The question of broadband metering is becoming more important by the day. And while there’s much to be discussed about the cost of bandwidth, the trends of consumption, the public money involved in the infrastructure, and so on, one basic fact today is this: AT&T wants to put caps on your bandwidth, but they can’t be trusted to measure it correctly. That’s not a situation consumers should take without protest.
Readers over at Broadband Reports are noticing marked differences between AT&T’s measurements and their own. One user found differences of several orders of magnitude. Now, if AT&T (and of course Comcast and others) are unwilling to allow for wiggle room in their GB caps (fees start the byte over 250GB), why should we allow wiggle room in their measurement? After all, we don’t let grocers use poorly (or maliciously) calibrated scales. → Read More
Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form tight-knit “communities” online—ghettos, in other words. Instead of broadband, and more generally the Internet, bringing people together, it threatens to further separate different groups of people from each other. → Read More
It’s hardly a secret that many of us here are big fans of Steam, Valve’s digital download service that makes buying PC games pretty painless. Who among us hasn’t spent more than a few dollars during one of those big Steam sales?
The only problem with Steam sales is that, having purchased a game, you have to sit there for at least several (long!) hours, waiting for it to fully download. Meaning, if that you were waiting all year to buy, say, BioShock 2, then when you finally buy it when it’s on sale for 75 percent off, you’ll probably have to leave the download running overnight, the servers being swamped with other, like-minded folks. That’s not fun at all. → Read More
The FCC has just released its latest report on the sate of broadband in the US of A, and the results are… less than encouraging, and for a number of reasons. The agency found that around two-thirds of Americans’ broadband connections don’t actually qualify as broadband under its definition. (Broadband to the FCC is 4 mbps down/1 mbps up.) What’s sorta odd is that this isn’t a result of the lack of infrastructure or anything, but a result of people choosing low speed plans. → Read More
There’s good news and bad news about broadband coming out of newly released Census data, courtesy of the Commerce Department. The good news is that more people than ever before now have broadband, with 63.5 percent of all households now subscribing to a broadband service. That’s up from 9.2 percent from way back in 2001. Read that carefully: that’s up from 9.2 percent, not merely up 9.2 percent. The bad news? → Read More
The Pew research center put out survey results today on broadband adoption and Internet use in America. There was one data point that I found startling. According to the survey, 21 percent of American adults say they don’t use the Internet. One fifth of all Americans.
This isn’t just people who do not use broadband (which is 66 percent of American adults). It also includes people who don’t use dial-up (another 5 percent). These people don’t use the Internet at all. That is like not using the telephone. → Read More
The Cousins were mulling over a broadband tax, but the new Government has put a stop to that. (Now they’re considering using some of the BBC license fee to fund broadband development.) The idea was to charge people 50p (around $0.70) per month to fund the expansion of broadband into rural areas. Would such a move work here in the U.S.? Would you be willing to pay, say, $1 per month, paying toward some sort of Broadband Fund, to ensure that people in the middle of nowhere have access to reliable broadband? What’s more American than wanting to help your neighbors? → Read More
It’s a brave new world of health and technology, coming together to keep you as healthy as modern medicine allows. The Senate Committee on Aging was witness to a show-and-tell of sorts last week, getting a first-hand look at some of the hi-tech innovations that promise to annoy people who cringe at the idea of universal healthcare. Because keeping people healthy is pure, pure evil, apparently. → Read More
Remember when 56K modems first came out? I remember walking around the mall thinking to myself, “Man, the Internet must be so fast with that thing!” I mention this because Akamai Technologies, the company which pretty much powers the Internet’s biggest sites, has published a list of the fastest Internet cities in America. The winner is Berkley, Calif., which has an average Internet speed of 18.7 Mbps, followed by Chappel Hill, NC (17.5Mbps), and Stanford, Calif. (17.0 Mbps). Notice anything? Yes, those cities are the home of large research universities. Gotta trade noted across the world lickety-split! → Read More
Kudos to Comcast for embracing the year 2009. The nation’s largest—and quite possibly worst—ISP has finally committed itself to deploying 100 mbps broadband beginning this year. That will make the FCC happy, what with the loft goals it set with its National Broadband Plan. It’s also good news for people who know their way around things like Usenet—taps nose like a spy. Will it be affordable, though? → Read More
The FCC would like to know what you do with broadband. This is what I do, and what I imagine 99 percent of Americans use it for. → Read More
Up until a moment ago, this was going to be a standard “newsy” post: the FCC will announce its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday, here’s what it’s all about. Then I read the comments of a PC World article discussing that very same plan—many people are outraged that the government would muscle its way into the free market! If Americans wanted fast broadband then the market would provide it on its own terms. That, of course, is complete nonsense: plenty of Americans live in one-ISP towns, and if said ISP provides terrible service, well, though cookies, chico. This is America! Love it or leave it~! → Read More
About a year ago I signed up for Cablevision’s Optimum Online Ultra, and aside from a little snafu that I’m trying to fix right now (don’t ask!), it’s been great. How could you go wrong with a reliable 100 mbps down/15 mbps up connection? Only $100/month, too. Other ISPs are getting close to offering similar speeds, thanks to Docsis 3.0, but some people are wondering: will people even need that sort of speed, and if so, then for what? → Read More
Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go prepaid 3G data service made a splash last summer by offering no-contract plans that came close to competing with two-year offerings from the likes of Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. The major drawback was that the top plan, at $60, only allowed for 1GB of data usage, whereas you’d get 5GB on a contract plan. → Read More
They’re trying to balance the books over in the UK, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has proposed a tax that may interest you. The proposed budget for the next year includes a broadband tax! The name is a bit misleading in that it’s not a tax on broadband, but a tax on telephone landlines (POTS), the money of which will go to making sure people in rural areas have sufficient access to broadband. → Read More
More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband. → Read More
What’s the deal with Comcast, Verizon, and other ISPs petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of broadband? It’s all about money—broadband stimulus money—MG Siegler explains on G4′s Attack of the Show.
As the Obama administration looks to expand broadband access to rural and urban areas that are still under-served, the ISPs want to lower what constitutes broadband so that they can get some of the billions of dollars in stimulus money without shelling out as much to actually deliver the broadband access the stimulus package is designed to create.
Those phone and cable companies are tricky. Watch the video after the jump. → Read More
There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be beholden to all sorts of government-imposed restrictions, one of which relates to net neutrality. → Read More
By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic issued by Cisco today. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes, dummy. (I had to look that up too). And that number represents more than a fivefold increase in IP traffic from today. (See the forecast in the tables below).
What is driving this growth is video. Cisco forecasts that 90 percent of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP traffic) will be video in 2013. Cisco also predicts that mobile data traffic will also be overtaken by video, reaching 64 percent of total mobile IP traffic by 2013. Part of this might be wishful thinking on Cisco’s part, which needs broadband usage growth to continue apace in order to sell its networking gear. But part of it is also the fact that these numbers are based on the percentage of bits traveling over those broadband pipes, and it doesn’t take a lot of fat video files to fill those up. → Read More
From downloading videos and high-resolution photos, to online gaming and chatting with friends over instant-messengers, the mobile broadband networks of today are strong – but they’re starting to feel ancient. Today, AT&T clarified their plans to upgrade their network to deliver considerably faster mobile broadband speeds by way of HSPA (High Speed Packet Access). HSPA roll outs will begin later this year, firing up in full sometime in 2011. → Read More
