Broadband

Are There any Cable Companies Left?

Are there any companies left that we can still call cable companies? Everything in the business press still refers to Comcast and Charter as cable companies and AT&T and Verizon as telephone companies. It's getting harder to justify using these traditional labels, and maybe the time is finally here to just start calling them all ISPs. After all, these four companies collectively have 80 million broadband customers... more

Detroit, Memphis and Miami Amongst Worst Connected Cities in the US

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has ranked all 185 U.S. cities with that 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city's households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. more

23 Countries Ahead of U.S. in Internet Usage According to ITU Broadband Report

United States ranks 24th worldwide in the percentage of residents who use the Internet, according to the International Telecommunications Union's 2013 State of Broadband Report, released recently at a meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. Eighty-one percent of U.S. residents use the Internet, the ITU said. Countries with the highest percentage of people using the Internet was Iceland, where 97 percent of the people are Internet users. The top 10 countries all had usage rates above 88 percent. more

Beavers Kill Fiber Route

An article from CBC earlier this year reported that beavers had chewed through an underground fiber and had knocked 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia off broadband for 36 hours. The beavers had chewed through a 4.5-inch conduit that was buried three feet underground. This was an unusual fiber cut because it was due to beavers, but animals damaging fiber is a common occurrence. more

Cuba’s New WiFi Regulations – Good, Bad or Meh?

Soon after ETECSA began rolling out WiFi hotspots for Internet access, people began linking to them from homes and community street nets. These connections and importing the WiFi equipment they used were illegal, but generally tolerated as long as they remained apolitical and avoided pornography. Regulations passed last month legalized some of this activity in a bid to boost connectivity by allowing Internet access from homes and small private businesses like restaurants and vacation rentals that are located close enough to a hotspot to establish a WiFi connection. more

Are Light Poles Telecom Infrastructure?

A long-running issue resurfaced recently asking if light poles should be made available for telecommunications. This idea that light poles might be telecom infrastructure comes from language included in Section 224 of the United States Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) code that says that a "utility shall provide a cable television system or any telecommunications carrier with nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it." more

New Harvard Study Recognizes Community-Owned Internet Service Providers as Value Leaders in America

Community-owned fiber networks provide least-expensive local "broadband," according to a recent study by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. more

FCC Open Internet Rules

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Tom Wheele, the FCC Chairman, gave a range of spirited responses to a grilling from the Director of the GSMA, Anne Bouverot. She was following the line of the telcos and questioned if the FCC intervention would stifle growth and investments in the market; however she had problems reconciling her position with the fact that, despite these regulatory changes, the American industry was still prepared to invest a whopping $45 billion in new spectrum. more

Why US Broadband Service Continues to Stagnate - Some Simple Numbers to Drive the Point Home

I've been fascinated by the recent announcement that Australia is spending $31 billion USD to upgrade its broadband. With all the excitement and fuss over the broadband stimulus funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it may seem strange to be claiming that the $7.2 billion is a pitifully small amount -- but let me bring this home for you... more

Internet Access and the Missing Institutional Design

It's Friday, a day to tie some threads together. There were three announcements/events this week that are connected in a non-obvious way... These three elements go together in creating a picture of US policy towards Internet access at the beginning of 2008. Rather than seeing the Internet as an engine for economic growth, creativity, innovation, and new jobs -- and as the converged communications medium for the next generation -- current policy is to wait for private companies to decide when investment in access makes sense for them. Those private companies have plenty of incentives to shape access to suit their own business plans. more

Google’s Loon Announces First Commercial Deal With Telkom Kenya to Provide Internet-by-Balloon

Google's sister-company Loon has announced its first commercial agreement with Telkom Kenya in order to deliver connectivity to the region using a network of giant balloons. more

Amazon Announces Project Kuiper Customer Terminals with Speeds up to 1Gbps

Amazon has announced the development of a range of customer terminals for its broadband satellite network, Project Kuiper. The company's first device is a "standard" customer terminal that measures less than 11 inches square and one inch thick and weighs less than five pounds. more

Home Broadband and the Cloud

I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud -- and this movement to the cloud means we're using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past. A huge number of online functions now reside in the cloud, when only a few years ago, a lot of processing was done on our computers. Take the example of Twitter, where I keep an account to upload a copy of my blog every day. more

Can 5G Replace WiFi?

Verizon recently posted a webcast with investors where Ronan Dunne, EVP and CEO of the Verizon Consumer Group said that he believed that 5G hotspots using millimeter wave spectrum would eventually displace WiFi in homes. He cites major benefits of 5G over WiFi. He believes that a 5G network will be more reliable and more secure. He thinks that people will value the safety that comes from having traffic inside their home being encrypted... more

Google Announces a New Private Subsea Cable Connecting Africa With Europe

Google on Friday announced a new private subsea cable, called "Equiano," to connect Africa with Europe. This will be Google's third fully funded private undersea cable in addition to fourteen other cable investments globally. more