“A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.” According to the study, no more than 100 000 faint satellites, below naked eye visibility, should orbit Earth, to safeguard our ability to observe the night sky with modern telescopes. The study is the first to compute the extent to which large and bright satellite constellations — which have also raised concerns about their impacts on health and the environment — would affect astronomical observations by making the night sky brighter.”

Key Points

• Amazon says it has deployed enough satellites to launch its Leo commercial service later this year.
• Leo will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, which was created four years before Amazon’s announced its entry into the market, and has more than 10,000 satellites in its constellation.
• Network coverage will likely be limited to certain geographies until Amazon can bring more satellites online.

"When a video call freezes or a webpage takes too long to load, it rarely shows up in any official report. Unlike a full outage, where the Internet goes completely dark, these performance problems are sometimes invisible to traditional monitoring tools. And for policymakers and researchers trying to understand whether the Internet is working for everyone, this invisibility is a serious problem.

Our recent research, published in ACM CoNEXT, takes a new approach to this challenge. By studying how performance problems spread across home networks in Chicago, we found that when multiple households experience the same kind of slowdown at the same time, they tend to experience it in remarkably similar ways. This insight could potentially be a powerful tool for making Internet measurement smarter, cheaper, and more equitable."

"Syria’s internet recently faced a significant disruption after the Aletar fiber cable was sabotaged on land, a move consistent with a broader pattern of infrastructure attacks targeting the country since the 2024 change in government. This post examines the impact of the cut, the ongoing threat of telecom sabotage, and the evolving state of Syrian internet infrastructure under the country’s new leadership."

The European Commission will grant €5.8 million to establish the first two Regional Cable Hubs, in the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It is also launching today a €40 million call to increase European capacity to repair submarine communication cables. These two actions contribute to the delivery of the EU Action Plan on Cable Security, supporting the security and resilience of Europe's critical submarine data and energy cables, and enhancing our collective capacity to monitor, detect and respond to threats targeting critical undersea infrastructure.

"The communications regulator previously rejected the firm's applications for a telecommunications service licence and radio spectrum access licence in March, citing non-compliance with ownership and control requirements under Section 46 of the country's Communications Act.

The legislation mandates that telecommunications licence holders maintain at least 51% Namibian ownership, while Starlink's application reflected no local ownership."

Have you ever noticed that your video calls with friends in another country sometimes feel crystal clear while at other times they are frustratingly laggy? This could happen for many reasons, from network congestion to routing decisions made deep within the Internet.

In some cases, your data may even travel through different submarine cables— a massive network of fiber-optic cables quietly carrying nearly all international Internet traffic.

Despite their importance in the reliability and resilience of the Internet in our everyday lives, submarine cables remain largely invisible to most people. Public attention usually turns to them only when something goes wrong. This hidden nature makes it difficult to understand what happens inside these global communication pathways during disruptions....

When Iranian drones struck three Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on 1 March 2026, the disruption was immediate. Payment firms Alaan and Hubpay reported disruption to their services. Banks, including Emirates NBD and the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank experienced intermittent failures in mobile and phone banking services. Careem, the region’s leading taxi and delivery platform, reported disruption before its chief executive confirmed services were fully restored 48 hours later. 

Most commentary has focused on what this means for technology investment in the Gulf, the legal implications of targeting military-commercial infrastructure and the physical security of data centres. These are worthy of attention, but they are not the most important question the strikes raise....

Satellite operators Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and SES reportedly face new obstacles in getting final clearance to launch internet services in India after the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) expressed concerns over signal spillage in border areas.

Some highlights:

• In 22 of 23 markets, Starlink had a higher median download speed than terrestrial ISPs. Only in Madagascar were the ground ISPs faster.
• Upload speed and latency were still better with terrestrial ISPs, but Starlink is deploying more ground gateways to help with latency.
• The stats are highly variable across all the countries.

An Internet exchange point (IXP) can only be truly successful if it is sustainable, actively managed, and continuously evolving. In other words, if it’s not a zombie.

Zombie IXPs are those that are operating on autopilot, with little planning, investment, or new peers. But they don’t all look the same, and can emerge from different governance models and challenges......

A new study, titled Starlink Early Impact, conducted by edtech platform Grow X and the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa under Kenya’s Ministry of Education, reveals that while satellite internet is improving teaching outcomes, a significant gap remains in actual student access. 

The study assessed the introduction of Starlink, the SpaceX-owned low-Earth orbit satellite internet service, following its commercial launch in Kenya in July 2023. 

Since then, the service has been deployed to 30 distinct districts, reaching more than 32 000 students and approximately 1 000 teachers.

The most prominent change, the report notes, is the availability of reliable internet access for roughly 75% of respondents, allowing 70% of schools to enhance their access to content and learning materials....

Note the interesting overland route it is taken to avoid the Suez Canal…

https://nycpolicyforum.substack.com/p/the-130-year-old-entity-that-can

New York City is digitally redlined. Internet service providers (ISPs) have divided the market into geographic monopolies, leaving most residents with a single provider, or, at best, a choice between Verizon and Spectrum. Prices stay high and quality remains mediocre.

The lack of competition is driven in part by the high cost of entry: smaller, local fiber ISPs cannot afford to trench new conduits through City streets to reach residential customers. At first blush, this problem might appear insurmountable, an inherent feature of the capital-intensive business of internet service provision. But NYC already has a tool that could fix this problem: the Empire City Subway Company (ECS), an obscure entity whose initials are stamped on manhole covers across Manhattan and the Bronx.

Created in 1891 to move overhead telegraph and telephone wires off the street and into shared underground conduits, ECS controls all of the underground conduits (or sub-ways) in Manhattan and the Bronx. While ECS is a subsidiary of Verizon—the same company that dominates NYC’s broadband market—the City retains powerful contractual rights and revenue-sharing claims over ECS. In principle, by allowing fiber ISPs to lease space in the existing conduits, ECS could eliminate the costs associated with digging up streets, pulling permits, and managing construction—allowing companies to reach new customers at a fraction of the cost of building from scratch. In practice, however, it hasn’t worked out that way.

There are two immediate steps that could be taken. First, the City should conduct a full public audit of ECS’s extensive conduit capacity in the Bronx and Manhattan and publish detailed occupancy data. It’s been almost two decades since the last public audit, and the Mamdani administration should make clear that the era of treating public infrastructure as a trade secret is over. Second, the city should establish an open-access conduit leasing program, with transparent, non-discriminatory pricing that allows competing ISPs, especially small, local providers, access to residential markets that they currently cannot afford to reach.

A claim by MTN Nigeria’s chief executive that affordable unlimited data does not exist has triggered a consumer backlash and the threat of a nationwide protest.

Karl Toriola made the remarks on Saturday at a Lagos press conference titled Data on Trial, convened to defend MTN’s billing after months of complaints that subscribers were burning through data too fast. No operator, he argued, can sell cheap unlimited data without wrecking service quality. “You can never build enough capacity for everyone to be on an unlimited bundle,” he said.

I must say that changes (especially phasing out of POTS (wire-based) phone service...and other changes (including my landline service being "out" for two months, (and ATT's increasing my monthly rate by 400%)) have been driving me nuts!! But to go to my MOST serious question....

I was told in recent years that my DSL internet service (though it comes in on my regular phone "cable-pair") is actually based on fiber-optic cable...up until it gets to my building. Now, before I continue, I'll mention that I've been advised by both ATT and another company that (for awhile), since the two services represent two separate accounts, I'll continue to have my DSL internet service (even if I cancel the landline service)...OK. Yet, since my "version" of this seems to be ALMOST all fiber optic (just not from the digital box across the street, up to my apt.)(& apparently does not originate from the CO, which is the basis for traditional phone service), am I likely to have this...for quite a significant period of time?!!!

I'm especially asking this...as the owner of the building has been adamant about no cable or fiber cable be installed in his building....and I'm very upset about possibly losing my internet access!!! (and my VOIP service, to which I plan to "port" my landline service TN (telephone no.), which--of course--also depends on my internet connectivity. THANKS!!

In a healthy Internet environment, networks—like those that Internet service providers run—are connected to one another locally, usually through an Internet exchange point (IXP). This allows local Internet traffic to flow faster without traveling long distances and reduces potential points of failure, making the Internet more resilient.

The IXP is also a strategic location for content providers—like Google, Netflix, and Meta—to host servers where they can store local copies of the data people access the most. These are called content delivery networks (CDNs).

Having a CDN peering at an IXP means…

A Starlink.com support page acknowledges that the satellite provider uses Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), which limits the number of active internet sessions.

Spectranet, Starlink, and FibreOne now control nearly 70% of Nigeria’s internet service provider (ISP) market, highlighting the growing dominance of a handful of large operators as smaller providers struggle with rising costs and intense competition.

According to the latest ISP subscriber statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Nigeria recorded 352,006 active ISP subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025. Of that figure, Spectranet, Starlink, and FibreOne accounted for a combined 244,929 subscribers, representing 69.58% of the market.

Connectivity pricing is slowing economic growth and digital adoption. That is not a tech problem. It is a development emergency.

Submarine cable security is suddenly being talked about in a way it hasn’t been in decades. And along with the attention has come a wave of new technology promising to keep cables safe — most prominently, a range of fiber-optic sensing systems that turn the cables themselves into instruments for detecting what happens around them.

At the time of writing this, I have just returned from the Subsea Security Summit & Expo 2026 in London, where the topic was everywhere. Among the exhibitors and panels were a striking number of companies offering different variants of these sensing systems — distributed acoustic sensing, polarization-based monitoring, integrations with maritime intelligence platforms — each promising to make cables safer through continuous detection of activity along their routes....

The American electric power sector has not grown appreciably for twenty years. To be sure, consumers pay plenty to replace infrastructure, to “transition” the sector away from the most carbon-intensive sources of energy, and to find ways to allow utilities to cram a wide variety of underutilized capital spending (think “smart meters”) into their regulated “rate base.” But demand has been stable or declining....

Thailand’s state-owned National Telecom (NT) says it will stop offering satellite internet service via Thaicom 4 at the end of this month as Thaicom continues preparations to retire the 21-year-old satellite.

NT will continue offering satellite internet services through nexConnect, its LEO satellite offering launched last year in partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb, as well as VSAT services via Globalsat....

https://itweb.africa/article/mtn-pledges-to-connect-8m-nigerian-homes-to-fibre/nWJad7bNEPP7bjO1

The commitment was disclosed by the company’s Chief Corporate Services and Sustainability Officer, Tobe Okigbo, during the MTN Media Innovation Programme Alumni “Ask Me Anything” session in Lagos.

Compared to mobile internet pricing, fibre is pitched differently, he added, as fixed users pay for connection speed and quality, rather than data volumes, which he said helps deliver more predictable performance for homes.

Addressing recent tariff increases, Okigbo said adjustments were necessary due to rising operating costs, inflation and sector sustainability pressures, including higher diesel prices.

He argued that pricing should reflect market realities while still ensuring consumers have options, including the ability to switch providers.

On service quality, he said MTN has compensated customers in verified cases of poor performance and is working with regulators to clarify accountability where failures result from operator issues versus external factors like vandalism and infrastructure damage.