Tuesday, August 11, 2026
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Opinion

Telecom Tweets of the Week: Autonomous Vegas shuttle debuts; promptly hit by truck

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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Is this a win or a loss for the robots? A new, self-driving shuttle in a test program on the Las Vegas Strip had its first accident in its very first hour of operation, reportedly due to the error of a human delivery truck driver who ran into it.

The autonomous Navya Arma shuttle is 15 feet long and traverses a 0.6-mile loop along Fremont Street, between Las Vegas Boulevard and Eighth Street, with three stops and is being limited to speeds of 12 miles per hour for testing purposes, according to Forbes. The shuttle only operates between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., but on its first day of operation, it encountered a delivery truck that was pulling into the street. “The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it’s (sic) sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident,” the city said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. “Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle. Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.”

The truck driver was cited. After the accident, the shuttle reportedly took two complete loops around its route without further incident — after being patched up with some bandages meant for actual humans, apparently.

Elsewhere in the Twitterverse, Sherif Hanna of Qualcomm made light of the potential mega-merger of his company and Broadcom, which was the big chip news of the week:

https://twitter.com/sherifhanna/status/927542900757426176

Oh, not much, really:

Tech M&A aside, Qualcomm showed off its gigabit LTE prowess this week, working with T-Mobile US as teh carrier doubles down on LTE-Advanced deployments:

Also of note — the T-Mo/Sprint merger may have fallen through, but that only makes Softbank’s increased investment in Sprint more interesting, as observed by analyst Walt Piecyk:

And for your Friday fun, there’s nothing like a little dance-off between the Avengers and the Justice League. It’s worth it, I promise.

https://twitter.com/KC_Goddess29/status/928479865736716288

 

 

 

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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