Wednesday Evening Links07:03PM Wednesday Dec 16 2009 by Revcbcomments? According to the Wall Street Journal, McDonald's will be offering free Wi-Fi service to everyone -- starting in January. The fine dining establishment has traditionally charged customers $2.95 for two hours of Internet access at 11,000 of its 14,000 U.S. story continues..41 comments With just 63 days left to go before the FCC unveils the nation's first ever broadband plan, the FCC this morning shared the plan's basic structure with the press and public. According to a press announcement (pdf), the plan will focus on reforming the USF, fostering more ISP transparency, address spectrum issues, exploring accessibility for those with disabilities and pushing for the creation of a national wireless broadband network. story continues..68 comments Small Texas broadband operator GVTC Communications says they're bringing 40 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps fiber to the home service to portions of Texas. According to the company's press release (pdf), the new service costs $89.95 -- if you bundle it with other GVTC services. GVTC is competing locally with AT&T's U-Verse (with top speeds of 24 Mbps) and Time Warner Cable -- who have yet to deploy faster DOCSIS 3.0 services to anywhere other than portions of New York City. According to GVTC, the company's spending $35 million to extend fiber to 80% of their customers across Far North San Antonio, Boerne, Bulverde and other Hill Country and Southeast Texas communities. 19 comments story continues..35 comments Earlier this week "fake Steve Jobs" (Newsweek journalist Dan Lyons) wrote a satirical tirade against AT&T, lamenting the company's inability to adequately address iPhone bandwidth demand, and their recent comments suggesting they might impose new metered charges for iPhone users. In response, Lyons urged readers to use as much bandwidth as possible this Friday in protest against AT&T's failure to understand that people using your product is a good thing. story continues..82 comments While some had hoped that the new Obama administration would bring with it a little more government responsibility in terms of allowing corporations to fully dictate technology policy, there's no bigger example to the contrary than this week's anti-piracy summit being coordinated by Vice President Joe Biden. As Techdirt notes, the invite to Biden's summit at the White House proudly proclaims (pdf) that the event is designed to "bring together all of the stakeholders." Yet in examining those invited to attend, the list is comprised entirely of entertainment industry executives. story continues..39 comments Project Honeypot says they've just received their one billionth spam message: an IRS phishing scam sent to an e-mail address harvested nearly two years ago. The project started in 2004, and includes tens of thousands of network admins from over 170 countries who spend their time tracking online fraud. According to the project announcement, they estimate that for every e-mail Project Honeypot gets, the same message goes out to 125,000 real victims. As such, 125 trillion spam messages have been sent to users since the project began tracking. To celebrate the milestone, they've authored an interesting report exploring in-depth spam and scam statistics including where they come from and who they're targeting. 2 comments ViaSat says they've completed the acquisition of satellite broadband provider WildBlue, and is now moving forward in the process of integrating ViaSat's ground network technology with WildBlues operational and distribution platform. "The WildBlue acquisition advances our entry into the Ka-band broadband service business by over a year and more completely establishes the financial and strategic framework to capture the value anticipated from the ViaSat-1 satellite," says ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg. ViaSat says they'll launch a new satellite in 2011 that offers more capacity than "all current North American satellites combined." That's good news for WildBlue, who not only imposes incredibly low usage caps on consumers -- but hasn't even had the capacity to expand their customer base. 10 comments
Wednesday Morning Links08:33AM Wednesday Dec 16 2009 by Revcb9 comments
Tuesday Evening Links07:04PM Tuesday Dec 15 2009 by Revcb11 comments Back in July, shortly after calling Cablevision's free Wi-Fi a "marketing stunt," Verizon began offering select broadband customers free Wi-Fi. As noted at the time, the service wasn't extended to Verizon Wireless users or base package DSL users, required a third party application that only works on Windows, and wasn't usable on home PCs (netbook/laptops only). story continues..16 comments It's fairly common practice for cable carriers to blame their often bi-annual TV rate increases on the high costs they incur from broadcasters. While content (especially sports programming) certainly is expensive, cable operators share responsibility for the continually increasing rates. story continues..74 comments As expected, Comcast has nationally launched the beta of their new Internet video implementation of "TV Everywhere." Dubbed Xfinity, the service offers Comcast cable TV customers access to Internet video content at no additional charge. Interested Comcast users will need to head to either the Comcast.net or Fancast portals and download a movie player created by Move Networks. story continues..88 comments Last week you'll recall that the cable industry's chief lobbying and policy group, the NCTA, unveiled a new talking point suggesting that network neutrality protections would violate the cable industry's First Amendment rights. It's a weird and incoherent argument for anybody who has actually bothered to read the First Amendment. story continues..76 comments The Australian government has been sinking millions of dollars into ISP Internet filters, conducting trials with a handful of ISPs, many of whom have been very vocal in their beliefs that the filters won't technically work. Australian political leaders in favor of the filters don't seem to care -- the government admitting the ongoing trials have no quantifiable metric to determine whether the trials were a success or failure. story continues..27 comments story continues..20 comments Back in August, cable provider Suddenlink expanded their deployment of faster DOCSIS 3.0 service in select portions of Texas. At the time, the service clocked in at 20 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream -- far below DOCSIS 3.0's maximum capability. story continues..16 comments
Tuesday Morning Links08:53AM Tuesday Dec 15 2009 by Revcb3 comments
Monday Evening Links07:02PM Monday Dec 14 2009 by Revcb8 comments ·more stories, story search, most popular ..
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