The Internet once held great promise to empower individuals, but it has become yet another path of control for bad actors. Today, authoritarian governments and companies around the world track and surveil individuals; data is not private and is sold for profit; some states algorithmically “score” their citizens; and propaganda and disinformation are rampant.

Thankfully, we are on the cusp of “Web3,” a next-generation Internet that could shift the balance back toward individuals. If the United States embraces Web3, it could also offer a pivotal advantage in its ongoing competition with authoritarian states, especially China.

What is Web3? To understand, it helps to go back to the beginning.

Think of Web1 as the original one-way Web pages of the 1990s—static sites coupled with the dawn of widespread email. Web2 came to life as the Internet became interactive, allowing users to log in and create their own content. At the same time, Google, Facebook and other massive tech platforms hosted “free” services in exchange for our data. Over subsequent decades, of course, the Internet has continued to advance and grow more sophisticated, but we mostly still operate in a Web2 world.

Now, we are closing in on a new version of the Internet—Web3—built on the blockchain, a technology that makes it possible to transact data securely, and smart contracts, which allow users to make agreements without relying on intermediaries, it’s what permits you to pay a vendor directly using cryptocurrency, no bank required. Web3 is still being developed and defined, but it’s clear that, fundamentally, it will offer a more decentralized version of the Internet.

Web3 is in its heady early days. New companies are forming daily to remove central platforms and bring decentralized, more secure services to users globally. Some focus on video-sharing services with no central repository—in contrast with YouTube or TikTok. Others are creating decentralized shared-storage options, unlike centralized cloud services.

These new services address many of the biggest problems of today’s Internet. Security is improved because there is no central database to hack. Privacy is protected because users directly control their data. Resiliency is built into Web3 through decentralization.

And this decentralization makes control by authoritarian governments much more difficult.

In 1999, it would have been hard to believe that one day teenagers would become millionaires by making videos of themselves playing video games or that political revolutions would be fomented on a website designed to share photos of college students.

Web3 could be equally revolutionary by shifting power back to individual users—which would be good for democracy and for the United States, for two reasons:

First, authoritarian states cannot abide private life because that’s where anti-governmental activities can percolate. China and Russia have already set up mechanisms to spy on and control the existing Web2 infrastructure through firewalls, censorship and coercion of technology platforms. Web3 would make such authoritarian controls much more difficult.

Second, although the United States still dominates Web2 in many ways, the Web’s current framework allows China to sweep up swaths of data to power its political and military artificial intelligence systems. The decentralization and personal data control of Web3 would make it much harder for China to maintain data dominance.

Web3 will, of course, be disruptive for good actors as well. Law enforcement will confront websites for which there are no “take down” notices and no corporate CEOs to enforce regulations. Intelligence agencies will need to find new ways to monitor terrorists. Seemingly invincible technology companies could go the way of Blockbuster. Nonetheless, the United States should not fear the rise of Web3—it should adapt to, invest in, and promote it.
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Geopolitics is about relative power and relative gains. Conceptually, Web3 is innately more beneficial to Western liberal democracies, which value democracy and personal privacy. This would return the advantage to the West and force China and other authoritarian states to confront their weaknesses, change them or fall behind.

1Password, a leader in enterprise password management, recently launched Secrets Automation, an easy-to-use way to secure, manage and orchestrate the rapidly expanding infrastructure secrets required in a modern enterprise. Secrets such as corporate credentials, API tokens, keys and certificates can number in the hundreds for midsize businesses and many thousands for enterprises. This scale and complexity lead to huge security risks. Besides the new product launch, 1Password also completed the acquisition of SecretHub, a secrets management company that protects nearly 5 million enterprise secrets a month. The SecretHub team and CEO Marc Mackenbach will join 1Password immediately, adding expertise and engineers to speed up the 1Password Secrets Automation roadmap. 1Password Secrets Automation launches with a host of partnerships and integrations that will make it easy for developers and DevOps teams to integrate with the mission-critical tools and libraries they already use.  

1Password is the first line of defense for over 80,000 businesses worldwide protecting their employees, customers and intellectual property by securing passwords, financial details and other sensitive information. Today's launch and SecretHub acquisition signal a major expansion of 1Password, helping enterprises secure their infrastructure and machine-to-machine secrets alongside their human passwords. 

"Companies need to protect their infrastructure secrets as much as their employees' passwords," said Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password. "With 1Password and Secrets Automation, there is a single source of truth to secure, manage, and orchestrate all of your business secrets. We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way." 

Secrets Security Not Keeping Pace. With the massive expansion of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, infrastructure secrets are multiplying as never before, scattered across multiple services and cloud providers. Companies often try to protect these secrets through a combination of home-grown solutions and awkward hacks. Human error within IT and developer organizations happens all the time and is compounded by risky shortcuts taken in the name of speed and productivity. 

Leaked secrets can have widespread ramifications; when an engineer accidentally placed a secret key into source code at Uber, the names, driver's licenses, and other private information of 57 million users were stolen. A recent GitGuardian report detected over 2 million infrastructure secrets exposed on code sharing platforms, growing 20% over the previous year. This underscores the massive and growing issue of properly managing secrets and protecting sensitive customer data. 

1Password Secrets Automation was developed to address directly these challenges. Key features include:

• The security of 1Password--store credentials, tokens and other secrets fully encrypted, using the same security that made 1Password the No. 1 enterprise password manager. 
• A single source of truth for all your secrets--gain complete visibility and auditability in a way that you can't when secrets are spread across multiple services. 
• Granular access control--define which people and services have access and what level of access they are granted. 
• Ease of use--built on 1Password's intuitive user interface, Secrets Automation delivers administrative simplicity, providing for good secrets hygiene. 
• Integration with your existing tools--Secrets Automation integrates with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, Kubernetes and Ansible, with more integrations on the way. You'll also find ready-to-use client libraries in Go, Node and Python.

1Password and GitHub are also announcing a partnership: "We're partnering with 1Password because their cross-platform solution will make life easier for developers and security teams alike," said Dana Lawson, VP of partner engineering and development at GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. "With the upcoming GitHub and 1Password Secrets Automation integration, teams can automate fully all of their infrastructure secrets, with full peace of mind that they are safe and secure."

A Roadmap Driven by Customer Demand. Kira Systems, an AI-based contract review and analysis software company, was one of many customers that requested 1Password expand its offering to solve their secrets management problems. 
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"We've been a 1Password customer for six years and have long wanted to centralize our secrets management," said Joey Coleman, Kira Fellow and director, systems with Kira Systems. "We store terabytes of sensitive data across many deployments, so it is critical for us to have a secure and efficient way of managing the credentials that give access to that data. Secrets Automation delivers an extra level of security while also removing the manual labor required to manage the volume of passwords and credentials."

At Amazon’s AWS re: Invent conference earlier this month, the company announced a new platform for mainframe migration and modernization called simply “AWS Mainframe Modernization,” which aims to help AWS customers get off their mainframes “as fast as they can” to take better advantage of the cloud.

Today, customers may take a couple of different paths to get off their mainframes—either they take a “lift and shift” approach and bring their application pretty much as is, or they may refactor and break the application down as microservices in the cloud. But neither path is all that easy, and the process can take months or even years to complete as customers must evaluate the complexity of the application’s source code, understand the dependencies on other systems, convert or re-compile the code, and then everything must be tested to make sure it all works.

“It can be a messy business and involves a lot of moving pieces. And it isn’t something that people really want to do on their own,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, speaking at the press event. “And while AWS Partners can help with the transition, it can still take a long time,” he added.

The new solution, AWS Mainframe Modernization, instead will make it faster to migrate, modernize and run mainframe applications on AWS. The company claims that it can cut the time to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by as much as two-thirds, using its set of development, test, and deployment tools and a mainframe-compatible runtime environment. The solution will also help customers assess and analyze their mainframe applications for readiness, then help them choose which path they want to take—re-platforming or refactoring—and then come up with a plan.

If the customer wants to re-platform, the Mainframe Modernization solution will offer compilers to convert code and testing services to make sure no functionality is lost during the translation. If the customer wants to refactor or decompose the application—if the components could be run in Amazon’s EC2 service, in containers, or in the Lambda service, for instance—then they can use the Mainframe Modernization solution to convert the COBOL code automatically over to Java. A Migration Hub lets customers track their migration progress across multiple AWS Partners and solutions from a single location.
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Amazon touts the system as being an agile and cost-efficient (with on-demand, pay-as-you-go resources) managed service that offers security and high availability, scalability, and elasticity.

The first two prototype satellites from Project Kuiper, the internet-from-space venture from the e-commerce giant, are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon announced on earlier this month. That will formally kick off its competition with SpaceX, the space company owned by Elon Musk, and OneWeb, among other rivals, for beaming high-speed internet connections to customers from low-Earth orbit. It will also be a crucial test of the satellites’ design before the company launches thousands more devices into orbit.

Amazon first announced its goal of deploying a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit in 2019. This was the second pursuit in space by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and former chief executive who also owns Blue Origin, the rocket company. A handful of other firms are also racing to offer high-speed internet to governments, other companies and consumers whose access is hampered by the digital divide in remote locations.

Like SpaceX, Amazon plans to spend $10 billion on the project, which sits within its device’s unit. But the company has been slower to start than SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets have lofted nearly 2,000 internet-beaming satellites into orbit for its own venture, Starlink. Thousands of customers are testing the SpaceX service for $99 a month with $499 antenna kits.

Amazon unveiled a customer antenna concept in 2020 and has been testing prototype satellites on the ground for years.

“You can test all the stuff you want in your labs, which we do,” Rajeev Badyal, a vice president at Amazon overseeing the Kuiper project, said in an interview. “But the ultimate test is in space.”

Competition among the companies is fierce, and their plans have drawn interest from investors and analysts who foresee tens of billions of dollars in revenue once the constellations become fully operational. But those same plans have also drawn criticism from space safety advocates who fear collisions of satellites adding to pollution in orbit; astronomers, whose ground-based telescope observations of the night sky could be disrupted by the satellites; and dark skies advocates who fear light pollution from sunlight reflecting from the constellations.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates satellite communications to the ground, approved Amazon’s network in 2020 and gave the company a deadline to launch half of its 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. Amazon bought nine launches from the rocket company United Launch Alliance in a deal likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Amazon has been talking to other launch companies, Mr. Badyal said, including its competitor, SpaceX, whose rapid Starlink deployment is partially because of its ability to use its own reusable rocket boosters for launches.

The first two prototype satellites, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat- 2, will launch separately on rockets from ABL Space Systems, one of a handful of start-ups building smaller launch vehicles to sate demand from satellite companies. The market for smaller rockets, designed to deliver payloads to space quickly and affordably, is packed with competitors, making ABL’s Amazon contract — good for up to five launches on ABL’s RS1 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. — a boost for the company.
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The pair of Amazon prototype satellites will test internet connections between space and the company’s flat, square antennas for consumers on the ground for the first time in Amazon’s Kuiper program. Regions for the test include parts of South America, the Asia-Pacific region and Central Texas. Past experiments involved flying drones with satellite hardware over antennas on the ground and connecting ground antennas to other companies’ satellites already in space, drawing internet speeds fast enough to stream high-definition video.

Last year a hacker group used a bit of malicious code it hid in a software update by the company SolarWinds to launch an immense cyberattack against U.S. government agencies and corporations—see Issues 7-27, 7-36, and 7-38.

The group behind the attack, Nobelium, is reportedly being directed by the Russian intelligence service. And they're at it again.

According to Microsoft, one victim of the SolarWinds hack, the group is targeting technology companies that resell and provide cloud services for customers.

"Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global IT supply chain," Tom Burt, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust, said in a blog post on the company's website.

"We believe Nobelium ultimately hopes to piggyback on any direct access that resellers may have to their customers' IT systems and more easily impersonate an organization's trusted technology partner to gain access to their downstream customers," he added.
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The hacker group hasn't tried to ferret out vulnerabilities in software, Burt said, but has been using techniques like phishing and password spray to gain entry to the targeted networks.

What if you could run the full Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience on the iPad you’re carrying around everywhere with you? Microsoft actually has a product that does that: The brand-new Windows 365 lets you create and customize a Cloud PC. You can then access it securely from any device that supports internet browsers. Even an iPad or a Mac.

Windows 365 is a cloud-based Microsoft experience that targets businesses. The product might help companies rethink their strategies for upgrading their fleet of Windows devices. Rather than continuously investing in new hardware, some businesses might want to keep their current PCs and get Windows 365 PCs for their employees.

The Windows 365 Cloud PC comes with customizable hardware. You can choose how many cores, how much RAM, and how much storage a workstation requires. It can all be changed after the fact, in real-time, if a particular Cloud PC needs more resources to get the job done.

That PC is tied to a single user who can then access their remote desktop from anywhere in the world.

How to get the Windows 365 Cloud PC. After configuration, the Cloud PC is always there, ready to let you pick up where you left off. You can access it via a browser or an app. To get back to the iPad example, you can choose between Safari and a dedicated iOS app.

You’d access your Windows 365 PC similarly from any other device that can run browser apps.

The Cloud PC is encrypted, and the data is encrypted as it’s streamed to you. That’s the key thing about Microsoft’s Cloud PC. You need an active internet connection to use it. Microsoft explains that if you can stream video on your current device, then Windows 365 works. And the Cloud PC’s connection is more formidable than most home setups.

But once set up, the Cloud PC will offer you an instant-on experience. You’ll get all your documents just as you left them the last time you “opened” your work PC. And you’ll be able to roll back the Cloud PC to previous states if you’ve deleted anything by mistake.

Windows 365 launched on August 2nd, but it’s only available to businesses. You can expect a per-user monthly subscription cost, in line with what’s available from other 365 experiences.

It’s unclear when commercial users will ever get access to the product. There might be regular Windows users who might want a similar Cloud PC experience without getting one from their employer.

What does a Cloud PC cost? Things aren’t as easy as with Microsoft 365.

You’ll be able to customize the Cloud PC’s hardware depending on your organization’s needs. Or have your company’s IT department configure your virtual Cloud PC based on the performance you require for getting work done.

Cloud PCs start at a single-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage, but they can go up to an eight-core CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.

The idea of running Windows in the cloud isn’t new, and Microsoft already offers an alternative to interested customers. But Windows 365 is going to make the entire thing a lot simpler. IT departments can customize a Cloud PC within minutes, and users can log into their remote workstation as soon after that initial setup.
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You can check out Windows 365 in great detail at this link. There are three configurations priced at $31, $41, and $66 per month per user. A more detailed Microsoft Mechanics video gives you an actual look at what the Windows 365 experience will look and feel like, including on the iPad.

Ford is finally ready to roll out over-the-air (OTA) software updates to its vehicles at scale. While Tesla and other automakers have offered OTA updates for years, Ford only delivered its first software updates to select Ford F-150 and Mustang Mach-E customers this year. But the automaker says it’s prepared to rapidly increase the number of vehicles capable of receiving software updates, with the goal of producing 33 million vehicles with the capability by 2028. 

Ford, which is fond of using the phrase “Built Ford Tough” for its trucks, is playing it cool with the branding this time, simply calling its software updates “Ford Power Ups.” Over the past two months, Ford says over 100,000 F-150 and Mach-E customers have received their first OTA updates. And there will be more to come, including owners of the new Ford Bronco. The automaker is preparing a major update later this year that will include Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. 

With this new update, Ford owners can ask Alexa for a weather update, play music, find the nearest gas station, or provide directions to their favorite destinations. Over 700,000 vehicles in the US and Canada will be eligible for the Alexa update this year, with “millions” more added over the next few years, Ford said. 

This isn’t exactly new for some Ford owners. Customers with Alexa accounts have been able to mirror the smart home assistant in their cars via their smartphones’ mobile connection. This new software update, though, will “embed” Alexa inside the car’s operating system, allowing for a more integrated user experience. And Ford is offering three years of Alexa complimentary, after which subscription fees will kick in. 

Not all the updates will come for free. BlueCruise, the automaker’s “hands free” highway driving assist system, will be available later this year to select F-150 and Mach-E customers who have purchased the relevant software updates. 

Legacy automakers have struggled to catch up to Tesla, which has long been the leader in shipping over-the-air updates to its customers to change everything from its Autopilot driver help system to the layout and look of its infotainment touchscreen. The idea that a car can be updated similarly to how Apple or Samsung can upgrade or repair the software on a smartphone has proven to be difficult and elusive for most car companies.

Most car dealers are wary of OTA updates for fear of being cut out of the lucrative service and maintenance process. Basically, if you can fix your car with an OTA update, you don’t need to take it in to the dealership as often. And that means less money for them.

Ford said that most of the updates will be “virtually invisible” to its customers and require “little to no action.” Others will require a reboot of the vehicle’s operating system that can happen when it’s most convenient, like overnight. 

“It’s a total reversal of the ownership model where vehicles used to just get older,” said Alex Purdy, head of business operations. “Now Fords will actually get better over time.”
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Earlier this year, Ford announced that Google’s Android would power the infotainment systems in “millions” of its cars starting in 2023. That, along with the Alexa software update that will begin rolling out later this year, is proof that Ford is committed to “giving our customers the choice to stick with the technologies and brands they’re already using and love or to try something new,” Purdy said.

Some of the world’s biggest companies, like Amazon and SpaceX, are looking towards space for the future of the Internet. Satellite-based Internet is a nascent enterprise, but analysts believe that broadband Internet beamed to Earth from orbit could be a massive business within the next 20 years, earning hundreds of billions of dollars.

Attention has focused on the “space” part of “space Internet,” with news stories focused on the rocket launches getting SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into space and how Amazon plans to catch up with satellites of its own. But all of these satellites will need transceivers on Earth to send and receive data. Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Socionext Inc. have built a new one that works with the next generation of Internet satellites.

What are transceivers? Unassuming pieces of technology, they are some of the least-flashy but most important components in history. A transceiver is a device that can both transmit and receive signals, hence the name. Combining a transmitter and a receiver into one device allows for greater flexibility, and since their development in the 1920s, they’ve been used to reach remote locations. One of the earliest transceivers, invented by the Australian John Traeger, was used to help doctors reach remote villages.

The new transceiver, designed for space internet technology, was developed at Kenichi Okada's lab at Tokyo Tech and presented recently at the virtual IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium. The new device has several improvements on both the transmitting and receiving ends of the business. All of these developments are geared toward providing Internet access in rural and remote areas. At only 3 mm (0.118 inches) by 3 mm, the transceiver can communicate with satellites over 22,000 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere.

"Satellite communication has become a key technology for providing interactive TV and broadband internet services in low-density rural areas. Implementing Ka-band communications using silicon – complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology in particular – is a promising solution owing to the potential for global coverage at low cost and using the wide available bandwidth," Okada said in a statement released by Tokyo Tech.

On the receiving end, the transceiver uses a dual-channel architecture. That translates into two receiving channels being able to attain signals from two different satellites simultaneously. If there’s ever any interference, be it from a malicious actor, a satellite breaking down in space, or the odd solar flare, it can effortlessly pick up another signal.

Stopping Interference. It can also handle one of the worst issues to plague any transceiver: adjacent channel interference or ACI. ACI occurs when a signal sent on one channel begins to overlap with another, adding noise and interference. The new transceiver’s dual-channel architecture can stop ACI at the source. Any interference is eliminated by adjacent channels. ACI is the type of problem that can frequently occur in remote areas, and eliminating it allows the device to extend its range even further.

On the transmitting side, Okada says that the device’s “transmitting power was the biggest challenge” for the new transceiver. Not only does it have to work, but it has to be cost-effective for companies like Amazon and SpaceX to show any consideration.

Designers use semiconductors known for the efficiency, as well as transistors made of the little-known compound Gallium arsenide, which has the lovely acronym of GaAs. GaAs transistors are superior to their more common silicon in many ways, and Okada says that getting the semiconductors and GaAs transistors to work together is “the most important technology for the transceiver design.”

Who This Helps. It’s not just space-based Internet that could benefit from the design that Okada and his team have developed. Okada says that balloon-based Internet, the type currently being implemented by Alphabet’s Loon in Kenya, could also use this improved transceiver.

In emergencies with inferior to non-existent Internet, the type that Loon, Starlink, and now Amazon’s Kuiper want to solve, every advantage can count. And now, one of the most significant advantages might come on the ground.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a trend that was already well underway: employers letting their workers perform their jobs remotely, from home, most or all of the time. But even if you and your employer both know exactly where you live and work, you may be surprised to learn that state departments of taxation can have some very different ideas about where "here" is. As a result, Texans, Utahns, and Arkansawyers who work for New York- or Massachusetts-based companies will have income taxes withheld from their paychecks, even if they've never set foot in the home office.

In the wake of the pandemic, dozens of major companies are embracing employees' desire to stay remote, increasing their support for working from home permanently. Some businesses have even closed offices or let leases lapse, counting on a physically distant, flexible workforce to reduce their real estate needs.

In many ways, this can be a win/win: employers can save overhead costs on expensive square footage in high-demand cities, and employees can save time and money by skipping the commute and dialing in from, basically, anywhere they want. New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are expensive; maybe you want to move to Montana and dial in from the woods or get a nice little ocean-view place in Florida. Unfortunately, as far as the state is concerned, your beachside cabana may as well be squarely in the middle of Manhattan, and you will be taxed as such.

Even before COVID, living in one state but working in another was common in many of the biggest US metropolitan areas. Many commuters into New York live in New Jersey or Connecticut, for example, and vast numbers of workers in Washington, DC live in Maryland, Virginia, or sometimes even farther out in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Delaware. Kansas City sprawls into both Kansas and Missouri, so traveling across city limits can mean crossing state lines. Any major city near a border likely has loads of workers that saunter over that line every day.

From a tax perspective, that's tricky because both the state where you perform a job and the state where you actually live are going to want to try to tax your income. Still, only one state at a time can, and most jurisdictions with a lot of overlap have agreements worked out with their neighboring states that make it easy for workers to take state withholdings and pay state tax where they live. (I, for example, only had to fill out one short form when I worked in downtown Washington, DC to make sure my taxes were properly withheld across the river in Virginia.) 

However, the increase in remote work means as offices downsize, some employees are now migrating to areas of the country where there are not tax agreements in place, leaving individuals to try to muddle through multiple states' tax codes on their own. Even more challenging: states are losing money hand-over-fist due to the pandemic and are likely to be more aggressive about chasing down every dollar they can claim.

Seven states – Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, and Pennsylvania – have so-called "convenience" rules on the books that require any work performed for an employer based in their state to be taxed as if the worker performing the job is in their state, no matter where the employee is located. Those states are still attempting to collect tax from telecommuting workers, and other states are fighting back.
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New Hampshire,  one of nine states that do not have an income tax, is suing neighboring Massachusetts over its convenience rule. Four other states – New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Iowa – are supporting the suit.

In the near future, your phone may take its 5G signal from the sky instead of a nearby mast on the ground. It's an innovative way to solve the problem of increasing connectivity without relying on thousands of terrestrial cell towers. The concept is known as a High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), and it essentially takes the cell tower from the ground and puts it in the sky.

The latest HAPS project to be unveiled is from Great Britain – Stratospheric Platforms and Cambridge Consultants. Recently, the pair revealed the core of its efforts, a special antenna and crewless aircraft, which it has been working on confidentially for the last four years.

How will it work? Instead of talking to a nearby tower to get its signal, your phone talks to a three-square-meter antenna attached to hydrogen-powered aircraft with a 60-meter wingspan, flying at an altitude of 12 miles (20 kilometers). The aircraft, or HAP, is expected to stay aloft for at least a week, all the while providing 4G LTE and 5G network coverage over an area of about 86 miles (140 kilometers).

Phones don't give off a powerful signal, hence the antenna array's size on the aircraft, which has 4,000 radios working together inside it. The processing power is similarly immense, helping to steer and direct the beams toward the ground even when the aircraft is shifting around. The cooling system has to work at high altitudes, minimize drag, and keep the weight manageable. It's an exciting piece of technology in itself.

The aircraft itself, which is made of a composite material, has already been certified for use, so it's deemed safe and ready for flight in civil airspace. There's no pilot, and ground-based operators will only be involved during takeoff and landing. The hydrogen power cell is not only environmentally friendly, as it only produces water vapor and emits very little noise, but it also gives off a lot of power — it has been tested to 50KW in labs already — for a long duration. That's a lot more than the low-power solar power systems used on other HAP vehicles.

HAPS systems are also expected to be cheaper to implement. Building each aircraft reportedly saves 70% over the costs of building and installing a traditional mast. Then there's the space-saving and logistical benefits. According to research quoted by the team, it's estimated that an impractical sum of 400,000 5G masts will be needed to cover the U.K., for example, and each aircraft could replace around 200 of those masts.

What can you expect from the connection? The aircraft should return a smooth Sub-6 5G beamed signal offering speeds of 100Mbits per second and 1m/s latency to devices connected to it, which don't need any special software or hardware modifications. While a fleet of HAPS aircraft could provide enough coverage for an entire country, what's very interesting is that the unique modular design of the antenna enables targeted coverage.

This means a signal from a part of the antenna could be focused on an individual area like a motorway or even a single vehicle driving on it. The team said a fleet of 60 aircraft could cover the U.K. in its entirety, and the idea is for networks to partner with dedicated "airlines" that operate the planes.

Potential problems. This new technology forces networks to rethink how they currently work. Network operators are already installing a 5G network using traditional masts. Convincing them to bypass this and adopt a sky-bound service will take a lot of work. However, the team calls its stratospheric network complementary to a traditional terrestrial network and says the costs involved will be temptingly less than creating a widespread 5G network using only ground-based masts.
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When will it arrive? When can we expect to see Stratospheric Platforms HAPS system in operation? Deutsche Telekom is the project's initial investor and launch partner, and it has already tested an early version to show the system works. Stratospheric Platforms' aircraft is in preproduction now, with plans for the first prototype flight in 2022, while the antenna exists as a proof of concept and works with 3G, 4G, and 5G. It's anticipated the service will go live in 2024.