Today T-Mobile announced the closure of their deal to acquire 700 MHz A-Block spectrum from Verizon, which was originally announced back in January. This A-Block of spectrum was purchased from Verizon to the tune of $2.4 billion and gives T-Mobile some very high-quality spectrum in areas where it is most needed. The deal also supposedly gives T-Mobile some AWS spectrum as well, to help them shore up any holes they might have in their existing AWS spectrum holdings. Ultimately, though, T-Mobile wants this A-Block spectrum so that they can enable much higher speeds and better overall bandwidth to their customers. They will likely accomplish this through carrier aggregation with various different 10 or 20 MHz blocks of spectrum.

As you can see from the Map above, Verizon’s 700 MHz A-Block holdings are the vastest and cover cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Kansas City, Denver, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati. All of the customers that reside within these cities should expect to see the benefits of living in a T-Mobile market with A-Block 700 MHz spectrum, and to see those benefits within the next year or so. Keep in mind that T-Mobile went from Zero LTE coverage in March of 2013 to Nationwide LTE coverage in September of 2013, so we could realistically see this new spectrum getting utilized possibly by the end of the year.

In fact, T-Mobile states that they expect to actually have this service rolled out by the end of the year, which is by their own words, wicked fast. In fact, such fast and robust rollouts may be one of the primary reasons why T-Mobile has managed to actually steal away customers from their competition in ways that their competitors never thought possible. T-Mobile isn’t really just fighting with them on price, they’re also fighting with them on speed and coverage. There are some places that I go where I am shocked to find that I have T-Mobile service but no Verizon service and not just that, but I have T-Mobile LTE service in those areas and nothing from Verizon. With T-Mobile’s expanded spectrum holdings in these lower frequency blocks, I would expect to see T-Mobile recreating such an experience in many urban centers where their low-frequency signal is capable of penetrating more urban landscapes.

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So, remember when TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) built the Stampede supercomputer using VERY preferred pricing from Intel for using Intel Xeon Phi cards back in 2012? Well, that Stampede supercomputer in conjunction with the Lonestar Supercomputer at TACC are responsible for some pretty interesting research. The TACC at the University of Texas, Austin houses many supercomputers, but the two that were utilized for this project were the Stampede and Lonestar. The team of scientists from Houston’s Methodist Research Institute (HMRI) found that Alzheimer’s disease and cancer share a pathway in gene transcription, a fundamental process of cell production and growth. They published their findings in the December 2013’th issue of the open access journal Scientific Reports by the Nature Publishing Group.

The Stampede supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

They used the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at TACC to analyze and compare data collected from thousands of genes in order to narrow their search for a common signaling pathway between the two diseases. The two systems are part of TACC’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, dubbed XSEDE, which is a single virtual system that scientists use to share computing resources and much more. The research was made possible thanks to a donation from the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation which has donated tens of millions of dollars to education, health and environmental research. This includes the establishment of BRAIN center at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which was involved with the discovery of this link between cancer and Alzheimer’s. The TT and WF Chao foundation were primarily funded by Ting Tsung Chao’s cration of Westlake Chemical [NYSE:WLK] which has revenues exceeding $3.8 billion annually and a market cap of nearly $9 billion. Family members of the Chao family are worth billions of dollars since Ting Tsung’s passing in 2008. Even so, the foundation continues to be funded by the family’s wealth and continues to do good for mankind. The research was also supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, which currently only has a $30 billion budget per year as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Lonestar supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

Stephen Wong, a bioengineer and medical researcher at Houston’s Methodist Research Institute said that his study was able to find a new link between Alzheimer’s disease and glioblastoma multiform, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. He said, “This is the first time people have found that at the molecular mechanism level there are linkages between the two diseases.” 

These findings contrast a 2013 study of public health in Italy and a 2012 study of public health in Taiwan that showed an inverse association between Alzheimer’s disease with cancer, making those findings possibly less relevant. Wong said, “No one understands why this link is there, in a biological sense. And that’s the reason we did this study. I think we are among the first to study it this way. Once you identify the mechanism, the particular pathway, we can use that information to design a new therapeutic strategy.”

More about these groudbreaking scientific research can be found on the TACC’s website that has a much more detailed explanation of how their research methodology was assisted by the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at the TACC.

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According to reports flooding in through Twitter, AT&T Uverse users are suffering from nationwide outages of both TV and internet service. While there is no official explanation from AT&T or an estimated time of return to service, this is another outage from AT&T’s Uverse service which has been having issues as of late with multiple nationwide outages in recent memory. This is one of the problems with having a unified TV and internet service through one network and one provider. Not to mention the fact that Uverse, when available, is the only alternative to most cable companies that people are stuck with.

There are many customers that are being told that they will have service sometime today, but most of them are still without internet service. And with so little competition between the duopoly of Comcast/Timewarner and AT&T there really isn’t much need for them to actually deliver good service and competitive pricing. Today’s outage is just another sign of how horrifically dysfunctional our network infrastructure really has become.

You can read what people are saying over at downdetector where people are reporting what their problem is and what kinds of service they do and don’t have and in what area they’re located. The truth is that it appears that AT&T largest markets are the ones being hit the hardest, which explains why there are some very bright red spots on the map above in cities like Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and Miami. In the end, people will probably have internet service by the end of the day, but multiple nationwide Uverse outages are simply unacceptable from a company that effectively has control over almost all of the landlines in the nation.

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