Open Source: Is cell service improving on Durham’s 9th Street? Plus, other story updates

I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

Durham’s 9th Street, a busy commercial stretch near Duke University, has notoriously dreadful cell service. For years, business owners and patrons have complained of dropped calls and futile Google Maps searches. Signal bars dwindle. Text messages go nowhere. “SOS” signs commonly appear in the upper-right corner of cellphone screens.

Last June, I visited the street to learn why service is weak and how it might be fixed. Returning this week, I heard a bit of positive news and plenty of continued frustration.

“It’s still terrible,” said Bailey Moore, a staffer at the dive bar Dain’s Place who has AT&T. “I seem to do better than most people.”

One reason for the service graveyard has been a dearth of local small-cell sites, which amplify cellular network coverage in cities. In an email this week, the nation’s largest cell provider Verizon said it has installed two small cells around 9th Street since the start of the year. The company added it intends to add more cell sites in the area “to ensure our network coverage meets the growing population.”

As a Verizon customer myself, I did find the service much improved from 12 months ago. My phone was able to search a book title while at The Regulator Bookshop and a text I sent from Dain’s went through. So, progress.

News happens fast, and as a journalist, I don’t always keep tabs on developments after initial stories publish. Let’s rectify that, to a degree, with updates on a few more unique news items from the past two years:

The Red-Light Robber of Cary

Earlier this year, Raleigh ended its use of red-light cameras, which each year caught tens of thousands of red-light violations at 25 intersections across the city. In September 2022, I spoke with Brian Ceccarelli, a software engineer in Cary who dubbed himself “The Red-Light Robber” for his crusade against the cameras, which included recruiting plaintiffs for court challenges.

Raleigh nixing its program was a step forward, he said, but it doesn’t solve what Ceccarelli sees as an underlying safety issue: That the interval for yellow lights is too short.

“The formula is wrong,” he contends. “Getting rid of the cameras stops punishing people for engineering mistakes, but the mistake is still there,” he said in an interview this week. The North Carolina Department of Transportation refutes this claim, however, saying the time on yellow remains appropriate.

Once common in a handful of North Carolina cities, the cameras are now only used in Wilmington.

Punching back at an alleged “patent troll”

In October 2020, Rocky Proffit received a threat cloaked as an offer. It came from a Triangle-based company called Landmark Technology, which is considered by many to be a “patent troll.”

Patent trolls threaten to sue businesses for infringing on patents. Critics argue these patents tend to be vague in language, dubious in validity, and wielded indiscriminately to make companies pay rather than endure costly litigation.

Proffit is the founder of NAPCO Inc., a custom packaging maker in the small North Carolina town of Sparta. Rather than acquiesce to Landmark’s demand for $65,000, NAPCO sued the alleged patent troll, becoming the first plaintiff to test a 2014 state law that made it unlawful to make a “bad-faith assertion of patent infringement.”

I featured NAPCO’s fight in the summer of 2022. And the case today? It’s still ongoing.

Last August, a federal district judge in North Carolina ruled to invalidate Landmark’s patent. But Landmark has since requested permission to appeal this decision, and NAPCO continues to seek damages from Landmark under the 2014 state law (called the Abusive Patent Assertion Act).

“The case is at a critical phase,” said attorney Kelly Cameron, who represents NAPCO. The attorney for Landmark did not respond to an email from the N&O.

NAPCO has friends in its corner, with Red Hat, SAS Institute and the North Carolina Technology Association among organizations to file briefs on behalf of the packaging company.

Is Google Fiber finally here?

Google Fiber made plenty of noise when it announced its arrival to the Triangle in 2015. T-shirts were made. There was a #FiberIsComing ad blitz. But for years after, large sections of Raleigh and Durham lacked access to this fiber internet service.

This appears to be changing. When I first wrote about these coverage gaps two years ago, fewer than 20% of Raleigh residents and only 7% of Durham residents had Google Fiber options, according to the platform BroadbandNow. Today, these percentages are 46% for Raleigh and about 21% for Durham.

“We continue to grow and build out our network in the Triangle area daily,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said in an email, while noting their company doesn’t share or confirm coverage statistics.

In the summer of 2022, Durham resident Dequan Bradley was frustrated Google Fiber didn’t extend to his home. Bradley, a part-time DJ and podcaster, says the service still isn’t available but that he’s switched to AT&T Fiber which has been “much better than what I had originally.”

NC Wikipedia editors have a decision to make

Lastly, North Carolina’s formal group of Wikipedia editors is humming along, actively contributing to one of the most-visited websites in the world. “The user group is active, and it’s still doing its thing,” said Emily Jack, who sits on the North Carolina Wikipedian group’s executive committee.

The last entry Jack edited was on Jewish-American rock singer and music producer Genya “Goldie” Ravan.

The global Wikipedian movement has drafted a new charter, detailing governance rules and strategic planning, and Jack said the North Carolina committee is currently weighing whether to vote to ratify.

Clearing my cache

• Boom Supersonic on Monday will cut the ribbon on its supersonic jet factory at the Greensboro airport. Announced in January 2022, the facility aims to employ 1,750 workers by the end of the decade. The site’s future is tied to whether commercial supersonic travel takes off.

• Durham is getting a new headquarters as electric vehicle charger manufacturer Ionna announced it’ll spend $10 million on a corporate center in the city. Launched in February, Ionna is a joint venture between seven major automakers: General Motors, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Kia. It aims to eventually open 30,000 charging stations across the continent.

• Relay, a Raleigh cloud-based communications company, has raised $35 million in Series B funding to expand to new markets and “accelerate its product roadmap.” The firm makes walkie-talkies and other devices geared for front-line employees in hotels and hospitals, among other workplaces. Formed by a group of former Bandwidth employees, Relay initially marketed itself as a smartphone alternative for kids before shifting to businesses. In 2022, the company relocated from North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus to a tower in North Hills.

National Tech Happenings

• Apple is seen to have been slow to the AI arms race, but the maker of Siri looks to change that as it announced a partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

• An AI chat bot is maybe, sort of, running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

• “Spreadsheet Superstars,” a recent article from The Verge, features the Excel World Championships in Las Vegas. The story is formatted on a Microsoft Excel sheet.

Enjoy Triangle tech news? Subscribe to Open Source, The News & Observer's weekly newsletter, and look for it in your inbox every Friday morning. Sign up here.