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Broadband usage has spiked across the US this year as students and employees suddenly found themselves working from home and needing broadband to connect to school and work servers. But there is another quickly growing demand for broadband coming from gaming. We've had online gaming of some sort over the last decade, but gaming has not been a data-intensive activity for ISPs. more
The topic of satellite broadband has been heating up lately. Elon Musk's StarLink now has over 540 broadband satellites in the sky and is talking about starting a few beta tests of the technology with customers. OneWeb went into bankruptcy, but it is being bought out by a team consisting of the British government and Bharti Airtel, the largest cellular company in India. Jeff Bezos has continued to move forward with Project Kuiper, and the FCC recently gave the nod for the company to move ahead. more
Analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta looked at the long-term impact of working from home on the economy and ranked different parts of the economy on two factors related to working at home – the likelihood that an area will generate a lot of work-at-home opportunities, and the ability of an area to support a work-at-home economy. more
On Monday, the Trump administration announced plans to auction off 100 megahertz of mid-band spectrum dedicated initially to military purposes for commercial use starting in mid-2022 to fuel 5G network deployment in the United States. more
The posting with a similar name seems a bit contrived by anonymous in some strange attempt to enhance its significance. Many others, including myself, have been discussing this subject for some time. Indeed, a concerted lobbying effort and anti-competitive efforts by legacy TCP/IP internet stakeholders have been really ramped up over the past year to mischaracterize what is occurring. more
Over the past two years, governments and foreign intelligence agencies around the world have tried to understand the inexplicable, chaotic, irrational, indeed maniacal 5G policies of the Trump Administration. Revelations by former Trump administration officials and most recently Trump's niece confirm that there is no rational basis for Trumpian positions and policies and that the best response is to recognize that Washington is no longer capable of playing a meaningful role... more
The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) published a recent report that looks at "5G policy Principles and 5G Essentials for Global Policymakers." For those who don't know ITI, they are a DC-based lobbying group that represents most of heavy-hitter tech firms, and which works to help shape policy on tax, trade, talent, security, access, and sustainability issues. I don't think I've seen another document that so clearly outlines the hopes of the big US cellular companies. more
A consortium of the UK Government and Bharti Enterprises bought bankrupt OneWeb, a company that had raised $3.2 billion and had acquired valuable spectrum rights, for $1 billion. That is a good start, but a BBC article says experts believe that at least $3 billion is needed to complete the OneWeb constellation. Will they make it?
The UK government will be a source of further funding. OneWeb's primary goal is closing the digital divide by bringing broadband connectivity... more
One of the recurring themes used to promote 5G is that wireless broadband is going to become a serious competitor to wireline broadband. There are two primary types of broadband competition - competition by price or performance. Cable companies have largely won the broadband battle in cities and suburbs, and I've been thinking about the competition that cable companies might see from 5G. more
A new Google for India Digitization Fund, announced by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, will invest approximately $10 billion into India over the next 5-7 years. more
The media is filled with hyperbolic claims that "Our network is the fastest!" And there are many so-called "Speed Test" tools available on the Internet. Most are easily run in a web browser. Should you trust those tools? Not really. The popular speed testing tools provide a very narrow and limited measure of network "speed." It is quite possible that a network that is rated as "fast" could actually deliver poor results to many applications. Why is this so? more
Something has been bothering me for several months, and that usually manifests in a blog at some point. During the COVID-19 crisis, the FCC and big ISPs have repeatedly said that the only reason our networks weathered the increased traffic during the pandemic was due to the FCC's repeal of net neutrality and deregulation of the broadband industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. more
Alphabet's Loon on Monday announced that its high-altitude balloons are now providing internet service in Kenya to subscribers of Telkom Kenya. more
Just in the last two weeks, two stories in the United States hit the press that highlight behavior from ISPs that would have likely have violated the Net Neutrality rules that were killed by Ajit Pai's FCC. The big ISPs have been surprisingly quiet and have not loudly violated those rules, even though they are no longer in effect. The industry speculation is that the big ISPs are treading lightly because they don't want to trigger a regulatory overreaction should there be a change of party in the administration or Congress. more
The Internet is a catalyst for what has revolutionised and transformed human societies in giving extraordinary access to information that has catapulted development and economic growth. It also comes with threats of exploitation by those who wish to do harm. In Part 1 of these series, we looked at how Twitter banned Graham Linehan for his tweet where we saw that to an extent, it was justifiable under Californian law but that a Judge in the Fiji courts would disagree with. more
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