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The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

License Plates for the Internet - The Blueprints for Obama's Assault on the Internet The report's recommendations emphasize taking away cybersecurity from DHS in order to create a special department to oversee cybersecurity. It recommends ending the division between civilian and national security systems. And calls for establishing "international norms" when it comes to the internet. And it focuses a good deal on identity verification, not just for Federal employees, but for ordinary Americans as well. The report urges a move away from passwords, and toward physical identity verification, via a device that would verify an individual's identity. And calls...

While U.S. broadband providers continue to boost speeds for their subscribers, they still are falling behind the broadband deployment efforts of many other nations, according to survey of 230,000 U.S. Internet users. The survey, conducted by the Communications Workers of America, indicates also that population density can be a factor in providing broadband " Rhode Island, the smallest state geographically in the union, has the fastest median download speed with 6.8 Mbps while Alaska, the largest, has the slowest at 0.8 Mbps. Internet users in the survey took the CWA's Speed Matters Speed Test. The median download speed in the...

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The technological and economical development of Scandinavia (including Finland) is today more groundbreking than anywhere else in the world. The investments being made in relation to population size is mind-boggling. Despite a mere population of 25 million inhabitants, the combined GDP of the Scandinavian countries today ridicules that of a Russia often viewed to be a "reborn" super power "on the go" (combined Scandinavian GDP is actually 125% that of of Russia - and the gap is widening!!) But, let's focus on telecommunications here; Five bidders have paid €226 million ($346 million) for fourth generation (4G), super-fast mobile telephony licences,...

Other than Time Warner's single-city foray into monthly data caps, consumption-based billing has mostly been little ISPs with little monopolies, and given the market, we thought it'd stay that way. Broadband Reports is, uh, reporting that now Comcast is mulling monthly caps (which Comcast's PR guy confirms, though not the details)—something like 250GB, and then $1.50 for every GB over that. According to their source, the idea has "a lot of momentum" and it'll start rolling out in the next two months. The other part is that they're going to start ramping up DMCA notices to pirate assholes, with a...

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years. Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system....

NEW YORK (AP) - Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q) (Q) on Thursday introduced DSL plans with faster download speeds, including one that is the fastest DSL service from a major U.S. phone company. Qwest is charging $104.99 per month for a download speed of 20 megabits per second. For 12 mbps, it is charging $51.99 per month. The prices are $5 lower when combined with local phone service. The plans will be available in 23 of Qwest's top markets, the company said. By the end of the year, they will be available to 2 million customers. Download speeds on DSL,...

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ? That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up...

Web could collapse as video demand soars By Lewis Carter Last Updated: 2:52am BST 07/04/2008 The internet could grind to a halt within two years under the pressure of booming demand for online video, experts have warned. Last year it was said that YouTube consumed as much capacity as the entire internet took up in 2000 Soaring visitor numbers to video websites such as YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer are putting the copper wires, which underpin parts of the internet, under severe strain. Experts warn that unless billions of pounds is spent on upgrading the web's infrastructure, it could slow...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 18, 2008 STATEMENT BY FCC CHAIRMAN KEVIN J. MARTIN Washington, D.C. –FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin today announced the close of Auction 73 (the 700 MHz auction). The auction began on January 24, 2008, and closed today after 261 rounds of bidding. The FCC auction raised a record $19.592 billion and helped advance new open platform policies. Auction 73 Raised More Money Than Any Auction has Ever Raised The $19.592 billion in revenue raised in the 700 MHz auction is significantly more than raised in any past FCC auction. In comparison, the 2006 Advanced Wireless...

Excerpt - NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- AT&T Inc. (T) raised the price of its high-speed Internet service by $5 a month. The San Antonio telecommunications giant will raise rates for its bottom three tiers of DSL service in the 13 states which made up SBC Communications. The price for the lowest priced service - 768 kilobits per second - is now $20. The 1.5-megabit-per-second service is now $25, and the 3-mbps service is $30. The move comes after Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said last month the softening economy was affecting its DSL service in certain markets. ~ snip...

"What's shocking about the report isn't what it covers (or that Ars is cited in footnotes 126 and 211), but what it leaves out: it doesn't contain a single extended discussion of the fact that the US has been slipping in a worldwide broadband rankings throughout the decade. That hugely significant fact doesn't mean that the current approach isn't working or that the US is becoming a Luddite paradise, but it does suggest that there are other approaches to be considered, approaches that have proved successful in real-world conditions. As broadband continues to be a key driver of economic opportunity...

NEW DELHI: Internet users in India struggled with slow surfing speeds and companies tapped redundancy systems to overcome a disruption to international connectivity. The problem was caused due to the breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. An anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged Indian-owned FLAG cable and also SEA-ME-WE on Wednesday morning and urgent repair teams had set sail for the location. An official of Reliance group, which owns FLAG, said the repair will take about 10 days. But some mission-critical operations can sometimes suffer. Wednesday's disruption in SEA-ME-WE and Indian-owned FLAG cables had not been resolved...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The first round of the much-anticipated Federal Communications Commission auction of communications airwaves drew $2.4 billion in prospective bids before closing at midday Thursday, according to the agency. Nearly half the money, some $1.04 billion, was bid by one participant seeking a national license for a swath of 22 megahertz of radio spectrum. The bidding for a second national license of 10 megahertz topped out at $472 million in the first round. Both these bids are believed to be the minimum bid allowed in the first round for these chunks of spectrum. The information was...

NEW YORK (AP) - A satellite due to launch in three years promises to expand high-speed Internet services to rural Americans who cannot get access through cable or phone companies. ViaSat Inc. (VSAT) bills its forthcoming ViaSat-1 satellite as the world's highest-capacity broadband satellite. The company said the new satellite should provide at least 10 times the capacity of those in orbit today, largely by using the spectrum more efficiently. That means each customer could get faster speeds and more customers could be served in any given area, Chief Executive Mark Dankberg said. He said satellite broadband providers have been...

I am in a discussion with Sprint and the Illinois Commerce Commission on the taxes that appear on my bill for my Sprint Pentech PX-500 broadband card for my laptop. I am paying $0.57 for Federal 9-1-1 taxes and $0.75 for local 9-1-1 tax. This isn't a bank-breaker, but it's the principle. The card cannot "dial" 9-1-1 and it lacks GPS chipset for Phase 2 wireless E9-1-1 location requirements. Because of this, I contend that I should not be paying taxes for a device that CANNOT use the services for which I'm being taxed. It would be the rough analog...

A church in southern Sweden has refused to allow a wireless broadband antenna to be installed on its tower, after fears were raised that parishoners would stay home surfing for porn instead of attending services. The proposal to install broadband equipment at the church in Hylletofta, 200 kilometres east of Gothenburg, would have brought high speed internet access to the community, where residents currently have to struggle with dial-up connections. But the Church of Sweden decided that the ability to download high quality images and videos could harm the morals of the local population. "The diocese has formally taken the...

Excerpt - ~ snip ~ It is very doubtful, almost impossible, that we'll catch up to those countries ahead of us in broadband penetration. They are too far ahead and our native demand is simply less because our Internet economies are developing more slowly. Absent some miracle, the game is already over. As I wrote two weeks ago, the situation is likely to improve somewhat over the next year or two as the telephone companies sacrifice a little to lock us in before we switch to DOCSIS 3 cable modems and the cable companies, in turn, offer incentives to jump...

I've been having trouble with my broadband Internet service lately. It cuts out frequently. The calls to customer service have gotten longer. The actual speed of the service isn't close to what was advertised. And the price has gone up twice in a year. I'd like to take my business elsewhere. But I can't. Even though I live in a large metropolitan area, my local cable company is the only option for broadband at my condo. The local phone company has yet to wire my building for DSL. Satellite broadband -- which costs more for slower speeds -- isn't an...

WASHINGTON - If they're lucky, Americans have two choices for getting high-speed Internet access: the local cable company or the local telephone company. Hoping to increase competition, regulators have promised that a third choice will become available when TV broadcasters abandon part of the airwaves as part of the digital revolution.But a proposal previewed this week by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission suggests that dreams of a "third pipe" for broadband is really a pipe dream.A critical provision that some say is needed to attract a new broadband competitor did not make it into the draft.Some technology companies...

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels are now hers for the taking.

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection. Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed. But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm,...

So-called high-speed Internet broadband connection speeds are "pathetic" compared with other industrialized nations, a communications union report claimed. The study was commissioned by the Communications Workers of America in Washington in a bid to get the Federal Communications Commission to redefine what constitutes true high speed, USA Today reported Tuesday. The study found Japanese Internet users enjoy speeds of 661 megabits per second, South Korea averages 45 mps, France has 17 mps, and Canada has an average 7 mps. The median U.S. speed was 1.97 mps, the study said. "We have pathetic speeds compared to the rest of the world,"...

Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Monday announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country.Howard said Optus, the Australian offshoot of Singapore telco Singtel, had been awarded a 958-million-dollar contract to build a broadband network in the bush with rural finance company Elders. The joint venture, known as OPEL, would contribute a further 900 million US dollars to provide broadband of at least 12 megabits per second by June 2009."What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very...

HOUSTON - The former chief of Enron Corp.'s high-speed Internet unit, who turned government witness and testified in the trial of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling and company founder Kenneth Lay, was sentenced Monday to 27 months in prison. It's been nearly three years since Kenneth Rice, 48, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to help federal prosecutors on other cases related to the energy giant's collapse. His sentencing was postponed as he cooperated with prosecutors. Before sentencing, Rice apologized for his role in the corporate scandal that wiped out thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in market...

Excerpt - NEW YORK - Without any sort of fanfare, AT&T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, half the price of its cheapest advertised plan. The DSL, or digital subscriber line, plan introduced Saturday is part of the concessions made by AT&T to the Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved last December. The $10 offer is available to customers in the 22-state AT&T service region, which includes former BellSouth areas, who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband, spokesman Michael Coe confirmed Monday. Local phone service and...

A potential collaboration between Telenor and Telia could result in extremely high speed broadband for 1.8 million Swedish households. Computer Sweden magazine reports that Telenor has invited Telia for talks about the new vdsl2 technology. The cost of developing a vdsl2 network in Sweden is estimated at 10 billion kronor ($1.5 billion). "The best thing would be for Telia, Telenor and Tele 2 to reach an agreement on how best to finance the investment," Telenor's Swedish CEO Johan Lindgren told Computer Sweden. If implemented, the system is expected to grant almost two million Swedish households access to a broadband capacity...

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association is holding its annual convention in Las Vegas (where else?) and this year, super-high-speed cable service is finally moving into the limelight. Announcements from hardware providers like Motorola and Texas Instruments suggest that we're finally moving closer to the promised land of DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS 3.0 offers two immediate benefits over what cable ISP subscribers are currently stuck with (DOCSIS 1.1): faster speeds and support for IPv6. The technology has the potential to bump download speeds to 160Mbps and upload speeds to 120Mbps, although that bandwidth will be divided up between households attached to a single...

I have posted several times in the past about this topic, this is just an update for you techheads who might be interesetd...oh, and anyone who uses the internet... which is...everyone. Most people have no idea what CALEA is. It is a law to assist law enforcement's ability to intercept phone calls. It was written and passed and signed into law in 1994 by Congress. It mandated that digital switching equipment technology be required to have certain specific capabilities which would make tapping a person's phone calls, and making the call history easier to get. Congress ante'd up millions to...

The State government should immediately issue directions to the Commercial Taxes Department to collect sales tax and value added tax (VAT) from all private and public sector companies which are offering broadband services through optical fibre cable, said the sub-ordinate legislation committee in its special report submitted to the Assembly on Wednesday. In the report, the Committee pointed out that such companies have to pay sales tax of thousands of crores of rupees to the government and steps should be taken to issue notices to the companies to pay the tax. The Committee, headed by legislator N Yogish Bhat, also...

FairPoint Communications owned one small rural telephone business in Kansas when the company first came to New England in 1994 to buy a cluster of small, rural operations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. More than a decade later, the same small company is asking utility regulators in those three states to approve a deal with Verizon - the region's largest carrier - that will catapult FairPoint into the big leagues of the telecom industry. But before the company can swallow up Verizon's traditional telephone service in northern New England, FairPoint must prove to regulators that it has the money,...

One year ago this month, Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) told his fellow members of the Congressional Rural Caucus that the Universal Service Fund needed to be strengthened and made available to companies that are deploying broadband in rural areas. "Nobody knows the importance of the Universal Service Fund better than the Members of this Caucus and their constituents," he said then. "The USF is vital to the future growth of telecom service in our districts, states, and country. That is why it is critical that Congress take the initiative and reform the current program before rural America is left completely...

Senators reintroduce net neutrality bill By Grant Gross, IDG News Service January 09, 2007 Two U.S. senators have resurrected a debate over net neutrality in Congress by reintroducing legislation that would prohibit broadband providers from giving customers faster and more stable access to their own content than to competitors' Web sites and services. Senators Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, and Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act Tuesday. The two first offered the net neutrality legislation in May and then tried to amend it to a wide-ranging broadband bill in June, but the Senate Commerce,...

New rules for broadband switchers Ofcom said it had complaints from a "significant minority" Switching broadband suppliers looks set to get easier for UK net users.Regulator Ofcom has drawn up new rules to address complaints from the "significant minority" who struggle to move to a new high-speed service. It said the rules would streamline procedures and would replace the voluntary code that broadband firms have abided by before now. Ofcom said it was getting "increasing" complaints about the difficulties of shifting from one net firm to another. Rule change Broadband has proved hugely popular in the UK and now...

When news came this week that a leading Chinese language search engine, Baidu, was set to enter the Japanese search market next year, it only affirmed one of the emerging ironies of this internet age. Though backward in terms of traditional media, China is leaping ahead in internet development, so much so as to become, in effect, an exporter of its knowhow. To Japan yet. Indeed, as a new study points out, at least among its affluent classes, China's internet culture has already leapt ahead of those of many developed counties with far more advanced traditional media infrastructures. “It is...

NEW YORK (AP) - AT&T Inc. (T) is launching an Internet TV service where subscribers can watch live cable channels such as Fox News on any computer with a broadband connection for $20 per month. The AT&T Broadband TV service announced Tuesday features about 20 channels of live and made-for-broadband content. The channel lineup includes the History Channel, the Weather Channel, the Food Network, Bloomberg and Oxygen. Additional channels will be added soon, the company said without elaborating. The content is being provided by MobiTV Inc., a company that has specialized in delivering live cable channels to cell phones through...

Broadband networks for the home are fueling the growth of sales of wireless devices, and will continue to do so for the next five years. Research from the Boston-based IT consultancy, Strategy Analytics, indicates that homeowners worldwide are going to purchase nearly 950 million wireless home devices, including game consoles, wireless MP3 players and connected TVs by 2012. By Gene Koprowski

A three-year project led by the University of York, which aims to revolutionise broadband communications, reaches its climax later this year. The CAPANINA project, which uses balloons, airships or unmanned solar-powered planes as high-altitude platforms (HAPs) to relay wireless and optical communications, is due to finish its main research at the end of October. The consortium behind the project will open York HAP Week, a conference from 23 to 27 October, which will showcase the applications of HAPs, as a springboard for future development in this new high-tech sector. The CAPANINA Final Exhibition will open the conference by highlighting the...

FINDING IT HARD TO UNDERSTAND the "net neutrality" debate? On one side are the hip, cool, billionaire web service companies like Google, eBay, Yahoo, and even Microsoft. Net neutrality is their rallying cry. Despite the fact that they are basically schlocky ad salesmen on a grand scale, they're pushing this quaint, self-serving '60s notion that the Internet is a town square--all for one and one for them, or something like that. Everyone should be allowed to hang out in the town square and use it as they please, one low price, eat all you want at the buffet.On the other...

Institutional and individual investors are eagerly examining prospects in the so-called broadband over power line (BPL) market and are helping finance proof-of-concept projects in the field, experts tell UPI's Networking. The interest comes as utilities are embracing a "validate and endorse" approach to BPL, said John J. Joyce, president and chief executive officer of Ambient Corp., a developer of technologies for power companies and multi-unit dwellings, based in Newton, Mass. By Gene Koprowski http://www.upi.com http://www.upi.com/Hi-Tech/view.php?StoryID=20060612-054759-4009r

Excerpt - NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Satellite TV providers EchoStar Communications Corp. (DISH) and DirecTV Inc. (DTV) signed five-year distribution agreements with WildBlue Communications Inc., a satellite-broadband provider, to provide Internet access targeting rural consumers. ~ snip ~

(AP) NEW YORK Middle- and working-class Americans signed up for high-speed Internet access in record numbers in the past year, apparently lured by a price war among phone companies. Broadband adoption increased 59 percent from March last year to March 2006 among U.S. households with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000, according to a survey to be released Monday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It increased 40 percent in households making less than $30,000 a year. Among blacks, it increased 121 percent, according to the study. Middle- and lower-income households still lag higher-income households when it comes to...

NEW YORK (AP) - Middle- and working-class Americans signed up for high-speed Internet access in record numbers in the past year, apparently lured by a price war among phone companies. Broadband adoption increased 59 percent from March last year to March 2006 among U.S. households with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000, according to a survey to be released Monday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act would keep broadband providers from slowing customer access to competitors' Web sites. A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved a bill that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or impairing their customers' access to Web content offered by competitors. The House Judiciary Committee voted 20-13 to approve the bill, called the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act. Bill sponsor James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the chairman of the committee, was joined by a handful of Republicans and most of the committee's Democrats in supporting the bill. Some committee members said they had questions about the bill's...

Thanks to its relentless marketing and low prices, Vonage has quickly become synonymous with phone service over the Internet. But when Brandon Sehlke and his wife, Jennifer, moved into a new home in San Antonio two weeks ago, they chose a new Internet phone service from Time Warner Cable, not Vonage or AT&T, his old provider. Skip to next paragraph The deal Time Warner offered was just too good: phone service with a television package and a broadband connection for a promotional price of $89.95 a month. "Getting all three services was better than anything else we could find," said...

Net Brutality… Literally FreedomWorks crashes press event: check out the great photos! By Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks Grassroots Manager May 18, 2006 A free market coalition led by FreedomWorks and Protest Warrior crashed the press conference held today by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), MoveOn.org and musician Moby. Our sign “Net Brutality” proved fitting, as one of the Left’s activists struck one of our members in the face with a sign. This incident interrupted the press conference, causing Rep. Markey and Moby to turn and look at the commotion. The man was swiftly ushered away by the MoveOn crowd as to avoid...

CHICAGO, May 8 (UPI) -- Integrating disparate data and voice networks -- broadband, mobile phone and WiFi -- into one unified network is promising to be a foremost technology trend in the next few years, one that could lead to totally personalized telecom services, experts tell UPI's Networking. Experts at Gartner Inc., the IT research consultancy, indicate that by 2010 at least 40 percent of U.S. companies will have completely integrated their entire voice and data networks into a single network, and 95 percent of all large and mid-size firms will have at least started the process to do so....

CBS Corp. on Thursday launched a new broadband channel called "innertube," an ad-supported outlet that will include specially created Web series and some use of material that has already run on CBS