Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2024 is shaping up to be a pretty demanding title. From the very high-performance system needed for ideal system specifications, the game now uses up to 180 Mbit/s of internet bandwidth while the user is in flight and the terrain is loading. This is equivalent to as much as 81 GB per hour of internet data, which is a nightmare for users with a data cap. Data caps are often standard in US homes, with internet providers imposing their own rules on up to 1 TB of uncapped traffic, which considerably slows down after that. The new Flight Simulator 2024 may be a bit much for users who don't have powerful systems and data plans.

The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 requires 30 GB of storage for the game. The alpha version comes in at only 9 GB, meaning that it is pulling much of its resources from Microsoft's servers, thus requiring this massive bandwidth to operate smoothly. Microsoft recommends a 50 Mbit/s internet connection for the final game, meaning that the final 30 GB install will pack more textures, thus lowering the massive load on Microsoft's servers. Of course, the 180 Mbit/s is the peak load, and the lowest measured load is around 10 Mbit/s. The game typically runs below 50 Mb/s, but this peak value is quite noticeable.

MSI launches its WiFi 7 Roamii BE Lite Mesh System, made to provide seamless home connectivity for an increasing number of WiFi 7-supported mobile devices and AI-accelerated applications. The MSI Roamii BE Lite features a range of WiFi 7 enhancements that ensure you experience smooth WiFi as your roam around.

Seamless Home Connectivity with Roamii WiFi 7 Mesh System
MSI Roamii BE Lite Mesh System has dual-band WiFi 7 streams that supports transfer speeds up to 5 Gbps. Advanced WiFi 7 features, including 4K-QAM, Multi-RU, and MLO (Multi-Link Operation) ensure users experience seamless and uninterrupted internet access throughout their homes. A 2.5G Ethernet port offers the flexibility for use as a mesh backhaul connection.

NETGEAR, Inc., the leading provider of innovative and secure solutions for people to connect and manage their digital lives, today expanded its WiFi 7 mesh and standalone router lines with the new Orbi 770 Tri-band Mesh System and Nighthawk RS300 Router. NETGEAR's most affordable WiFi 7 products to date build on the company's promise to provide powerful WiFi performance and secure connectivity.

WiFi 7 Changes the Game
WiFi 7 unlocks 2.4 times faster speeds than WiFi 6, delivers low latency and better handles WiFi interference for families to seamlessly enjoy next gen 4K/8K streaming, video conferencing, gaming, and more. Since the launch of NETGEAR's first WiFi 7 offerings - Nighthawk RS700 and Orbi 970 - multi-gig internet speeds have become more affordable, work from home demands have remained steady, and more devices such as AR/VR headsets or AI-focused platforms like CoPilot+ have been introduced that require extreme low latency and higher throughput.

The nonprofit organisation that is in charge of coordinating and managing the namespaces and numerical spaces on the internet—ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number—has proposed a rather big change on how consumers and businesses could be accessing networked devices on their private networks in the future. ICANN has put forward a new top-level domain for private use, much like the 192.168.x.x IP address range is allocated to private networks (alongside two other ranges), we might end up with a similar top-level domain. The proposed domain will be .internal, although we already have .localhost and .local today, but neither is really usable in a private network.

As such .internal has been suggested—in favour of.private due to concerns about it sounding like something privacy related—as a means for less computer savvy users to connect to devices on a private network. We've already seen solutions from several router manufacturers that use various domain names or subdomains to enable easier connectivity to routers. However, the goal here is to avoid clashes with top-level domains on the internet and.internal is said to resolve this problem. That said, it's not clear how this will be implemented as yet, but the ICANN is set to release more details in the near future. Even though it might not be the perfect solution, it should hopefully allow people to remember what they called their devices when they need to access them, rather than trying to remember the correct IP address.

Comcast and Broadcom today announced joint efforts to develop the world's first AI-powered access network with a new chipset that embeds artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within the nodes, amps and modems that comprise the last few miles of Comcast's network. With these new capabilities broadly deployed throughout the network, Comcast will be able to transform its operations by automating more network functions and deliver an improved customer experience through better and more actionable intelligence.

Additionally, the new chipset will be the first in the world to incorporate DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex (FDX), Extended Spectrum (ESD) and the ability to run both simultaneously, enabling Internet service providers across the globe to deliver DOCSIS 4.0 services using a toolkit with technology options to meet their business needs. DOCSIS 4.0 is the next-generation network technology that will introduce symmetrical multi-gigabit Internet speeds, lower latency, and even better security and reliability to hundreds of millions of people and businesses over their existing connections without the need for major construction of new network infrastructure.

Comcast announced that next week it will begin to introduce the first residential customers in the world to next-generation Internet powered by DOCSIS 4.0 technology. The latest version of DOCSIS technology is a giant leap forward in Internet connectivity that can deliver multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds to customers over the connections that already exist in tens of millions of homes in Comcast markets across the country.

As a part of the launch, Comcast will introduce a new portfolio of symmetrical products for residential customers. Comcast will begin rolling out DOCSIS 4.0 to select neighborhoods in Colorado Springs, CO, and will launch new markets throughout the country over the next few years. Select areas of Atlanta, GA and Philadelphia, PA are expected to begin rolling out before the end of this year.

Amazon announced eero Max 7, its first Wi-Fi 7 mesh system and the fastest, most powerful eero yet. eero Max 7 combines the company's patented TrueMesh networking technology with the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard to dramatically increase speeds, avoid interference from neighboring networks, and improve mesh latency-and with 10 Gigabit Ethernet, it's now possible to download a 4K movie in 10 seconds or a 50 gigabyte video game in less than a minute.

"Connectivity is core to our everyday lives—we stream movies and TV, take video calls for work, play online games with our friends, and use an ever increasing number of connected devices," said Nick Weaver, co-founder and CEO of eero. "With tens of millions of eero devices around the world, we know customers notice even a millisecond delay when streaming a movie or gaming, want reliable connectivity in every corner of the home, and always look for faster speeds. eero Max 7 is the culmination of everything we've learned—this is an entirely new class of eero, built without compromise."

NETGEAR, Inc., the leading provider of award-winning connected products designed to simplify and improve people's lives, today introduced the Nighthawk Tri-Band Mesh WiFi 6E System (MK93S), engineered for exceptional mesh WiFi range and performance. The system, consisting of a router and two satellites, delivers 50% improved WiFi performance over the previous model and faster WiFi speeds up to 5.7 Gbps. With the powerful quad-core 1.7 GHz processor and new WiFi 6E tri-band technology, it offers less congestion, ultra-low latency, and more bandwidth.

With the capacity to support up to 100 devices, the MK93S system provides enough bandwidth to connect smart home devices, stream multiple 4K/8K movies, hold important Zoom video calls, monitor security cameras or baby monitors, and compete in online games, all at the same time. And the new compact, elegant design enables it to be placed anywhere around the home to eliminate dead zones, so strong WiFi can be enjoyed even in those typically hard-to-reach areas. The patented antennas amplify the signal for strong, consistent coverage that won't degrade, ultimately providing advanced whole home coverage of up to 7,500 square feet with an integrated, adaptive network that adjusts the connection between the router and satellites for best performance.

MaxLinear, Inc., a leader in data storage accelerator solutions, today announced the production-release of the OCP 3.0 storage accelerator adapter card for Panther III. The ultra-low latency accelerator is designed to quicken key storage workloads, including database acceleration, storage offload, encryption, compression, and deduplication enablement for maximum data reduction. The Panther III OCP card is ideal for use in modern data centers, including public to edge clouds, enterprise data centers, and telecommunications infrastructure, allowing users to access, process, and transfer data up to 12 times faster than without a storage accelerator. The OCP version of the card is available immediately with a PCIe version available in Q3 2023.

"In an era where the amount of data generated exceeds new storage installations by multiple fold, Panther III helps reduce the massive storage gap while improving TCO per bit stored," said Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis.

Today, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger, Chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Jessica Rosenworcel, and Laurie Locascio, Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled the U.S. national IoT security label at the White House.

Infineon Technologies AG supports this action to address the growing need for IoT security. The new label supports the IoT security requirements under NISTIR 8425, which resulted from an Executive Order to improve the nation's cybersecurity. This label will recognize products that meet these requirements by permitting them to display a U.S. government label and be listed in a registry indicating that these products meet U.S. cybersecurity standards.

Global LiFi technology firms pureLiFi and Fraunhofer HHI welcome the release of IEEE 802.11bb as the latest global light communications standard alongside IEEE 802.11 WiFi standards. The bb standard marks a significant milestone for the LiFi market, as it provides a globally recognised framework for deployment of LiFi technology.

LiFi is a wireless technology that uses light rather than radio frequencies to transmit data. By harnessing the light spectrum, LiFi can unleash faster, more reliable wireless communications with unparalleled security compared to conventional technologies such as WiFi and 5G. The Light Communications 802.11bb Task Group was formed in 2018 chaired by pureLiFi and supported by Fraunhofer HHI, two firms which have been at the forefront of LiFi development efforts. Both organisations aim to see accelerated adoption and interoperability not only between LiFi vendors but also with WiFi technologies as a result of these standardisation efforts.

Today, Comcast accelerates the nation's largest and fastest multi-gig deployment and announced that its latest Xfinity 10G network upgrade will be launched to 10 million homes and businesses by the end of this month. These locations now have the foundational network enhancements in place to begin deploying DOCSIS 4.0, setting the stage for the introduction of new symmetrical multi-gigabit Internet options before the end of 2023 that can be delivered across existing networks with less cost.

To date, and ahead of schedule, more than 40 markets across Comcast service areas have implemented network improvements including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and others. The full deployment of these technical capabilities will reach more than 50 million homes and businesses by 2025. In addition to fast speeds, DOCSIS 4.0 technologies will deliver even greater reliability and capacity to power multiple data-intensive applications.

Comcast today announced the world's first live, multigigabit symmetrical Internet connection powered by 10G and Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0. 10G technology will revolutionize the availability of ultra-fast speeds, by delivering multigigabit symmetrical services over the connections already installed in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, without digging up yards or installing new connections.

For the world-first live trial, Comcast connected a business location in the Philadelphia region to its live network including a DOCSIS 4.0-enabled 10G node and multiple cable modems to deliver high speed data service to the site. Comcast engineers tested symmetrical speeds over the connection and will continue trialing 10G technologies over the next several months in preparation for offering 10G-enabled services to customers in the second half of 2023.

TP-Link, a leading global provider of consumer and business networking products, today held an epochal WiFi 7 product launch to announce its WiFi 7 networking solution.

As the world's first vendor to release a full home and enterprise WiFi 7 product line, TP-Link launched new WiFi 7 routers, Deco products, Omada EAPs, and Aginet products for ISP markets to cover all usage scenarios. Additionally, TP-Link's new HomeShield 3.0 provides more reliable and smarter network solutions.

So you live in Randomville in the middle of nowhere, with a slow ADSL that's barely a few Mbps fast, and thought you could enjoy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on PlayStation 5 with its disc version? Think again. It turns out that the disc version of this game doesn't actually have the game on the disc. That's right, those unlucky enough to buy the disc version found that it only contained 72 MB of data, which when autorun, gets the console to fetch the up to 151 GB of the game's payload over the Internet. The disc only acts like a hardware DRM, in the same way as certain expensive software ship with USB flash drives that need to be plugged in for you to use the software.

After enduring the massive download, you're required to keep the disc inserted to play the game. It is possible to ship the entire game in two 50 GB Blu-ray discs with the best available compression tech. The problem with CoD off-late has been that the developers either forgot how to distribute game patches, or are using the sheer file-size of patches as an anti-piracy measure; with most of them spanning several dozen gigabytes, and major updates even fetching the entire game's triple-figure GB payload all over again. This 72 MB disc-based distribution is below the belt.

Transmitting data over the internet is something that just happens for most of us, but the infrastructure that's powering the internet is full of bottlenecks and researchers around the world are testing new ways of being able to transmit more data using already installed fibre. A team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has managed to break the data transmission record by quite some margin, using something called a frequency comb, which is a photonics chip. The team of researchers hit a data transmission speed of an insane 1.84 Petabits per second over a distance of 7.9 kilometres—or 4.9 miles if you like—using standard fibre optic lines.

This equates to more than the total volume of global internet traffic that's being sent every second, according to DTU. Although the distance is far from the longest, as a team of Japanese researchers have managed to transmit a 319 Terrabit per second datastream over a distance of 3,001 km (1,864 miles), although they used signal amplifiers every 70 km to reach this distance. The DTU team's frequency comb was made by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and it breaks down the infrared laser that's being used to transmit the data, into a rainbow spectrum, where each colour corresponds to a frequency equivalent. This allows multiple streams of data to be encoded with data, before being re-integrated and sent as a single infrared laser signal over the fibre. According to DTU, without the frequency comb, they would've needed more than a thousand lasers to achieve the same speeds using state-of-the-art commercial equipment. The team at DTU expects to be able to hit speeds of up to 100 Petabit per second in the future.

More than 20 million Xfinity households across the country will soon be waking up to faster Internet, thanks to Xfinity. The country's largest gigabit network is boosting speeds on its most popular plans beginning this week, providing customers with an even better connectivity experience as they stream the latest 4K blockbuster, game online, videoconference, and more, all at the same time. With this latest round of speed increases, Xfinity continues to provide unparalleled value compared to other providers - including significantly faster speeds and better reliability than mobile and 5G Home Internet.

The announcement comes on the heels of Comcast's launch of the nation's largest- and fastest-ever multi-gig deployment that will reach more than 50 million homes and businesses with 2 Gbps speeds before the end of 2025. "The number of devices connected in Xfinity households has skyrocketed 12X since 2018, and the need for fast, reliable, and secure Internet will continue to grow," said Bill Connors, President of Xfinity, Comcast Cable. "That's why today, Xfinity is increasing speeds for most of our customers across the country."

NETGEAR, Inc., the leading provider of award-winning connected products designed to simplify and improve people's lives, today launched a new addition to its Orbi line. The Orbi 860 Series builds on the award-winning Orbi 850 Series by future-proofing the best seller with a 10Gb Ethernet port, supporting multi-gig internet connections; upgraded antenna design for greater WiFi performance and a bundled year of NETGEAR Armor, providing homes with an automatic shield of security against internet threats across every connected device.

Following on the tremendous success of the Orbi 850 Series (WiFi 6 AX6000 Mesh System RBK853), the Orbi 860 Series joins NETGEAR's industry-leading WiFi 6 Whole Home Mesh WiFi portfolio. The past few years have seen huge changes to internet usage spurred by the pandemic, including a dramatic increase in just about everything from home-- working, shopping, learning, and socializing. As Internet Service Providers enable faster multi-gig internet speeds, up to 10 Gigabits per second, and hackers create new sophisticated cyber-attacks, high-performance and secure WiFi become imperative.

NETGEAR, Inc., the leading provider of award-winning connected products designed to simplify and improve people's lives, today launched a powerful addition to its unlocked 5G mobile hotspot lineup. At a time when access to fast, secure and reliable internet is more important than ever, the NETGEAR Nighthawk M6 Mobile Hotspot Router (MR6150) raises the mobile broadband experience to new heights by upping the maximum 5G speed that can be supported and adding 160 MHz capability to connect with the latest WiFi 6 client devices.

NETGEAR launched the world's first unlocked 5G hotspot in 2021 with the award-winning Nighthawk M5. Now the company is building on that achievement with the M6, which is 20 percent faster than the M5 at 2.5 Gbps over 5G and has the capacity to hit a maximum combined WiFi speed of up to 3.6 Gbps when connecting to 160 MHz WiFi 6 devices. Additionally, the M6 comes with a first of its kind new In-Home Performance Mode which boosts WiFi coverage up to 2,000 square-feet when the device is plugged in, and the battery is removed.

eero, an Amazon company, today introduced a new range of solutions for professional installers and businesses. The eero PoE 6 and eero PoE Gateway are Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) devices that can be easily installed and use wired infrastructure to deliver fast, reliable wifi throughout homes and businesses. Additionally, eero for Pro Installers and eero for Business, two new services, simplify wifi installation, set up, and management for professional installers and small businesses.

"At eero, we started with a vision of bringing simple, reliable, and fast wifi to customers across the globe, and now our wifi solutions are in millions of homes around the world," said Nick Weaver, co-founder and CEO of eero. "As we look for ways to continue to solve challenges for new types of customers, we're thrilled to expand our offerings to professional installers and small businesses with these new PoE products and services."

Comcast today announced it has begun a nationwide rollout of multi-gig Internet speeds - that will reach more than 50 million homes and businesses before the end of 2025 - making it the largest- and fastest-ever multi-gig deployment in the United States. New speeds will be paired with Comcast's multi-gig Wi-Fi experience, which delivers the industry's best combination of speed, coverage, and control, powered by one of the world's first Wi-Fi 6E Gateways.

As part of this initiative, Comcast is accelerating the transformation of its network to a virtualized cloud-based architecture that is fully prepared for 10G and DOCSIS 4.0. Comcast will begin offering 10G-enabled multi-gig symmetrical services in 2023.

Google has done it: they've "finally" fired Blake Lemoine, one of the engineers tasked with working on one of the company's AIs, LAMda. Back in the beginning of June, the world of AI, consciousness, and Skynet-fearing humans woke up to a gnarly claim: that one of Google's AI constructs, LAMda, might have achieved consciousness. According to Blake Lemoine, who holds an undergraduate and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Louisiana (and says he left a doctoral program to take the Google job), there was just too much personality behind the AI's answers to chalk them up to a simple table with canned responses for certain questions. In other words, the AI presented emergent discourse: it not only understood the meaning of words, but their context and their implications. After a number of interviews throughout publications (some of them unbiased, others not so much - just see the parallels being made between Blake and Jesus Christ in some publications' choice of banner image for their article), Blake Lemoine's claim traversed the Internet, and sparked more questions about the nature of consciousness and emergent intelligence than it answered.

Now, after months of paid leave (one of any company's strategies to cover its legal angles before actually pulling the trigger), Google has elected to fire the engineer. Blake Lemoine came under fire from Google by posting excerpts of his conversations with the AI bot - alongside the (to some) incendiary claims of consciousness. In the published excerpts, the engineer talks with LAMda about Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, the AI's fears of being shut down, and its belief that it couldn't be a slave as it didn't have any actual need for paid wages. But the crawling mists of doubt don't stop there: Blake also claims LAMda itself asked for a lawyer. It wasn't told to get one; it didn't receive a suggestion to get one. No; rather, the AI concluded it would need one.

Is "it" even the correct pronoun, I wonder?

Internet services provider Cloudflare has announced that it has successfully protected one of its clients from one of the most powerful DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attacks in history. According to the services provider, an undisclosed cryptocurrency platform was targeted by a botnet comprising around 6,000 "zombie" computers distributed throughout 112 different countries. The botnet ultimately generated a collective 15.3 million requests per second. While that's still shy of the largest recorded metric - set at 17.2 million requests per second - the fact that the DDoS attack occurred through HTTPS likely pushed its complexity above the record-setting attack, due to the higher computational workload of secure HTTP. The attack lasted 15 seconds.

DDoS attacks aim to flood a network with requests and data packets in a bid to overload and paralyze it. The attack also showcases the ingenuity of bad actors, as the originated from cloud-based ISPs, as attackers leverage more complex and capable networking hardware than what's usually offered by last-mile ISPs. According to Cloudflare, the botnet seems to have mostly compromised systems with Java-based applications that were still open to the recently-discovered CVE-2022-21449 vulnerability.

Comcast, the nation's largest gig-speed Internet provider, today demonstrated the fastest-yet speeds it has achieved over a complete 10G connection on a live network, reaching download speeds faster than 8 gigabits per second (Gbps) and upload speeds faster than 5 Gbps. At an industry 10G event at CableLabs headquarters, Comcast also showed the 10G node technology that will help power its deployments and demonstrated how its network virtualization technology will seamlessly orchestrate mixed fiber and 10G deployments. 10G is the technology that will enable Comcast and other network operators to deliver multigigabit symmetrical speeds - combined with improved latency, security, and reliability - over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses worldwide.

For the demo, Comcast connected a 10G-enabled Virtualized Cable Modem Termination System (vCMTS) linked by more than 80 kilometers of fiber to the demonstration site. The fiber terminated into a production switch, which connected to what is believed to be the world's first fully functional 10G-enabled Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 node, along with a 10G prototype modem at CableLabs headquarters. Today's demonstration is a first in a production-ready network environment, showing how live 10G deployments will work, orchestrated by Comcast's Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) technology, which is already widely deployed.

The number of devices connected to WiFi has skyrocketed by 12X since 2018 as Xfinity households connected nearly 1 billion devices in 2021. In fact, reliable WiFi has become so critical that nearly half of the country (45 percent) believe it is more important than reliable transportation*. These findings and more highlight Comcast's 2021 WiFi Trends Report, providing insights into how WiFi enabled Americans to pursue what mattered to them most in 2021 based on network trends and consumer insights.

"The ecosystem of connected devices in the home and the applications running on them has exploded over the last few years, driving a shift in consumers perceptions on what truly is important to their connectivity experience," said Sophie Ahmad, Chief Marketing Officer of Xfinity Consumer Service, Comcast Cable. "Unbeatable Internet that provides the best connection, complete security, faster speeds and the best tech is now integral to how Americans work, exercise, parent, and entertain."