MTS President Vyacheslav Nikolaev said that the company plans to move towards reducing sales of SIM-cards, as well as reducing their points of sale.

It seems to me that now, when the cost of SIM cards has increased by an order of magnitude, it’s time to heal this market. Therefore, from the point of view of sales of SIM cards, it seems to me that the sales volume can now be reduced, especially since for us, ecosystem effects provide very serious advantages in reducing the outflow – this also allows us to take sales more calmly.

Nikolaev noted that an increasing number of customers are also moving online, which also allows, in terms of telecom, to reduce the number of their own points of sale.

From the point of view of telecom, it seems to me that this is a very timely issue, and perhaps the right actions will be taken by the entire market. At least we will go in this direction. We hope that colleagues will not be far behind, because selling SIM cards is indeed becoming more expensive and pointless.

As we have already reported, MTS may sell its tower business.

One of Asia’s largest telecoms and pay-TV operators, Japanese company Sky Perfect JSat, has announced that it plans to use the SpaceX Starship interplanetary spacecraft to launch its Superbird-9 telecommunications satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2024. The details of the deal were not disclosed.

The situation is noteworthy in that Starship has not yet made a single orbital flight: Elon Musk promises to launch Starship on a test flight into orbit almost every month for about a year, but it is delayed each time. However, there is no contradiction that an interstellar spacecraft to launch a payload into orbit: in concept, Starship should replace all of SpaceX’s current rockets, including the workhorse Falcon 9, which goes into space every week.

Hackers at the DEF CON 2022 event in Las Vegas managed to break into a new technology of the US Department of Defense – local autonomous electrical networks (microgrids) at military bases.

The Pentagon has tested the technology to look for vulnerabilities. Many of the more than 1,700 DEF CON members have successfully shut down a dummy network that mimics the one being prepared by the Pentagon. So, one of the hackers found out that microgrids work on the Kelvin temperature scale, which does not use negative values. As a result, he put negative numbers in the forecast model, which caused the system to crash.

The Pentagon said they also plan to launch a full-fledged program to further test the microgrid and find gaps. A microgrid is a technology for dividing one power system into sections. Each cell is able to work autonomously if necessary and actively uses alternative energy sources.