FCC Plan to Boost Inflight WiFi Takes Off With Turbulence

Business travelers know that getting decent WiFi on long flights can be a roll of the broadband dice. The FCC may have an answer with a plan to boost bandwidth for inflight wireless that could mean faster, cheaper service. However, questions about a chip company's involvement in the original proposal is fueling objections from some key players, and that could stall the plan worse than a large file being uploaded over slow WiFi.

As more airlines begin to offer WiFi, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is proposing to increase the bandwidth available for inflight wireless broadband.

The FCC is essentially basing its proposal on Qualcomm's submission to the government from July 2011.

This raises the question of whether the FCC is perhaps too closely tied to one company in this area, and whether it should wait for proposals from other entities before proceeding.

That has caused division among potential players. The Satellite Industry Association and Row44, which offers inflight WiFi, oppose the FCC's proposal while American Airlines and Delta Airlines support it.

However, "This is just a proposal and the FCC is getting the ball rolling with the Qualcomm proposal," Jagdish Rebello, a research director at IHS iSuppli, told TechNewsWorld. "It gets people to think about the issue."

An FCC spokesperson was not immediately available to provide further details. 

What The FCC and Qualcomm Propose 

 The number of aircraft offering broadband service will quintuple from about 3,000 in 2012 to 15,000 by 2021, according to the FCC. The Commission is forwarding Qualcomm's suggestion of tapping into the 14.0 to 14.5 GHz band to provide a secondary service that would not interfere with fixed satellite service (FSS) Earth-to-space communications.

FSS satellites provide broadcast feeds to radio and TV stations and broadcast network and satellite TV, and handle telephony, telecommunications and data communications. The FSS uplink in the U.S. is in the 14.0 to 14.5 GHz band.

To facilitate bandwidth sharing, the FCC proposes spatial diversity, in which antennas used for different services within a given bandwidth are pointed in different directions. This is a technique that is already being used successfully.

The proposed service will provide multigigabit broadband connectivity to aircraft flying within the contiguous U.S., meaning that it won't be available over Hawaii, Puerto Rico and foreign countries. Qualcomm's proposal will see a total of 300 Gbps shared among planes in the air over any one area.

Licensees will be able to use the spectrum for air-ground mobile broadband only. The spectrum will be licensed on a nationwide basis, and the licensee will get a 10-year license. A substantial service performance requirement must be met the end of that period. Licensees must be able to construct and operate base stations that provide robust, uninterrupted service on routes serving at least 50 airports classified as large or medium hubs.

"There is a great need for this service," Philip Solis, a research director at ABI Research, told TechNewsWorld. "The connection on planes is fairly slow, and it can get really slow when more people use WiFi on planes."  

Speak Up Now 

 The FCC's proposal "would use ground stations using spectrum that is meant for satellites, but would be used between the planes and ground stations directly," Solis said.

Perhaps this is why the SIA's objection to the FCC's proposal contends that the proposed service will cause interference to the FSS services using the 14.0-14.5 GHz band.

The FCC is seeking comment on various issues related to its proposal. Interested parties have 45 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register to file their comments. Reply comments must be filed 75 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register.  

Gotta Get Connected 

Consumers "are demanding ubiquitous connectivity, and with more and more content stored in the cloud, consumers will have less access to content in their devices, and it makes sense to have a better connection for that reason," iSuppli's Rebello said.
Over time, the cost of inflight WiFi will go down, he added.
That might help adoption. Dissatisfied customers recently filed an antitrust suit against Gogo, the dominant inflight WiFi services provider, for charging up to nearly $18 for its services. The suit was dismissed without prejudice, which means the complainants can refile their suit with new facts

A Changing Earth Is on Display in Google Timelapse

A glacier shrinkage, a forest disappears and a major U.S. city spread before your eyes in the new Google timelapse project. The partnership blends 28 years of satellite imagery and Google Earth engine technology to reduce the impact of human activity on the planet to show. A new Landsat satellite was launched earlier this year leading cameras will contribute to the project.

 

Time, Inc., along with Google, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Carnegie Mellon University's Create Lab, a website with timelapse animation depicting changes in the earth's surface from 1984 to 2012.

 The timelapse project website hosts 25th planet images, one for each year

Landsat images "contain many layers of data collected at different points along the visible and invisible light spectra," said USGS spokesman Jon Campbell Tech News World. "As a result, [they] can show where vegetation thrives and where it is emphasized, where droughts occur, where wildland fire is a hazard, and shoreline erosion or river courses changed."

"We think it's important for people free access to this type of information that gives us all a real clear picture of how the world changed as a result of human impact," Google spokesman Nathan Tyler Tech News World.

Details of the Timelapse Project 

  Google, which has been digitizing Landsat images and putting them online with the USGS since 2009, sifted through nearly 2.1 million images - more than 900 terabytes of data. The project found that the highest quality pixels for each year since 1984 for every place on earth with the help of Google Earth engine technology.

It is then compiled the images in annualized planet images. Each image of the planet for one year 1.8 size terapixels.

Carnegie Mellon University's Create Lab with Google this annual images into a slick, searchable HTML5 animation.

The laboratory did not respond to our request to comment for this story.

Statements of the timelapse site includes the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, the retreat of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska and the drying of the Aral Sea.

"Landsat satellites give us a view as wide as 12,000 square kilometers per scene while describing land cover units of the size of a baseball diamond" USGS's Campbell said. "From a distance of more than 400 miles above the earth's surface, a single Landsat scene the condition of hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, agricultural crops or forest logging."

All Landsat data is freely available to everyone, said NASA spokesman Stephen Cole Tech News World. USGS Landsat data archive management and distribution. The data can be obtained here.

Time, Inc. did not respond to our request for further details.

What Landsat Offers 

Landsat images "reveal subtle, gradual changes, such as Wyoming pasture greening after a drought and massive landscape changes that occur in rapidly growing urban areas," said Campbell. "Landsat broad evaluation of sudden natural or man-made ​​disasters, such as the number of hectares burnt by a forest fire or the extent of the tsunami flooded."

Uses Landsat data include monitoring of water quality, the recession of the glaciers, the movement of the sea ice, deforestation rates, and population growth.

In February, NASA eighth satellite in the Landsat program, which is a gap in the program's ability to monitor the planet. Landsat 5 decommissioned earlier in the year, and Landsat 7 suffered a serious mechanical failure on a subsystem in 2003, produces about two-thirds of each image unusable.

Landsat 8 technical progress in the sensors project scientist Jim Irons told Tech News World in time will lead "to the best data yet our ears."

Releasing the timelapse data animations on Google Earth's engine help this information to the public in an engaging new way, NASA said on Thursday.

 

Risk and Compliance: The Yin and Yang of Security

Regulations and mandates - whether they're from the government and industry are important aspects of security within organizations. But there is more to the battle to include information in a Big Data world. Compliance should play a supporting role within a framework driven by risk assessment, ongoing monitoring and closed-loop remediation.

 

 when work output make headlines. So what role should compliance and risk management Play Cf. for example, an organization's overall security equation?

The Downside of Compliance 

Organizations that follow a box mentality as part of a compliance-driven approach to security only achieve point-in-time performance rather than improving the company's security posture, which is dynamic and changes over time. This has been proven time and again.

Recently, progressive businesses to become more proactive, risk-based approach to seek safety. The goal in a risk-based model to assess the effectiveness of an organization's IT security operations to maximize visibility into risk and compliance posture. The Holy Grail is to be in compliance, reduce risk and encourage security on an ongoing basis.

A number of factors that cause businesses the box approach to security and move to a risk-based model to reconsider. These include:

    1) Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002.

     2)Federal Risk and authority Management Program (FedRAMP).

     3)Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Cyber ​​lead.

     4)Emerging Cyber ​​legislation (eg, Cyber ​​Intelligence sharing and Protection Act).

     5)Presidential Executive Order on Cyber ​​Security.

     6)The Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime.

The Role of IT Security 

  It is generally believed that vulnerability management will reduce the risk of a data breach. But without problems in the context of the risk associated with them, organizations can misalign their remediation resources. Often they forget the most critical risks, while only a low-hanging fruit "to address.

It is not just a waste of money, but more importantly, it creates a longer window of opportunity for hackers critical vulnerability exploit. The ultimate goal is to shorten the window attackers to exploit a software bug. Therefore, vulnerability management complemented by a holistic, risk-based approach to security, which considers factors such as threats, reach the organization's compliance posture, and business impact.

If the threat can not reach the vulnerability, or the associated risk is reduced or eliminated.

Risk and Compliance: Security Bedfellows 

An organization's compliance posture can play an important role to play IT security by identifying compensate controls that can be used to prevent threats from reaching their target.

According to the Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, 97 percent of the 855 incidents in 2011 were avoidable through simple or intermediate controls. However, business impact is a critical factor in determining the actual risk. For example, problems that threaten critical business assets represent a much higher risk than that associated with less critical goals.

Since compliance posture is typically not tied to business critics of assets, it does not enable an organization to prioritize remediation efforts. A risk approach, focusing on security posture / compliance and business impact to increase operational efficiency, improve assessment accuracy, reduce attack surfaces, and improve investment decision-making.

There are three main components to the implementation of a risk-based approach to security.

Continuous Compliance 

Continuous compliance include the reconciliation of the assets and automating data classification, adaptation of technical control, automation of compliance testing, deployment of assessment surveys, and automation of data consolidation.

Continued compliance, organizations can reduce overlap by using a common control framework to increase accuracy in data collection and data analysis, and reducing redundant and manual, labor-intensive effort by up to 75 percent.

Continuous Monitoring 

Continuous monitoring implies an increased frequency of data assessments and required security data automation together and normalize data from a variety of sources such as security information and event management (SIEM), asset management, threat feeds, and vulnerability scanners.

In turn, organizations can reduce costs by unifying solutions, streamlining processes, creating situational awareness exploits and threats to expose in a timely manner, and the collection of historical trend data, which can help with the predictable security....