Time Warner Cable plans to buy Insight Communications, the nation’s ninth-largest cable company, in a deal worth $3 billion as the industry realizes it needs to streamline. The deal offers TWC greater scale as well as about $100 million in annual cost efficiencies. Read more »
A Boston company called NetBlazr wants to offer businesses free access to a communal broadband network if a user pays for about $300 in equipment and then turns over the management of that gear to NetBlazr so it can continue building the network. Read more »
Recent allegations of ISPs hijacking search traffic are just the tip of the iceberg. Dane Jasper, CEO of ISP Sonic.net offers his “quick guide to the five levels of ISP evil” and explains just how low some ISPs will go. Read more »
ISPs have been exposed as hijacking the search traffic that some of their customers have tried to type into Yahoo and Bing search engines, and now the backlash begins. Now companies involved in the scheme has been hit with a lawsuit and may face Congress. Read more »
Wi-Fi provider Towerstream is turning its superfast Manhattan Wi-Fi zone into a distribution platform for daily deal apps in a bid to monetize its wireless network, the largest in Manhattan. The company is partnering with BlisMobile, which will handle the app distribution through its AppZone service. Read more »
Connected consumer electronics are poised to surpass PC sales by 2013 as tablets, televisions, game consoles and Blu-ray players all latch on to the web, says iSuppli. All of these devices will add strain to wired and wireless networks for years to come as a result. Read more »
The Federal Communications Commission said it would combine the review of AT&T’s purchase of spectrum from Qualcomm with the agency’s review of Ma Bell’s $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile. Is the FCC worried about consolidating so much spectrum into the hands of one company? Read more »
Major Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, Apple.com, Best Buy and Buy.com saw an outage this afternoon, as Akamai faced DNS-related issues. For about an hour Monday, those issues slowed down some Akamai sites, while keeping users from accessing others altogether. Read more »
Every so often we hear about a network outage thanks to some completely non-technology reason: A truck rammed into a pole or backhoe cut the cable. Here are some of the top bizarre reasons why optical fibers are cut (and result in network disruption.) Read more »
More than 45,000 Verizon workers are striking this morning. People are concerned about what the strike could mean for telecom equipment vendors, but a better question is how much will Verizon’s legacy employees drag down the company as it competes against more modern IT companies? Read more »
DirecTV has admitted to taking a look at Hulu’s financials to see if it’s worth buying. While the satellite provider could accelerate its rollout of TV Everywhere services with such a buy, DirectTV’s CEO said a Hulu acquisition isn’t necessary to achieve its long-term vision. Read more »
A survey from British telecom regulator Ofcom paints smartphones as addictive, but smartphones are just a symptom in the spread of broadband across society. Instead of smartphone addiction, let’s talk about how broadband is changing society and creating new business opportunities. Read more »
Comcast says it added 144,000 new broadband subscribers during the second quarter of 2011. Thanks to growing demand for higher-speed tiers, the company saw its revenues jump almost 10 percent to $2.2 billion for the quarter, thanks to 17.55 million broadband subscribers. Read more »
Wearable smart displays aren’t new, but the category hasn’t caught on yet. WIMM hopes to change that with a wearable Android module that includes many smartphone components including a Wi-Fi radio. That could be the break these displays are looking for when it comes to apps. Read more »
Windstream, a Little Rock, Ark.-based phone and broadband company says it is buying PAETEC Holding Company of Fairport, N.Y. for $2.3 billion. On closing this deal, Windstream will have a bigger national footprint with a bigger fiber network to service the luractive business customers. Read more »
A British study found that people who went without the internet for 24 hours were “upset” and experienced “withdrawal.” But is this really surprising? It’s become obvious that internet access is a core function of modern life — talking about it as “addiction” misses the point. Read more »
When it comes to broadband, it seems Indians will increasingly use 3G wireless connections to access the Internet. At the end of the first quarter of 2011 there were 11.5 million wired broadband subscribers in India, a pittance versus the explosive growth in 3G connections. Read more »
We get terribly excited that the U.S. will have more smartphones than feature phones later this year, but for real excitement and mobile madness, China is on track to surpass a billion mobile connections by May of next year. That’s big news for Google and Apple. Read more »
AT&T’s solid second quarter results were driven by wireless, but its wireline business was nearing growth again — a success for the carrier as it nears the completion of its U-Verse deployment. But amid the cheering for U-verse, the DSL network was getting kicked to the curb. Read more »
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson spoke Tuesday at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners summer meeting in Los Angeles, where he called DSL “obsolete.” Since AT&T still provides and profits from DSL, this is a surprising admission. Read more »
Technology used by ISPs as well as regulatory decisions have shaped the Internet. The New America Foundation sees danger in the current evolution of the Internet as the web becomes segregated by what people are allowed to access and the cost of that access. Read more »
Do you sleep? Have a laptop or desktop that sits idle during those eight hours? Need an extra $10 a month? If so, startup CPUsage has a proposition that you should hear. Read more »
Shaw, a Canadian ISP said this week that its movies and on demand service would be exempt from its data caps. Such a move places Shaw’s upcoming Movie Club service at an advantage to a competitive movie streaming service such as Netflix. Read more »
This week both Republicans and Democrats proposed drafts of mobile spectrum bills that would incent television broadcasters to give up some of their spectrum to be used for mobile broadband. But one of those bills could hurt the development of more unlicensed airwaves. Read more »
The cautionary tales around broadband caps are trickling in and as I read them I wonder if amid these caps the web ecosystem is failing consumers (and maybe teleworkers) when it comes to broadband and cloud services.Here’s how and where things are breaking down. Read more »
The efforts to convert corporations to the next-generation Internet addressing scheme are falling on deaf ears. According to Ovum, a mere 3 percent of web traffic is IPv6-enabled and enterprises either aren’t convinced of the need to switch, or think they already have. Read more »
In the U.S. and Canada, Netflix has positioned itself as a complement to existing pay TV services. But in the wide-open Latin America market, consumers could choose to subscribe to Netflix instead of cable or satellite to supplement over-the-air TV services. Read more »
Netflix may have become the new face of evil for wireline Internet service providers as they seek to impose caps or tiers on subscribers. But it also looks like Netflix is willing to play the part of consumer advocate, countering myths ISPs perpetrate around broadband scarcity. Read more »
A new voluntary effort by the major U.S. Internet service providers to help enforce copyright restrictions and protect content owners from pirates, parodists and cheap teens who are sharing files could result in some folks losing access to their broadband. Read more »
H.264 remains the dominant force in online video, as the video codec now accounts for more than two-thirds of online video, according to a blog post by MeFeedia. Meanwhile, Google’s WebM format has yet to gain any significant traction after being released a year ago. Read more »
Could satellites help provide the fat pipes needed to meet our mobile data demand? Eutelsat’s latest bird can deliver 70 gigabits per second, but before we get out the party hats and start funding satellites, it’s worth understanding the drawbacks. Read more »
Last week I visited two Kansas Cities – in Kansas and Missouri – on a broadband site visit. When I went to Chattanooga, Tenn., I got an “after” picture of what communities can do with a gigabit. The Kansas City trip was about figuring out the “before.” Read more »
The accepted wisdom is that as mobile operators roll out Long Term Evolution networks, we will slowly move toward a more unified telecom world. But data published today by Wireless Intelligence, a research firm, suggests that the accepted wisdom will be a long time coming. Read more »
Recent developments in the vehicle industry suggest that 2011 could be the year of the car as a major platform for apps. From BMW’s support for Apple’s iPod Out feature to the emergence of Nokia’s Terminal Mode, a system that integrates mobile applications and the car, automakers and app developers are jumping on board the in-vehicle app movement. This report examines that landscape, its major players and their offerings, and how the market is shifting from device to car and, eventually, to the cloud. Increased broadband speeds, electronic vehicles and social apps such as those powered by Twitter will play major roles on this journey. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Ford, BMW, Geely, Nissan and Google. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The FCC’s net neutrality rules are their final steps to becoming a real law. Soon they will be on their way to the Federal Register. Once that happens, anyone can file a lawsuit and get the ball rolling on testing the rules in court. Read more »
Hipmunk, the hot flight-finding service, has added in-flight Wi-Fi as a new metric for travelers. Sure, this is an indication of how deep the web has sunk its talons into us, but working on flights has become pretty much the standard in many offices. Read more »
Nokia Siemens Networks, the telecommunications gear joint venture, is running out of options. The Wall Street Journal reported that the companies couldn’t find a private equity buyer for the gear maker and that the companies were thinking of putting more money into the entity. Read more »
Allied Fiber may be able to do something the FCC can’t: help make American broadband just a bit more competitive. In a few weeks it will begin construction on its new type of optical network. It’s six months late, but better late than never. Read more »
Here in the United States,cloud computing has allowed emerging companies to build much faster and much cheaper.But in Latin America, the development of the cloud has been nothing short of transformative. And developments are moving rapidly. Read more »
OS X Lion will only be available in the Mac App Store, but a 4 GB download-only OS upgrade is going to be trying for some consumers, because of connection quality and bandwidth caps. Apple has one possible solution: come use our retail store Wi-Fi. Read more »
