Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 9 August 2013

A weekly round-up of radio and communications news from around the internet.

Will 5G be measured in millimetres? Engineers with Samsung and New York University, say they've developed a 5G beam-forming antenna that could see data transfers rates of more than 1 gigabit per second over a distance of as much as two kilometres. The technology would operate on or near millimetre-wave frequencies.

Tactical training. Over 300 members of the French and foreign security forces recently undertook a training exercise that made use of Cassidian's Tetrapol tactical cell equipment. Tetrapol enables geolocation and voice services to be used in areas where there is no network coverage.

Send in the cloud. Researchers at MIT have developed a computer chip that helps to foil hackers. Called Ascend, the device cloaks the way CPUs request information from cloud servers. While such data is encrypted, canny criminals can launch a 'side-channel attack' by deducing information from memory address requests, computation time and so on. Ascend tackles this problem by cleverly messing with the pattern of memory access.

That's one hot handheld. Finally, a firefighter in Colombia, while fighting a fire, dropped his Hytera PD706 radio. Amazingly, according to the manufacturer, the radio - despite being severely singed - was still operable, although the channel and volume controls had given up the ghost.

The fire-damaged Hytera PD706.