Elon Musk’s SpaceX has reached a deal worth about $17 billion with EchoStar for spectrum licenses that it will use to beef up its Starlink satellite network.

The deal for EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses includes up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock. SpaceX will make approximately $2 billion in cash interest payments on EchoStar debt through November 2027.

SpaceX and EchoStar will enter into a long-term commercial agreement which will allow EchoStar’s Boost Mobile subscribers to access SpaceX’s next generation Starlink Direct to Cell service.

Shares of EchoStar surged 19% before the market opened Monday.

Last month AT&T said that it will spend $23 billion to acquire wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar, a significant expansion of its low- and mid-band coverage networks.

EchoStar said that it anticipates that the AT&T deal and the SpaceX transaction will resolve recent inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission about the rollout of 5G technology in the U.S. The FCC had been calling for hearings on whether Echostar was properly using the spectrum that it is now selling, and its efforts to make 5G more available to communities.

EchoStar said Monday that it will use the proceeds from the sale partly to pay down debt. Current operations of Dish TV, Sling and Hughes will not be impacted, the company said.

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When it comes to cutting out annoying outside noise, there is no brand in history that has denatured more decibels than Bose. The pioneers of noise-canceling haven’t been without challengers in recent years, including Sony, Apple, and others, but Bose has maintained the crown for generation after generation. Perhaps no product showcases this iterative talent more than its latest earbuds, the QuietComfort Ultra 2.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the first pair. I liked their ergonomic fit, excellent noise reduction, and bold low end, not to mention their excellent microphones, angled toward your mouth in an homage to Apple’s popular AirPods Pro.

With the new QC Ultra 2, we get wireless charging, more customizable sound, better immersive audio, and improved noise reduction. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re a business traveler or someone who wants a compact pair of headphones that truly removes the sound of the world around you, these are—once again—the best you can buy.

Generation 2

I find it very hard to fault Bose for its rubber-stamped design approach; the previous pair were very comfortable and functioned extremely well. The slight changes that appear on the new model are welcome, and I’m not mad at the lack of physical changes.

You now get wireless charging in the clamshell case and a guard to prevent earwax buildup, and you can toggle the included touch controls in the app, which is very helpful when doing activities where you might brush your ear.

Places I don’t find improvements include the weight (the new buds are about a gram heavier but still perfectly fine in your ears) and battery life (the new buds have the same six hours with ANC on, 24 hours in the case as the old model). Bose has even opted for the same drivers in this new generation of buds, with slight tuning adjustments that I’ll get into in a bit.

Features Galore

Courtesy of Bose

If you’re new to the world of wireless earbuds or are coming from a more basic pair, the amount of customization that you can do with Bose’s latest buds can feel daunting. You can choose various “modern traditional” adjustments like EQ and noise canceling/transparency modes, but the buds also allow you to dial in two kinds of immersive 3D upscaling (one for staying in place, one for while you move around), among other wild and fantastical new settings that take advantage of modern processors and machine learning tech.

Dell’s quarterly results show a huge growth in server sales, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) projects, but a relative lag in storage. Key reasons behind that might be that Dell’s current storage lags a little behind the curve in AI performance, while its massive parallel network-attached storage (NAS) that aims to plug that gap, Project Lightning, is in gestation.

Dell’s PC division usually massively outsells its datacentre products, but that’s not the case in its latest (second) quarterly results, which show 69% growth in sales of servers and networking equipment year-on-year. That equated to a revenue of $16.8bn for the infrastructure division that put the client services – i.e. personal equipment – into the shade with $12.5bn of sales.

Dell has benefited here from being the first to the AI market, with servers, the latest Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPUs), and switches compatible with high throughput Nvidia Spectrum-X networking and Ultra-Ethernet cards.

“In the last six months we have delivered $10bn worth of servers for AI,” said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and chief operating officer for Dell Technologies. “That’s more than was attained in the whole previous year. Demand is strong and sales of the new AI hardware has totalled $20bn for the year.”

Overall, Dell’s Q2 results showed record revenue of $29.8bn, which was up 19% on the previous year. Of the $16.8bn of revenue contributed by the infrastructure group – growth of 44% in a year – servers and network equipment contributed $12.9bn.

Meanwhile, however, storage arrays – flash and disk – saw revenues lower by 3% over the year at $3.9bn in the quarter.

Meanwhile, the client services group’s revenue growth was a mere 1% year-on-year, with enterprise PCs reporting $10.8bn revenue (+2%) and consumer products $1.7bn (-7%).