Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 25 April 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 25 April 2014.

Second-hand drones as Wi-Fi hotspots. US military surveillance drones, that were once used in war, are being fitted out with 4G gear and used as aerial Wi-Fi communications relays for soldiers in the field. The DARPA project is known as 'Mobile Hotspots'.

Google's Project Loon. Google wants everyone to be connected and is going to great lengths to make it happen… including testing balloons floating at 65,000 feet to act as comms links. It was recently reported that the latest tests - above the Nevada desert - involve LTE.

Satellite comms are unsafe. An investigation by IOActive found that satellite comms terminals (ground, air and maritime) from a variety of manufacturers are vulnerable to hacking, interception or complete loss of control to malicious players. “These vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to compromise the affected products," the report said. “In certain cases, no user interaction is required to exploit the vulnerability; just sending a simple SMS or specially crafted message from one ship to another ship would be successful for some of the SATCOM systems."

Colorado's poor radio system. Legislators in Colorado have passed a bill that requires the Department of Public Safety to fix the state's emergency radio system by 31 December 2014. The present system is said to be prone to poor coverage, particularly in mountainous areas.

LTE to dominate. A report by Analysys Mason says that LTE will slow the rate of decline in average revenue per user for mobile phone companies in the developed nations of the Asia-Pacific. Smartphones, which made up 53% of handsets at the beginning of this year, are forecast to reach 85% by 2018, which probably comes as no surprise to anybody.

World LTE Summit 2014. The 10th World LTE Summit will be held in Amsterdam from 23 to 25 June. Organisers expect more than 150 exhibitors, over 300 speakers and in excess of 3500 attendees in total.

Washington and Oregon 911 fails. A failure of the telephone system meant that some 911 calls in Washington state and parts of Oregon failed to get through earlier this month. During the outage, a recorded message told callers that their calls could not be connected. Social media was used to recommend to callers that they use a mobile phone (which worked in some cases) or to call non-emergency numbers. It was even suggested that people go to their local fire station to raise an alarm