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Today’s topics include the FCC limiting local governments’ ability to restrict 5G deployment, and Alphabet’s Chronicle launching VirusTotal Enterprise.
Local governments are no longer allowed to restrict the deployment of small-cell wireless infrastructure sites in ways that the Federal Communications Commission considers unreasonable.
To accomplish this, the FCC on Sept. 26 placed limits on restrictions that localities can place on cell infrastructure, as well as strict shot clocks of 60 and 90 days for consideration of applications for small cells. The 60-day limit applies to colocation on existing sites, and the 90-day limit applies to new builds.
This move is critical for the deployment of 5G wireless communications, since wireless signals for 24- and 28-gigahertz bands are very short and a significant number of new, although small, cell sites will thus need to be built. The order also limits the fees that localities can charge for approving these small cell sites to amounts that are related to their actual costs.
Alphabet’s Chronicle security division announced the launch of VirusTotal Enterprise on Sept. 27, which is a new version of the popular VirusTotal online service, combining previously premium capabilities with new ones.
The regular, freely available public VirusTotal service enables any user to upload a file and have it scanned by more than 70 different security products. The user then gets back a report that identifies if any of the security products branded the uploaded file as being malware. The premium features of VirusTotal that have been expanded with the VirusTotal Enterprise offering build on the collection of malware that has been collected and make it available to security researchers.
Another new capability is a private graph feature that enables enterprises to load their own data to run analysis against the VirusTotal corpus of malware samples.