News 28 august 2025 - 4 september 2025

Bangladesh’s two largest mobile operators launched the country’s first 5G services in major cities. Pakistan’s prime minister approved a delayed 5G spectrum auction to be held by December 2025. Iraq announced a state-backed 5G operator in partnership with Vodafone, aiming for nationwide rollout in 2025. The US restored FCC auction authority but sidelined key 5G/6G bands, opting to auction 100 MHz near 4 GHz.

SpaceX Starlink Maritime now delivers high-speed, low-latency internet to ships, enabling video streaming at sea, far surpassing previous 5–10 Mbps connections. Inmarsat, Intelsat, and OneWeb have upgraded networks, with OneWeb offering 150 Mbps for commercial vessels at $9,600/month. Iridium provides global coverage for critical communications. SES and Starlink jointly supply gigabit speeds to cruise ships using combined MEO and LEO networks.

A Verizon mobile outage on August 30 left millions across the U.S. without service for hours, with over 23,000 reports filed before restoration began. Pakistan authorities shut down 3G/4G mobile internet in Balochistan the same day, citing security threats amid unrest, leaving millions offline into September.

The global smart textiles market reached $6–8 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow over 30% annually into the 2030s. In 2024, the U.S. intelligence community funded the SMART ePANTS program with $22 million to develop clothing that covertly records audio, video, and location. Defense accounted for 29% of smart textile revenue, while sports and fitness showed the fastest growth at 35% per year.

Global chip sales reached $57 billion in April 2025, up 22.7% year-on-year. Analysts expect semiconductor revenue to hit $700 billion for the year. Apple launched 3 nm chips for iPhones and Macs, while Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs and TSMC’s 2 nm process are set for late 2025. NVIDIA plans up to $500 billion in new U.S. AI chip production capacity.

IBM’s NorthPole chip, unveiled in 2023, uses 22 billion transistors and runs vision models more efficiently than NVIDIA’s V100. Hala Point, announced in April 2024, links 1,152 Loihi 2 chips for 1.15 billion neurons and 20 quadrillion operations per second. Neuromorphic computing remains immature, lacking standards and software. The market is projected to grow 25–30% annually, reaching several billion dollars by 2030.

Apple will unveil four iPhone 17 models, including the iPhone 17 Air, at its September 9 event. Samsung plans a Galaxy Event on September 4 to launch Galaxy Tab S11 tablets and the Galaxy S25 FE. Xiaomi introduced HyperOS 3 with cross-platform features. Nothing faced criticism after demo units for Phone (3) were found using stock photos as camera samples.

MOFs hold world records for internal surface area, reaching up to 7,000 m²/g. CALF-20 can capture about one ton of CO2 per day per cubic meter in industrial use, while MOF-303 enabled a handheld water harvester in Death Valley in 2023. Nearly 90,000 unique MOF structures have been created in 20 years, with hundreds of thousands more predicted.