Let’s hear it for Facebook
My daughter, Claire, marvels how irrelevant the ads she sees on broadcast TV are and how relevant (to her) the ads she sees on social media, especially Instagram, which Facebook owns. My friends in marketing tell Facebook is the absolute best for their clients. Cheapest. Most directed. Most effective. Here’s the last two years of FB:
My co-author, Steven Schoen, alerts me to these incredible statistics:
+ A Parks Associates research report says over 15 million U.S. households have only mobile Internet service, up from 600,000 in 2015. This suggests that cord-cutting has now spread from voice telephone service to Internet service.
+ Global Internet subscriptions per 100 inhabitants: 15.2 fixed broadband subscriptions versus 75 mobile broadband subscriptions — that’s cellphone. That’s nearly five times as many cellphones are on the Internet as on landlines.
Now comes news from PC Magazine that
+ Tested: Verizon’s New 4G Beats 5G, Big Time
You can’t watch 10 minutes of broadcast TV without seeing an advertisement extolling the wonders of 5G. If 5G seems a little too good to be true, that is because it is. At least right now. When PCMag tested the Fastest Mobile Networks in 2020, we found that 4G actually outperformed 5G throughout the vast majority of the country. But the networks are always improving. PCMag’s Sascha Segan did some testing on Verizon’s new CBRS airwaves this week and saw downloads over 800Mbps on 4G phones right now. This use of 4G is a promising preview of what next year’s C-band 5G rollout could look like.
I’s guessing the beneficiaries of all this are the usual networking suspects — from Netflix to Amazon, from PANW to NVDA, from SWKS to TMUS.
More research needed. Anyone got better ideas?
Great reads in The Economist’s 1843 magazine
Banker, princess, warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad
How a girl from west London became the unlikely winner of Syria’s war
Click here.
Useful tips
+ Glasses get cloudy over time. Wash them with this:
+ The single point of failure! This is Texas. The water froze and the tank burst.
In the north-east, we have ways of stopping this, including an electric heating element and enclosing the tank in insulation.
In my house in the country (where I’m quaranting), our single biggest point of possible failure is our propane tank, which provides us with heat and electricity. Hence next week, I’m entertaining an engineer to discuss the possibility of a second propane tank.
+ A week for mulling is a good idea. Sitting at home, I get bombarded by great new things I want to buy — but don’t need. My new “strategy” is to mull a week. If the urge to buy has passed, then I save the money and, worse, having to dispose of the packaging.
When you play tennis regularly
Two things happen to your feet:
+ They get longer as your arch descends. I’ve gone from a 10.5 to a 12.
+ They get wider. I’m now on my third pair of increasingly thinner socks. Thank you Amazon and Bombas.
We dodged a bullet. The new autocrats.
Hong Kong. Myanmar, Turkey, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.
My favorite:
That’s it. We’re still allowed to play tennis. And today I’m playing outside for the first time in months. Yipee.
See you tomorrow. Harry Newton
