A resurgent housing market and stronger economy, along with our growing need for speed and connectivity is the reason why demand for US broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing. Read more »
Video has long been the driving force behind our growth in broadband traffic. The latest Sandvine report shows us that’s still the case and offers clues on how ISPs may cope. Read more »
If you’re one of CenturyLink’s 5.8 million broadband subscribers, you’re probably fuming because your service is out. Such nationwide outages are rare, but that doesn’t make it any less painful for customers. Read more »
Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt is watching the Aereo legal battle with interest. If the upstart prevails, Britt may try a similar tactic himself. Read more »
Guess who’s getting a gigabit network now? Residents of Omaha, Neb. woke this morning to news they are getting a fiber-to-the-home network. From CenturyLink. Read more »
It’s tough to count how many homes have a gigabit connection, but we can try to get some numbers to give a sense of how prevalent such connectivity is. The answer is not very. Read more »
The broadband speeds across the planet are going up, even as more and more people are connecting to the Internet from their mobile devices, according to Akamai State of the Internet Report. Read more »
Instead of being jealous of towns getting Google Fiber, municipalities should look not to Google, but to local businesses that might want broadband badly enough to help play the same role. Read more »
Are home automation and the internet of things always related? A recent $3.8 million funding for a company called Zonoff has me pondering this question. Read more »
Last year demand for bandwidth rose by 40 percent, and much of that demand is now coming from all over the world, not just in developed countries. Read more »
Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With both AT&T and Google planning a fiber-to-the-home, gigabit network in Austin the stage is set for a test of broadband deployment models that could determine how fiber is rolled out elsewhere. Read more »
the number of homes that have access to fiber-to-the-home connections increased by 20 percent year over year, but at 9.7 million North American homes, the population that has FTTH still relatively small. Read more »
It looks like Wednesday’s internet slowdown in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia may have been the result of sabotage, rather than the sort of accident that usually knocks out submarine cables. Read more »
Internet and telecommunication networks live on undersea cable networks. And like clockwork, every so often we have cable cuts which disrupt the flow of information. A recent cut near Egypt has impacted millions of Internet users in Asia, Middle East and Africa. Read more »
The EU still wants to meet its lofty fast-broadband goals despite having had to slash funding, and it sees simplification of roadworks and 4G mast planning as key to achieving this. Read more »
Could distributed computing hold the future for scaling out the internet and meeting our increasing demands for broadband? The CEO of BitTorrent argues it does have a place in next generation architectures. Read more »
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said he was stepping down from the role today. Let’s take a look back and see how he did against our hopes for him back in 2009. Read more »
The deployment of smart meters combined with the growth of cloud computing infrastructure has created opportunities to build business models around the volume of emerging energy data. Those who use data to solve customer problems and leverage decades of software development and advances in big data will attract investment dollars. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As we process more information, we need faster networking gear at the edge and deep inside telecommunications hubs. CompassEOS is coming out of stealth with an optical router that’s faster and cheaper to operate. Read more »
Google will map street grids, satellite views and even traffic conditions. Now it’s mapping the availability of white spaces, the unused portion of the TV broadcast airwaves that one day could be used for broadband services. Read more »
France plans to spend up to $27 billion on fiber connectivity. Yet, the plan so far doesn’t detail how operators will fund deployment in rural areas, a sticking point that torpedoed a previous attempt. Read more »
The cable industry has tweaked its justification for capping broadband, but a report from the Open Technology Institute is having none of it. Read more »
The web is getting more visual and our communication options now span video, voice and the written word. Technology and the web are breaking down the barriers of distance. Can bandwidth and devices keep up? Read more »
When it comes to broadband most Americas get at least 90 percent of what they pay for and those with fiber to the home or satellite may get even more. Read more »
In a massive blow to Europe’s plans of getting everyone – even in rural areas – on at least 30 Mbps by 2020, a $9.36 billion fund for stimulating broadband deployment has been axed. Read more »
The combined operation will have 25 million customers in 14 countries. It will also take John Malone’s Liberty Global head-to-head with Rupert Murdoch and BSkyB. Read more »
Forget getting a gigabit in one city in all 50 states of the U.S. The real gigabit challenge is helping the existing ISPs think like innovators, not like utilities. Read more »
Time Warner Cable’s $4 modem fee has cost it a few new customers suspect Wall Street analysts, but it is adding to sales and won’t have a long term affect. Read more »
Undersea cable maps are for the deeply nerdy, but Telegeography has just produced one that’s beautiful and functional. Plus it shows we’re only using about 36 percent of the purchased capacity. Read more »
Germany’s top court has decided that internet access is so essential to modern day life that when someone gets cut off they deserve additional compensation. What happens if U.S. courts make such a decree? Read more »
Akamai, the content delivery network, has once again issued its assessment of web traffic based on the requests hitting its servers. The resulting survey shows the world’s broadband getting faster. Read more »
Too many connected devices downloading, streaming or uploading in the home can choke a home network, and there’s not much average consumers can do about it. But Qualcomm hopes that its new StreamBooost technology will help make the router –and home networks — smarter and better. Read more »
Without the underlying pipes connecting data centers, cell phone towers and telco points of presence, there would be no internet. A $2 billion deal to merge two fiber providers shows how the new infrastructure demands of the consumer web and cloud computing are driving deals. Read more »
The efforts to sell Cisco’s Linksys business and Google’s attempts to sell Motorola’s set top business both indicate changes in the market for consumer boxes is changing. Soon we’ll see fewer of them. And maybe we’ll even lose the ISP-provided modems and routers. Read more »
Seattle will join Chicago, Kansas City, Bruistol, Tenn. and other cities with its very own gigabit broadband network. The proposed plan would see a mix of fiber-to-the-home, mobile broadband and gigabit point-to-point wireless services. The city will partner with Gigabit Squared to make it happen. Read more »
As a general rule, prices of technology-driven products and services tend to fall over time. But what’s happened with broadband prices is a clear exception. Read more »
Data from the Internet Society’s Global Internet User Survey shows that we’re contradictory when it comes to our feelings and actions taken online. This won’t come as a surprise to most, but we think the Internet is a source of good, yet we don’t trust it. Read more »
How do prices, speeds and rates of adoption for broadband in the U.S. stack up with the rest of the industralized world? Not as well as you might think. Here are some key facts on the state of broadband. Read more »
The European Commission has green-lit a vast chunk of UK state aid for a rural deployment of superfast connectivity. Most of it will probably go to one company – BT – but at least the countryside is finally set to get decent broadband. Read more »
