The massive Rogers and Fido outage leaves customers without precious data nationwide, Elon Musk says Starlink should be fully mobile by the end of 2021, and NASA successfully flies a helicopter on Mars.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, April 20 and I’m your host Baneet Braich.
You probably noticed a massive Rogers and Fido outage impacting customers across the country on Monday. As per this recording, it’s not clear what caused the interruption or how many were impacted. The outage affected wireless voice and data however, residential and business wireline internet services were not impacted. The website Downdetector showed Rogers outages beginning overnight and spiking to almost 13,000 reports during the day. The service disruptions also impacted Canadians trying to make COVID-19 vaccination appointments with calls dropping and verification codes not delivering. [Twitter]
Elon Musk says Starlink should be fully mobile by the end of 2021. The Tesla CEO also says Starlink will exit beta this summer. The offering to this point only allowed people to access Starlink from where they registered it. In March, Musk filed a request to the Federal Communications Commission for Starlink to go mobile. This would allow Starlink to be accessed from ships, planes, RVs, trucks and more. Tesla cars will not have access because they are not big enough to carry the Starlink terminal. Musk also says Starlink internet speeds would double and latency would drop by the end of 2021.
NASA has successfully flown a small helicopter on Mars. The drone called Ingenuity was in the air for 40 seconds. NASA say this is the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world. Getting airborne is a challenge on Mars because the atmosphere is very thin. It’s only 1% of the density here on Earth. This means the blades have very little work to life up. The drone also has two cameras onboard. A black-and-white camera points down to the ground, and is used for navigation. The other high-resolution colour camera looks out to the horizon. The control is also autonomous because flying by joystick is, well, not a great idea. The long distance to Mars means radio signals take minutes to cross the intervening space. More images of planet red will be coming this week.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Plus, catch episode one of Hashtag Trending in French, hosted by our own Catherine Morin from Quebec at DirectionInformatique.com. Episode 2 drops this weekend. I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening!