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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...

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...