The country’s economics and technology minister has reportedly urged Telekom to watch its step, after the telco announced caps for fixed-line users. Thing is, usage of Telekom’s own entertainment services won’t count towards those caps. 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 »
There are more than 80 million broadband subscribers in the US, a sign that the market is getting saturated. It is not a surprise that the growth of new broadband subscribers has started to slow. So far this year, we have seen 200,000 fewer new additions. Read more »
AT&T is going all-in on IP – the Internet Protocol, and cutting the cord with its past. Instead, it will push newer, faster broadband via a hybrid of fiber-and-copper technologies. And what that means is end of the line for classic DSL. Nothing wrong with it. Read more »
The other shoe has dropped on the copper telephone network with AT&T pledging $14 billion in new network investment in wireless and wireline networks with nary a dime or commitment for the old copper telephone network or DSL lines. Instead Ma Bell recommends LTE. Read more »
Broadband penetration in the U.S. is continuing to grow and is now stands at 90 percent of U.S. households that have a computer at home. With over 80.3 million broadband subscribers in the nation, computer ownership is at the heart of broadband divide. Read more »
The decline of DSL in the US has life tough for the phone companies – who in total lost 70,000 subscribers during the second quarter of 2012. Winner: cable companies in general and Comcast in specific as 260,000 new folks signed up for broadband in the US. Read more »
The adoption of tablets, social media and new interfaces and the changing nature of the TV itself mean the digital living room will continue on its path of rapid change, thanks to new ways of creating, viewing, bundling, distributing and selling content. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The slow death march of DSL continues!. Last week, Verizon reported a loss of about 89,000 DSL connections, but increased demand for faster FiOS Internet. Today, numbers from AT&T follow the same trend. Read more »
A California woman claims that Verizon talked her into buying a faster internet plan even though it didn’t have the technological capability to deliver what it promised. Read more at paidContent »
Vectoring, a technology that eliminates crosstalk on a DSL line can boost speeds on existing copper to up to 100 Mbps. And apparently service providers are interested in testing it out, according to Telebyte, which launched the first gear capable of testing how vectored lines perform. Read more »
The eighteen largest cable and telephone companies that account for 93 percent of the broadband market added 3 million net subscribers during 2011, according to data from Leichtman Research Group, a Durham, NH-based market research group. More revealing: AT&T’s dismal broadband performance. Read more »
The slow death of DSL will cause the rapid rise of expensive broadband if Verizon’s Fusion service is any indication. Verizon launched home-broadband powered by its wireless network — letting consumers trade unlimited slow broadband from a wire for faster, capped and more expensive service. Read more »
The country’s largest mobile operator and largest cable provider bringing their “quadruple play” service to San Francisco and the Bay Area, jointly marketing Comcast residential TV and broadband and Verizon mobile service. In the process, they’re poking a needle in the eye of mutual enemy AT&T. Read more »
From 1990s through 2011, DSL, a broadband technology, had a strong run at large phone companies in America. Now it is falling behind cable broadband and fiber. The latest data from Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable points to its declining fortunes. Read more »
Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable company, was the fastest broadband service provider in the U.S., according to Ookla, a broadband speed test company. In fact, Comcast and its cable industry peers trounced the phone companies when it came to download speeds. Read more »
Chinese equipment vendor Huawei has shown it can take copper DSL and push it to gigabit speeds over 100-meter distances, the company said on Wednesday. This will help cost-conscious ISPs such as AT&T gradually extend fiber to the edge. Read more »
The spectrum deal that Verizon signed to buy the unused airwaves from the nation’s top cable providers signals the moment that the consumer benefits of the convergence of voice, video and data hit the wall. It’s a deal that’s great for Verizon and bad for consumers. Read more »
Broadband analyst Craig Settles looks at how a fight over municipal broadband in Colorado drives home how ISPs can control the democratic process to deny governments and citizens access to better broadband. And they are willing to spend big to do this. Read more »
Sonic.net, a Bay Area ISP, has a service package and ethos that could disrupt the broadband market. Today it’s brand of disruption is limited to California, but Dane Jasper, the company’s CEO, says that Sonic.net plans to expand outside California. Read more »
Much of the discussion about ISPs centers around the nation’s largest players in the telecommunications and cable fields, but there are a number of smaller ISPs that can also share how competition is faring in the U.S. and what might happen if more flourished. Read more »
DSL is on the ropes, and cable companies are seeing their broadband subs rise, according to data from the second quarter. Leichtman Research Group also found that net broadband additions in the quarter were the second fewest of any quarter in the last ten years. Read more »
Is broadband one step in the economic value chain or the only step? ISPs have decided it’s the only value and want to charge based on usage. A better model might recognize it is just one element and rethink how it’s offered. Read more »
Does your Cablevision Internet connection feel a little slow in the evening hours? Turns out you are not alone: The FCC’s new broadband report shows that Cablevision delivers less than 60 percent of its advertised speed during peak hours. Most other ISPs fared significantly better. 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 »
It took me 25 minutes to download OS X Lion at home, but using LTE mobile broadband service, you could do the same in a few hours. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s amazing when you realize 3G networks, like OS X, launched 10 years ago. 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 »
A report shows that by 2018, the traditional phone system is going to be reaching less than 6 percent of U.S. residents. It’s perhaps time to rethink the very notion of what a phone is and what defines the classic phone network. Read more »
Fiber broadband is finally coming into its own, thanks to the growing number of fiber broadband deployments across the world. However, fiber broadband’s growing popularity is coming at the cost of DSL, one of the more widely deployed broadband technologies Read more »
The most pressing need for broadband providers in the U.S. is spectrum to enable the mobile ecosystem said AT&T’s CEO and chairman speaking at a conference. He also replayed his talking points on why AT&T must buy T-Mobile for $39 billion. At least he’s consistent. Read more »
AT&T’s continuing reliance on its fast growing wireless business cannot hide the fact that the wireline broadband growth is slowing for the company, as its first quarter financial results show. Despite competition, Ma Bell has muddled along, choosing to devote all its energies elsewhere. Read more »
As we’ve noted, the rise of LTE opens up the potential for wireless carriers to court wireline broadband subscribers. Well, even with the limitations of wireless, the comparison is valid, at least for now, according to Deutsche Bank, which studied the latest 4G offerings. Read more »
Verizon is thrilled to cover 285 million people, or 97 percent of the U.S. population, with 4G wireless services by 2013, in part because it makes such a dandy fixed broadband access technology says an executive. This must make companies that bought Verizon’s DSL lines scared. Read more »
James Nelson has been offering folks in Kansas City Internet access since 1995 through his ISP KCnet, where he is the CEO and president, but Google’s decision to deploy a Gigabit fiber network is both a threat and an opportunity for the area’s largest independent ISP. Read more »
Latest data from Point Topic, a broadband research firm, shows that broadband prices are down by 50 percent on per megabit basis from 2008. Price declines, are being driven by competition, especially for DSL services which are struggling to keep pace with fiber and cable offerings. Read more »
Copper, thanks to new generation DSL technologies is staying competitive with fiber and cable broadband. Today, a new breakthrough shows that it will only be a matter of time before DSL broadband crosses the 800 Mbps threshold. For now lets’s settle for 100 Mbps DSL. Read more »
Huawei, the telecom gear maker, today said it has achieved speeds of 700 Mbps over DSL using a prototype shown in Hong Kong: the fastest DSL we’ve seen. Earlier this year, Alcatel-Lucent showed off 300 Mbps over DSL that could travel for one kilometer. Read more »
Cable and telephone companies added a scant 336,000 net broadband subscriptions during the second quarter, according to the Leichtman Research Group: the lowest amount in the nine years that the analyst firm has tracked such additions. Telcos were the big losers as cable tromped DSL. Read more »
US telcos are phone companies in name. They have been losing their grip on the voice business. And now they are even starting to lose their traction in the broadband business as well. Q2 will see firstever quarterly decline in broadband subscribers at large telcos. Read more »
AT&T is deploying pair bonding throughout its DSL network as a means to bring U-Verse to more subscribers in 122 of its markets in 22 states. But before anyone gets excited, the upgrade will not boost speeds and will be about three years late. Wheee! Read more »
