"I look to people like Ajit to give me some foresight into what is likely to happen," said Mr. Ravuri. During his four years leading the FCC, Mr. Pai sought to cut regulations, fight illegal robocalls and make more radio frequencies available for 5G wireless networks. While the U.S. is poised to be a leader in 5G deployment, regulatory disputes could scuttle further adoption, Mr. Pai said on a video call. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. "On the regulatory side, some of the disputes we've seen among federal agencies could slow down, or even potentially stop the reallocation of spectrum for commercial uses, and that is something that would be unfortunate, of course, for all consumers and enterprises and for the country writ large," said Mr. Pai, who was appointed to the helm of the agency by former President Donald Trump.

No, it's not bingo at your local silicon chip enthusiast meetup, and no, I am not trying to game Google's search algorithms (well, maybe just a bit). Rather, it's a combination of technologies that are predicted to become critical for the future of the Internet of Things across industries as diverse as shipping and security. One way to get all these technologies into single devices is just to agglomerate a bunch of off-the-shelf silicon chips and jam them into a product. Take a wireless radio chip, add some computing capacity, add some AI chip wizardly and voilà, you have yourself a modern IoT device. There's just one problem: These devices often have a lot of constraints.

EdgeQ, a startup developing 5G systems-on-chip, today emerged from stealth with $51 million in funding. The 90-employee company says the fresh capital will accelerate its go-to-market efforts as it moves toward mass production of its chipset products. With a team of semiconductor, 5G, Wi-Fi, and AI industry veterans hailing from Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom, EdgeQ is adopting a "software-driven" development model for OEMs and operators that supports private networking via cellular protocols including 5G (and also 4G). This model promises to decouple the infrastructure from expensive, closed, and inflexible systems to intelligent software layers running on off-the-shelf hardware. The global edge computing market is anticipated to reach $43.4 billion by 2027, according to a 2020 report by Grand View Research.