New data from Pew Research Enter suggests that home broadband use is on the decline, despite the booming number of popular streaming services and the abundance of content available from those services. Pew Research found that 67 percent of Americans have a broadband connection at home, down from 70 percent in 2013. That’s a slight slip, but Pew Research thinks of it more of a plateau,...
All sorts of crap have been thrown around about what’s causing media disruption, particularly now that TV and movies are being creatively destroyed by the Internet. But it’s a simple story at its core – the story of media disruption is the story of bandwidth. And it’s about to get really interesting. Let’s start at the beginning. Back in the early days of networking, our computers...
Can we get some of that 10Gbps, please? Records are meant to be broken, but sometimes they’re downright shattered. Case in point — Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, just set a new broadband speed record of 10 gigabits per second using traditional copper telephone lines combined with a prototype technology that’s intended to show how existing copper access networks can be...
Nothing like a little competition to ratchet the broadband envy up a few notches. It's not enough that Austin, TX, is getting Google Fiber — which alone is turning geeks everywhere green with jealousy (except perhaps Kansas City and Provo) — but soon they'll also be courted by nervous broadband competitors hoping to beat back a mass exodus from their services. Word has it that AT&...
If you're in a LTE coverage area, you're probably living the good life. Likely, it's a metropolitan area with multiple sources of high-speed connectivity — whether home cable/broadband, fiber or 4G cellular service. Many rural users, however, have long suffered through a black hole of Internet existence. Did you know that there are still people out there who use dial-up service? Horrors...
Hoping your town or city will join Kansas City and Austin, and become the proud hosts of Google Fiber? Well, I hate being the bearer of bad news, but the chances of that happening are not very good. Not that it doesn't make sense, at least on the surface. A nationwide rollout of Google Fiber would likely be a huge success. After all, Harris Interactive's latest corporate reputation...
Sprint's 4G LTE network is beginning to take shape: the carrier announced today that, within the "coming months" it will activate the high speed data network in nine new markets. The new areas include: Minneapolis and St. Paul Minn.; Oakland, Fremont and Hayward, CA.; Key West, Florida; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Michigan City, La Porte and Bloomington, Indiana; Eau Claire, Wisconsin;...
Though broadband Internet speeds in the U.S. can vary from one provider to another, there's at least one thing that these ISPs have in common — when it comes to speed and value, they just can't compete with the rest of the world. The New America Foundation released a study that compared high-speed Internet services across several major cities across the globe. Not only did the U.S....
Google's patent portfolio has just gained a little weight, as the software/search engine giant has cemented its purchase of more than 50 patents from Magnolia Broadband. There's no mention of how much green Google ponied up to acquire this wireless catalog of goodies, but the new arsenal of intellectual property will likely mesh well with the company's more prominent purchase of...
T-Mobile announced on Thursday that it will launch new no contract plans beginning on May 20th. There are four new plans in total, including a 300MB 1-week pass for $15, a 1.5GB 1-month pass for $25, a 3.5GB 1-month pass for $35 and a 5GB 1-month pass for $50. The plans aren't for smartphone users, rather they are for those who are interested in purchasing any of T-Mobile's mobile...