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 »
The link between Paris and Lyon is the first operational deployment of long-distance 400 Gbps wavelength fiber connectivity, with its first tester being France’s educational and research network, Renater. Read more »
Figuring out how to bring the speed of light to communications on chips, between chips and everywhere has been an overarching goal of semiconductor research. IBM says it is ready to bring a technology that puts optics and electronics on a chip using conventional manufacturing methods. Read more »
Plexxi has made a new networking box that it calls a switch, but is radically different from the switches on the market today. The switch contains software plus an optical transceiver that link to other Plexxi boxes to form a fast connection between thousands of servers. Read more »
Not all fiber optic cable is created equal, and miles of older fiber deployed in Japan aren’t able to keep up with the latests electronics. This is why a test that delivered 8Tbps of bandwidth across DSF fiber in Japan is s big deal. 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 »
Time Warner Cable is shelling out $25 million to lay fiber to select NYC buildings, but comparing the cable company’s network to Google’s fiber-to-the-home network in Kansas City is silly. The end customer, the money spent, the rationale for the investment and the scope are different. Read more »
Backbone provider XO claims it is the first US operator to build an inter-city 100-gigabit fiber network — other carriers have performed the feats in the confines of big cities, but XO has gone coast to coast. The upgrade boosts XO’s capacity by a factor of 10. Read more »
Google’s fiber-to-the-home network may look like a loss leader for the search engine company, but its executive teams says it’s profitable. Here are the three ways Google has managed to cut the costs of building out a network and beat ISPs at their own game. Read more »
Time Warner Cable and I have something in common — we both want to figure out details on Google’s fiber-to-the-home deployment in Kansas City. TWC, which provides broadband access in Kansas City, is fishing for details on the Google deployment and is willing to pay for tips. Read more »
Researchers showed off a way to deliver speeds of 2.5 terabits per second over wireless networks — 500,000 times faster than the current low-end LTE speeds and 5,000 times faster than 5.5 gigabits per second, which is the fastest theoretical wireless broadband I’ve encountered. Read more »
Changes in the power market are rippling through the Internet industry, altering both the location of data centers and their sources of power. There are many factors in picking a data center location beyond the geographic location, such as how to procure energy and green-energy models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
If there were an Olympics of pushing the broadband envelope, Verzon would consistently take the gold, because the carrier is always testing out new superfast broadband in its labs and in its test networks. Today’s speed record is 21.7 terabits per second in field trials. 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 »
Sonic.net, an independent ISP in San Francisco, plans to roll out a gigabit network to the city, putting the hub of today’s tech and web community on equal footing with Chattanooga, Tenn., and eventually both sides of Kansas City, where Google plans to lay fiber. Read more »
Long-haul networks aren’t the only pipes getting 100 gigabit upgrades these days. On Tuesday Verizon said it is upgrading the metro networks in at least seven U.S. cities to meet the demand for broadband at the edge. Looks like we’re closing in on the terabit age. Read more »
One of the benefits of D.C.’s 100 gigabit network is that it should open eyes to the importance of middle mile infrastructure, but it’s not clear how many last mile projects will spring up to connect to it. How DC-CAN resolves this could influence federal policy. Read more »
Washington D.C. went live with the first link of a 100-gigabit network Wednesday. The new network, called the D.C. Community Access Network, will provide links out to communities east of the Anacostia River, but the ultra-high-speed network will soon serve the entire District. Read more »
Johns Hopkins is building a 100 gigabit per second network to shuttle data from the campus to other large computing centers. The network would be capable of transferring the amount of data equivalent to 80 million file cabinets filled with text each day. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. 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 »
The U.K. will get 300 Mbps fiber to the home connections available on a wholesale basis. And that, my friends, is the sound of broadband supremacy passing us by in the U.S. as we lag behind other countries when it comes to upgrading our networks. 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The cable business isn’t going to cede its share of the broadband market by waiting around for coaxial cable to become obsolete, and now cable providers won’t have to make an expensive transition to a fiber-to-the-home infrastructure to achieve gigabit networks. Read more »
Two days in Chattanooga, Tenn. show how a municipal broadband network can pay dividends when community leaders focus on the applications a gigabit network can deliver and consider the long-term economic development potential. And yes, it can even generate enough revenue to become profitable. 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 »
Two research groups in the last few weeks have shown off 100 terabit per second speeds delivered over fiber connections. The advancement in speeds is both unexpected and necessary as we rely on broadband as the interconnect for our increasingly digital lives. Read more »
Verizon refuses to stop in its quest to support the future of our connected society, with the nation’s largest ISP testing terabit backbone speeds with NEC out in the field. At terabit speeds, performing high performance computing and big data analytics in real time become possible. Read more »
Chip Rosenthal headed the effort to bring Google’s gigabit fiber network to Austin. He says the Texas capital was on the short list of cities, but thinks Austin was passed over because of a state law banning municipal participation in broadband networks. Read more »
Kansas City may not be alone in getting gigabit broadband. In Google’s blog today, it said: “We’ll also be looking closely at ways to bring ultra high-speed Internet to other cities across the country.” Sounds like Google isn’t finished yet. And that’s a good thing. Read more »
Unlike the cap and congestion crowd, Verizon Communications keeps upgrading its network, planning for the cloud and streaming era coming up. It plans to upgrade backbone pipes in the U.S. along select routes to 100 Gigabit per second capacity before the second quarter of this year. Read more »
Infinera has demonstrated that it can built an optic transmitter capable of delivering multi-terabit speeds, paving the way for growth of the next generation of the Internet. The world is moving toward 100 Gbps in the coming years, but this enables growth for decades to come. 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 »
Municipal fiber may the fastest way for smaller communities and those in areas without competition to bring better broadband to their community. But these networks generally aren’t popular with incumbent communications providers, which have a history of suing to stop them. But their tactics have changed. Read more »
MIT’s brains have figured out how to deliver a faster Internet using optical connections throughout the entire transmission, which could result in a web that’s up to 1,000 times faster, cheaper and more power efficient. But this faster network requires new routers — an expensive proposition. Read more »
Marvell is going to Hollywood next week in an effort to show the film industry what it’s missing because the U.S. has such slow broadband speeds. The chip firm wants the film industry to agitate for broadband speeds of up to 2.5 gigabits per second. Read more »
