Tag: BROADBAND

The US was buzzing for months after Google announced that it was planning an experimental high-speed fiber network, but these days it seems like the project's been all but forgotten about. Breathing new life back into it again, Google has now created a new site: Google Fiber for Communities. The new site combines related sources of information dealing with fiber technology, broadband in general, ...

Starting this week, Irish ISP Eircom will begin the three-month pilot-phase of a new program in which they'll enact a "three strikes" rule against subscribers found to be file-sharing. In the program, any subscribers who use up their three warnings will have their broadband connections severed for one year. The move makes Ireland the first country to enact a graduated-response policy, and affects ...

Not content to give up and suckle on the buzzworded cable teat just yet, Bell Labs has just successfully tested a variant of DSL that is capable of up to 800Mbps -- about 100 megabytes per second -- using just a pair of traditional DSL connections. The range is short -- only a few hundred meters -- but the same technology, according to Alcatel-Lucent, is capable of 100Mbps over a 1,000 meter ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/03/02/welcome-to-google-kansas-no-its-not-a-new-office-its-a-t/'; As the last few vestiges of sanity left the rocky outcrops of Mayor Bill Bunten's brain, he decreed: "Let our fair city (formerly known as Topeka) henceforth be known by the mad moniker GOOGLE, KANSAS!!" Just kidding; he didn't say that exactly (probably). But Topeka is ...

Google has just announced plans to deploy insanely fast broadband to between 50,000 and 500,000 households in the U.S. They say they're going to offer the service at "competitive prices". It doesn't mean they're going into the business as an ISP per se (even though 500,000 households is not exactly a tiny number), but they're mainly going to use it as a large-scale connectivity experiment. ...

As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life ...

Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to ...

Cheap commodity PCs aren't so much news as the are ubiqouitous. However, news that Wal-Mart is set to offer a cheap Windows PC with OpenOffice pre-installed could strike fear into the hearts of the Microsoft OFfice development team, already losing market share in minor ways to the open source competitor. Ars Technica reports that Wal-Mart will soon offer a $298 PC built by Everex which will come ...

It's often argued that the U.S. is lagging behind in broadband adoption compared to other first-world countries around the globe. With broadband becoming an important tool for work, play and communication, that's a statement that could bode bad times ahead for a country which has always taken somewhat of a lead in technology; If it's true. A new study which looks at the numbers in a different ...

If you happened to be in the offices of Vonage, Packet8, SunRocket, or any other VoIP provider today, you most likely were witness to some high-fives and knuckle-taps by their top executives. The reason for that is that the FCC has ruled/declared/said that VoIP providers should be treated the same as your friendly neighborhood telecom which, according to one FCC honcho, means that VoIP-ers will ...

Apparently Verizon didn't realize when they got into the broadband Internet business that they were getting into, well, the broadband Internet business. TechWeb is reporting that Verizon, which charges its customers $38 per month, thinks that companies like Google and Microsoft whose apps use up that bandwidth should chip in, too. The Verizon rep quoted in the article says that content providers ...