it can provide internet access to every person on earth for cheaper prices. The increase in the interconnection through the internet will make every single task accessible through a smartphone. For now, the company target is to connect 7.5 billion IoT devices on earth with the help of nanosatellites by 2020.

Partnerships and Fundings

Fleet Space has got the Australian as well the US government on board for the development process. Private companies like SpaceX has also partnered with the company to fulfil the goal. The French space agency CNES has also taken an initiative to help Fleet Space get the financial backing, and will be tracking and supporting the satellites built by Fleet Space. The company raised a $5m in Series A capital from Blackbird Ventures and Atlassian.

At the time Nardini founded the company, there was only one space startup in Australia. But with the success of Fleet Space, other budding entrepreneurs have also stepped into the same technology, and there are over 260 new startups that are working in the field of space research. In fact, the Australian government also announced in 2017 that it will be building the national space agency for Australia.

In September 2019, the company raised $7.35 million in the Series B funding led by Momenta Ventures and Horizons Ventures. Till now, Fleet has placed four CubeSat-class satellites in orbit and plans to send more satellites to the space to fulfil the demands.

Nardini’s love for space and satellites proves that the sky is the limit for her. She is an inspiring woman and a true example of women empowerment.

SpaceX to Bring Free and Open Internet to All with the Launch of Starlink Project

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Last year, the aerospace transport agency SpaceX had launched the prototype satellite for its much-talked-about project, Starlink, a project that targets to provide internet to the whole planet through a network of the satellites. And now after a year-long wait, the company will finally be launching the first batch of satellites of Starlink’s “production” version with the help of SpaceX Falcon 9 today at 10:30 PM EDT.

SpaceX Starlink project
Image Source: futurist.com

The company will launch 60 satellites with the help of a Falcon 9 rocket, which will be launched from a launchpad based in Cape Canaveral. After the launch, the satellites will be arranged like a constellation to cover a part of the Earth like a blanket. Starlink project will be responsible to provide open, high speed and low-latency internet to anyone in the world.

The Starlink project revolves around the concept of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Once the satellites are positioned in the orbit, these will link to the small terminals on the surface of the earth. The satellites are able to easily make a connection with the ground terminals as the LEO satellites are positioned at a distance as close as 99 to 1,200 miles from the surface of the Earth. This way the internet speed will also be faster as compared to the conventional methods used to provide internet.

The 60 satellites have been placed like kernels on a corncob, and with the help of a spring, these will be sent to the orbit at a particular velocity.

The launch of those satellites is a challenge for the company, which if went favourably, will be a great achievement for the company. Otherwise, there are other rival companies of SpaceX too that are also looking forward to getting their hands on similar projects, including OneWeb and Amazon too.

But since the company had test-launched similar satellite TinTin A and TinTin B successfully in the month of February, there are higher possibilities of the success of the Starlink project. According to Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX those 60 satellites are the “production design”, and in future, the company plans to launch as many as 12000 satellites to achieve that constellation network. If the experiment goes according to the plan, people will be able to access high speed and free internet by the mid of 2020.