As ISPs continue to explore new ways to charge customers, many are embracing the idea of pricing based on data consumption. But the lack of pricing transparency and sheer number of variables make it too consumer unfriendly. 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 »
A British man has found some sympathy in the courts because Google did not delete false comments about him made on Blogger fast enough. Does his case open a backdoor to internet regulation? Read more »
The latest firmware update for Free’s set-top box adds a beta ad-blocking feature, which turns on by default when the user resets the device. If this was deliberate, it’s an interesting development for an ISP already embroiled in a net neutrality investigation. Read more »
After users complained about bad online video experiences, France’s telecom regulator launched an investigation trying to figure out if a local ISP was blocking YouTube or if it was just underinvesting in its network. A decision is expected soon, and could have worldwide repercussions. 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 »
The Internet can handle several million people staying home to watch Netflix and telecommuting, according to Sandvine. The deep packet inspection company noted that traffic was up 114 percent on Monday as people stayed home to await Hurricane Sandy. Read more »
NetZero is giving each of its customers 1 GB of free bonus data each month. You can’t use that yourself, though. You have to give it to other NetZero customers in 200 MB increments, but there’s nothing to stop your friends from returning the favor. Read more »
Google has signed up 180 out of 202 neighborhoods in a pre-registration drive for its fiber-to-the-home service. That’s an amazing take-up rate, although it’s not clear what percentage of homes have signed up. But the incumbent ISPs, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, must be worried. Read more »
Google has convinced 10 percent of the people living in areas where it can deploy fiber to pre-register for the service with two days left before the Sept. 9 deadline. That’s a good start, but it might not be enough to get the service to profitability. Read more »
The British government is considering once again whether to apply mandatory filters to block all adult content on the internet. But what’s the point of campaigning for a technological solution when the technology itself doesn’t work properly? Read more »
Under new proposals from the British media regulator Ofcom, internet providers will start sending warning letters to those accused of illegal filesharing in 18 months — and will be forced to handed people’s data over to copyright holders after three successive hits. Read more »
In a victory for Comcast, a federal judge in Chicago quashed four subpoenas that would have let a porn studio identify hundreds of subscribers accused of using torrent technology to share videos. Read more at paidContent »
The stereotype of Russia as a haven of copyright infringement could be a thing of the past, after officials in Moscow said they were considering holding internet providers liable for illegal filesharing that takes place on their networks. Read more »
Martin Geddes thinks the telecom industry has reached its peak. As he explains, telecom is like the railroad business at the height of the railroad barons. It has acquired its maximum share of the economy, and the only way now is down. Read more »
FreedomPop plans to give away mobile data access to most of its customers for free, charging only premium users a monthly fee. If can it can make the math work, it could potentially shake up the wireless market, extending mobile data to broad swathes of the population. 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 »
In the net neutrality debate, Internet Service Providers talk about charging content providers for prioritization so they can invest in improving infrastructure. But placing a price on prioritizing content creates an inherent disincentive to expand. Professors Hsing Cheng, Shubho Bandyopadhyay and Hong Guo elaborate. Read more »
From the perspective of an ISP, making Skype calls on your iPad is far better than doing so on a MacBook Pro, while making calls via an Android handset falls in the middle when it comes to adding to the congestion of the overall network. Read more »
In a major win for Hollywood, a High Court judge told the country’s biggest internet service provider, BT (NYSE: BT), that it has two weeks… Read more at paidContent »
The uptake of the iOS 5 update for Apple customers was fast and far-reaching. But what did that look like to the ISPs who provide the bandwidth for Apple customers to update? Here’s a chart that shows what Sonic.net saw. 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 »
Getting to gigabit networks isn’t a cheap proposition, and once they are deployed, they generally cost more than the average person can afford. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem around building applications that could help network adoption. Why build if there’s no audience? 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 »
When we watch YouTube or stream TV through a Boxee, the assumption is that aside from some buffering, the experience will be fine. But add live content and interactive elements to those video streams, and it gets complicated. A new paper shows us how complicated. Read more »
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 »
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 »
Google Apps might not have many takers amongst the big boys of business, but the company is finding success with small and rural telecoms and Internet service providers, which, in turn, are offering Google Apps to their customers. 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 »
Comcast unveiled a home security product in six markets on Wednesday in what I expect will become a larger effort for Comcast as well as other Internet Service Providers that want to avoid becoming just a broadband delivery pipe. Read more »
Apple’s iCloud product poses a threat and an opportunity for ISPs. The product — which will deliver music and photo content on demand — is an acknowledgement that people are ready to stream content rather than store it on local hard drives. This has huge repercussions for ISPs. Read more »
The cloud is a wonderful thing, allowing us to backup files to remote servers for just pennies a month. But what happens when something goes awry and your backups start sucking up huge amounts of bandwidth? It’s not pretty, especially when you have a usage cap. Read more »
Bandwidth caps seem like not a bad idea, until you find yourself struggling to figure out how your home network suddenly started downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data in a matter of days, and you have blown through your monthly limit in less than a week. 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 »
ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: Data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. But is this really accurate and what can the application providers do to help? Read more »
It is hard being a broadband provider: Not only are new web services putting extra stress on the network infrastructure but there is plenty of pressure on revenues. Against that backdrop, ISPs eed to make better use of their network infrastructure, and ConteXtream wants to help. Read more »
We are inching toward half a billion broadband subscribers worldwide, thanks to booming demand for fast connections. Find out the top 10 service providers in the world. Which is the largest? The fastest? What are the top five US broadband service providers? Read more »
Google today launched a site that has the effect of creating a community action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to convince the search giant to build its planned experimental fiber-to-the-home network in their towns. Read more »
A Florida congressman has introduced a bill aimed to preventing the FCC from reclassifying broadband and imposing net neutrality unless it can find examples of systemic market failure. The bill, called the Internet Protection, Investment, and Innovation Act, reads like an ISP lobbyist wrote it. Read more »
