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Verizon demos THOR, its new vehicle for frontline rapid humanitarian response
The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat in the United States Pacific Northwest that has led to hundreds of deaths — with more heat on the way.
Heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, typhoons and many other types of weather-related disasters create huge challenges for infrastructure providers like energy utilities and telecoms, who have to keep uptime as close to 100% as possible for their customers even in the midst of some of the most challenging environments humans have ever witnessed.
To that end, Verizon (which, as a reminder, is the ultimate parent company for TechCrunch for now) announced today the first demo unit of what it dubs its THOR vehicle, for Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response. Designed on top of a Ford F650 pickup truck chassis, THOR is designed to provide highly mobile and resilient connectivity to frontline responders and citizens through wireless technologies like 5G Ultra Wideband and satellite uplinks.
Verizon’s THOR vehicle can deploy wireless technologies like 5G and satellite uplinks to rapidly deploy connectivity to frontline responders. Image Credits: Verizon
The company developed the prototype in partnership with the Department of Defense’s NavalX and the SoCal Tech Bridge, and unveiled the prototype last week at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, just north of San Diego.
In addition to wireless connectivity, THOR can also potentially deploy a variety of drone capabilities. For instance, a vehicle could deploy a drone for search and rescue operations, or to help augment firefighters with intelligence on how a wildfire is developing over time.
As I discussed a few weeks ago, telcos like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are increasing spending on a variety of resiliency initiatives, ranging from the rapid staging of mobile wireless equipment to novel solutions like AT&T’s FirstNet One, a dirigible capable of flying near a disaster zone to offer wireless services.
DisasterTech, as I have been dubbing it, has been gaining more attention of late from investors and companies both big and small as governments, the private sector, insurers, and individuals have to confront and respond to the intensifying nature of storms globally.
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How Reliance Jio Platforms became India’s biggest telecom network
It’s raised $5.7 billion from Facebook. It’s taken $1.5 billion from KKR, another $1.5 billion from Vista Equity Partners, $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, $1.35 billion from Silver Lake, $1.2 billion from Mubadala, $870 million from General Atlantic, $750 million from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, $600 million from TPG, and $250 million from L Catterton.
And it’s done all that in just nine weeks.
India’s Reliance Jio Platforms is the world’s most ambitious tech company. Founder Mukesh Ambani has made it his dream to provide every Indian with access to affordable and comprehensive telecommunications services, and Jio has so far proven successful, attracting nearly 400 million subscribers in just a few years.
The unparalleled growth of Reliance Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of India’s most-valued firm (Reliance Industries), has shocked rivals and spooked foreign tech companies such as Google and Amazon, both of which are now reportedly eyeing a slice of one of the world’s largest telecom markets.
What can we learn from Reliance Jio Platforms’s growth? What does the future hold for Jio and for India’s tech startup ecosystem in general?
Through a series of reports, Extra Crunch is going to investigate those questions. We previously profiled Mukesh Ambani himself, and in today’s installment, we are going to look at how Reliance Jio went from a telco upstart to the dominant tech company in four years.
The birth of a new empire
Months after India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched his telecom network Reliance Jio, Sunil Mittal of Airtel — his chief rival — was struggling in public to contain his frustration.
That Ambani would try to win over subscribers by offering them free voice calling wasn’t a surprise, Mittal said at the World Economic Forum in January 2017. But making voice calls and the bulk of 4G mobile data completely free for seven months clearly “meant that they have not gotten the attention they wanted,” he said, hopeful the local regulator would soon intervene.
This wasn’t the first time Ambani and Mittal were competing directly against each other: in 2002, Ambani had launched a telecommunications company and sought to win the market by distributing free handsets.
In India, carrier lock-in is not popular as people prefer pay-as-you-go voice and data plans. But luckily for Mittal in their first go around, Ambani’s journey was cut short due to a family feud with his brother — read more about that here.
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A maturing OpenStack looks to the future
OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform that allows enterprises to essentially run their own version of AWS in their data centers, was founded by NASA and Rackspace in 2010. Today, it’s being used by the likes of Comcast, PayPal, Volkswagen, CERN, AT&T, China Mobile and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in the U.K. The OpenStack Foundation’s bi-annual… Read More
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Facebook’s OpenCellular is a new open-source wireless access platform for remote areas
Facebook is clearly very serious about its mission to connect the world and in the process, it has launched solar-powered drones that use lasers to connect to each other and the ground, and more prosaic efforts like new antennas for covering both urban and rural areas. Today, Facebook is expanding this work with the launch of OpenCellular, a new open source hardware and software project that… Read More
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