Margo Anderson

4 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Remote sensing—a category broad enough to include both personal medical monitors and space weather forecasting—is poised for a quantum upgrade, much like computing and cryptography before it. A new type of quantum sensor that promises both higher sensitivity and greater security has been proposed and tested in proof-of-concept form. What remains to be seen is how broadly it will be

2 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Stuart Bradford In 2023, at least 20 civilian aircraft flying through the Middle East were misled by their onboard GPS units into flying near Iranian airspace without clearance—situations that could have provoked an international incident. These planes were victims of GPS spoofing, in which deceptive signals from the ground, disguised as trustworthy signals from GPS satellites in orbit, trick an

5 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. For IEEE Spectrum readers following telecommunications news in 2024, signals expanding their reach and range animated readers to read more: Including stories on early-stage cellphone “towers” now in low-earth orbit, low-power Wi-Fi implementations reaching out for kilometers, China expanding its satellite broadband constellations into regions of the globe dominated by SpaceX Starlink, and 6G signals curving around obstacles to expand

4 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Undersea internet cables around the world handle 99 percent of transcontinental digital communications, but they’re also still vulnerable to breakage—and sabotage. When the lights went out on the BCS East-West Interlink fiber optic cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden on 17 November, the biggest question wasn’t when internet service would be restored. (That’d come another 10 or so days later.) The

3 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Brooklyn, N.Y. startup Pi-Radio’s open-source research kit can help researchers explore a promising new wireless band for 6G. In 6G telecom research today, a crucial portion of wireless spectrum has been neglected: the Frequency Range 3, or FR3, band. The shortcoming is partly due to a lack of viable software and hardware platforms for studying this region of spectrum, ranging

9 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Thirty-five years ago, a misguided AIDS activist developed a piece of malware that encrypted a computer’s filenames—and asked for US $189 to obtain the key that unlocked an afflicted system. This “AIDS Trojan” holds the dubious distinction of being the world’s first piece of ransomware. In the intervening decades the encryption behind ransomware has become more sophisticated and harder to

3 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. In this rendering of a new optical metasurface, a laser beam (green) hits the surface, which creates steerable beams of light at different frequencies (blue). A new, tunable smart surface can transform a single pulse of light into multiple beams, each aimed in different directions. The proof-of-principle development opens the door to a range of innovations in communications, imaging, sensing,

5 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Harald Ritsch/Science Source While the technology world awaits NIST’s latest “post-quantum” cryptography standards this summer, a parallel effort is underway to also develop cryptosystems that are grounded in quantum technology—what are called quantum-key distribution or QKD systems. As a result, India, China, and a range of technology organizations in the European Union and United States are researching and developing QKD

4 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Getty Images A team of researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom have smashed the world record for fiber optic communications through commercial-grade fiber. By broadening fiber’s communication bandwidth, the team has produced data rates four times as fast as existing commercial systems—and 33 percent better than the previous world record. The researchers’ success derives in part from their innovative

4 min read Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum. Lime Microsystems has released a range of private 5G base-station kits built around the LimePSB RPCM board shown here. Lime Microsystems As the world’s 5G rollout continues with its predictable fits and starts, the cellular technology is also starting to move into a space already dominated by another wireless tech: Wi-Fi. Private 5G networks—in which a person or company sets