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Comment by greatjack613 | Hacker News Reader

The tech behind this is great, but I fear what the TV makers will do with this to prevent you from disabling ads. Samsung is bad enough as is, having a built in connection will make it even worse.

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I rented an old house for a few years that had lath and plaster walls, but they stapled chicken wire to the lath prior to adding the plaster. It made for a decent faraday cage. I had to stand by a window to get cell service. Wifi would not propagate between rooms, so I had to setup a mesh system with individual ethernet connections. I miss it.

Interesting. Are you sure it wasn't just metal lathe, which is meshed like chicken wire a bit?

My old 1940s had that, and wifi basically didn't work without the doors left open. I do miss its soundproofing, though.

I think you are describing expanded metal. This was definitely twisted wires. I had a heck of a time cutting in the boxes for the ethernet. It was built in 1905, and some flipper at some point decided to leave the lath and plaster and just add lath and drywall overtop. Presumably the same person put a metal roof over the old composite shingles and vinyl siding over the wood. They also chose to not add insulation. Always get an inspection before you buy!

Plain cellular connectivity would be enough for that, just about every TV would have a good terrestrial cell signal.

And this will almost certainly be more expensive than plain old cellular. TV manufacturers would be covering a very niche market of people who have a TV in a location with no cellular coverage.

If it was economical to do it they would, but that's still a long ways away I think

But I believe it's uneconomical more for licensing reasons than BOM reasons. Cellular baseband modems are an oligopoly, and so they attach all sorts of rev-share fees to use of their chips, beyond just the cost of the chip itself.

Apple actually owns the baseband/modem group they bought from Intel a couple of years ago. The 11 and 11 Pro were shipped with in-house ex-Intel modems. Since then they have moved back to Qualcomm but I have to imagine they're continuing development and will cut Qualcomm out one day. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/01/qualcomm-ceo-says-planning-f...

Yup, there are guides for how to open up your new TV and remove/disable the M2M modem inside. I don't think the cellular connection being in the sky will change too much about that.

I'm sorry, what? My TV is phoning home over the cell network?

How else would they bypass your home network and any firewalls in place?

Novel problems require novel solutions.

How do you think they make em so cheap?

I knew they phoned home in general, but it has generally been done over wifi. I'm surprised to hear that they are now including cell modems.

Would love to know more about this. I thought I had successfully neutered the Roku spyware on my TV by not giving it my network password.

They can and will connect to any free Wi-Fi

Do many people have a TV outdoors?

Not gonna happen. You need line of sight to the satellites.

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