Intel’s Thunderbolt connection technology announced today will help consumers with one of their biggest digital problems, transferring huge media files in minutes as opposed to hours, and will also give Intel chips a home inside a variety of connected devices. Read more »
Things are looking up for LightSquared, the company trying to build a wholesale LTE network. It scored a $586 million loan, got a huge waiver from the FCC and some unnamed customers. Yet, its network buildout has slowed and it picked a fight with the Pentagon. Read more »
Big Data software company Acunu said it has closed £2.2 million ($3.6 million) in Series A financing. The startups software helps bridge the gap between expensive in-memory storage and cheap-but-slow hard drives, by offering a rewrite of the storage stack optimized for solid state drives. Read more »
Huawei scored a victory last night in U.S. District Court when a judge ruled that Motorola, which is attempting to sell its wireless business to Nokia Siemens Networks for $1.2 billion, couldn’t share certain information and documents with NSN. But the company lost a battle, too. Read more »
Every attendee of SXSW Interactive is used to the yoga, the HTML5, the gaming, and the death of journalism panels, but for 2011, the conference has fastened onto two new trends: data as a double-edged sword and a lack of women in technology and startups. Read more »
While the U.S. government sets the bar low for residential broadband at 100 megabits per second, the telecommunications infrastructure guys are laughing all the way to the bank as demand for 100 gigabits per second pipes is expected by the telecommunications and computing infrastructure players. Read more »
In the wake of Egyptian protesters’ success, citizens of Bahrain, Iran, Libya and Yemen have made attempts to change their governments through protests and marches. Last night Arbor Networks posted a chart showing which countries appear to be manipulating their citizen’s web traffic and which aren’t. Read more »
Need a little lunchtime levity? Then kick it over to the Ykombinator Random Startup Generator, a hilarious send up of the buzzword-heavy, meme-laden startups culture created by … what else, an “experimental blogging social network” called Fireplace. Don’t forget to tweet. Read more »
Verizon launched a device this week that, much like a MagicJack or Ooma, will connect to your existing home phone and deliver voice calls for a fee. The move shows how Verizon is prepping for an all-IP future and could disrupt its competitors. Read more »
President Obama’s budget is asking for $126 million for the Department of Energy to reach a supercomputing milestone — exascale performance. Research paid for by these millions could create more power-efficient silicon and networking technologies that will benefit information technology in general. Plus we’d get faster supercomputers. Read more »
The State Department introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies to help with the task. One group has already applied for a $3 million grant to build the technology stack for a distributed, open-source telecommunications system. Here’s what it looks like. Read more »
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration unveiled our nationwide broadband map today, and said that “between five and ten percent of Americans don’t have broadband.” It also asked for help from users to continue the process and will make the data available via an open API. Read more »
The average U.S. broadband connection now delivers speeds of 9.54 Mbps down, which is about 2.5 times faster than the 3.8 Mbps that it was back in 2007. Today’s speeds are 34 percent faster and the cost has only risen 4 percent from 2009 to 2010. Read more »
The five FCC commissioners traveled to the Capitol today for a hearing on the necessity of its network neutrality rules. The hearing was the first step in a process that attempts to repeal the FCC’s efforts and prevent the FCC from trying to implement them again. Read more »
Underlying the entire mobile ecosystem are semiconductor firms that supply the radios and brains inside the handset and those that make the chips to power the network. From their product launches this week, it’s clear to see where the mobile world is heading. Read more »
A Sprint executive was quoted today saying that the nation’s No. 3 carrier is evaluating a switch to a Long Term Evolution network in the coming months, transitioning from WiMAX as its 4G wireless technology. But if Sprint dumps WiMAX, what happens to Clearwire? Read more »
Not to be outdone by the U.S. government estimates that spectrum currently set aside for digital TV transmission is worth $27.8 billion, CTIA and the Consumer Electronic Association said those airwaves were worth $33 billion. But these estimates make several assumptions. Read more »
Sony, Orange, SanDisk and SoftBank are proposing a new standard called HQME for getting content to mobile devices using SD Cards and Wi-Fi networks in the home, but is a download model for mobile content going to fly in a streaming world? Read more »
Research in Motion has announced its acquisition of social contacts service Gist, two months after Om said the two were in talks. The value of the acquisition was undisclosed, but the rationale is clear. With Gist, RIM adds a social element to its messaging capabilities. Read more »
When it comes to mobile devices, the gigahertz race is just beginning. Here’s why phones and tablets will need 4 GHz or even 10 GHz processors. The answers range from gesture controls to virtualization, but the computer of the future is mobile, connected and fast. Read more »
Wireless Intelligence took a look at how competition has fared among the wireless industry worldwide and found that markets with a large number of mobile operators saw price declines commensurate with markets that had a more concentrated number of wireless carriers. Read more »
In a crowded market for speech recognition, Vlingo will focus on becoming a personal assistant, signaling an evolution from voice as a user interface and a means to avoid cramped keyboards, to voice as a natural means of getting a computer to do what you want. Read more »
Now this is a surprise. Ericsson doesn’t think the growing demand for mobile data will overwhelm existing telecommunications networks, a rare thought in the smartphone world, and an even rarer one coming from a telecommunications gear vendor. Read more »
Next week, the mobile-obsessed hordes will descend on Barcelona for the hottest tech show on Earth: the Mobile World Congress. For those who are staying behind and are worried about being overwhelmed, here are the five themes worth paying attention to during the show. Read more »
Apple’s plans for a universal SIM card and allowing consumers to pay for mobile access from multiple carriers via iTunes would turn Apple into a mobile virtual network operator and puts Apple, not the carrier, in control of the customer. It changes everything. Here’s how. Read more »
President Barack Obama Thursday unveiled his plan to provide 98 percent of Americans 4G wireless coverage. The plan is a mix of programs costing $18.2 billion, but the president believes a new spectrum auction will cover the costs and even help reduce the deficit. Read more »
Sonos, the maker of a wireless music system, will soon have a free Android app, so the people who purchased one of the 67 million Android phones sold last year can control their Sonos music playback around their homes with their handsets (and their tablets). Read more »
With AT&T announcing its free mobile to mobile calls to help fend off customers defecting for the iPhone on Verizon’s network, it’s time to recognize that voice is now worthless, but operators will turn to data and M2M to make up for the loss of voice. Read more »
A new telecom infrastructure is emerging out of the disruption of old-style, twisted copper, public switched, telephone network-based business. It’s based on Ethernet, and is cheaper, more flexible and performs better than its legacy copper counterpart. Welcome to the new telecom network. Read more »
Global Crossing has weighed in on the peering debate in a Friday letter to the FCC that argued ISPs were trying to use peering as a smokescreen to charge content delivery networks and web service providers more for access to their subscribers. Read more »
LTE-Advanced, which would actually be an acceptable 4G wireless standard under the original definition of 4G, has gigabit wireless speeds and even more. I’ll detail the 10 things you need to know about the next gen wireless standard that will follow LTE in a few years. Read more »
Qualcomm introduced a new peer-to-peer communication technology today to allow devices to connect to one another to share broadband speeds. Dubbed, FlashLinq the technology is one of several attempt to change the way devices connect–creating a more distributed and more resilient network. Read more »
GigaOM and the New America Foundation are sponsoring a debate between Craig Settles, an author and broadband consultant, and Blair Levin, the author of the National Broadband Plan, on how America can meet the broadband needs of its citizens. Click through to watch. Read more »
The crush of smartphones, tablets and laptops all vying for ever more bandwidth intense content, has forced mobile operators to beef up their backhaul, rally for more spectrum and implement new network technologies. It’s also reshaping the way they build out their networks. Read more »
Like most social games, Tribal Crossing applications have a very high database write rate –- changes to the game state must be stored so the user doesn’t lose her game score, “loot” or location. Tribal Crossing migrated from MySQL to Membase to support a higher write rate. Read more »
Netflix offers rent-by-mail and streaming movies. The shift from mail-order to streaming video had fairly significant implications for Netflix’s application infrastructure. Netflix realized it would need multiple geographically dispersed data centers and far more processing capacity so it turned to Amazon’s Web Services. Read more »
Comcast’s broadband subscribers now consume a median of between 4 and 6 GB of data each month, up from 2-4 GB, thanks to the proliferation of devices using Wi-Fi in the home and streaming video services such as Netflix and Hulu. Read more »
Last week, Canadians got the unwelcome news that their Internet Service Providers could cap their broadband access to as little as 25 GB per month, or the equivalent of about 12 HD movies or 25 hours of Netflix streaming. U.S. ISPs might follow in Canada’s footsteps. Read more »
Alcatel-Lucent this morning announced fiber technology to deliver 10 Gigabits per second, but this won’t be used for residential connections anytime soon. This is for beefing up the back end of mobile broadband networks, especially as operators add components such as picocells in congested areas. Read more »
The U.S. Court of Appeals today denied Verizon’s motion to have the three judges who ruled against the FCC in an earlier network neutrality case hear Verizon’s current attempt to contest the regulatory agency’s network neutrality rules. It’s a small setback for foes of network neutrality. Read more »
