Tag: BROADBAND

Where can you find the fastest broadband Internet speeds on the whole planet? According to Ars Technica, the crown goes to Berkeley, California, which has the fastest average broadband Internet speed on Earth -- at 18.7Mbps. This West Coast college town beat out, according to Akamai Technologies' State of the Internet Report, other major urban hubs in both Asia and Europe. The U.S fared ...

The National Broadband Plan, Net neutrality and consumer advocates around the country took a major blow today when a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had no authority to regulate how service providers manage network traffic. The ruling was handed down in favor of Comcast following a 2008 challenge leveled by the FCC against the cable provider for blocking and throttling P2P file-sharing ...

It's no longer news that the U.S. has slower and more expensive Internet connections than most of the world. Being the place where the Web was invented makes that quite sad, of course, but there are legitimate reasons why a country like South Korea (which has the fastest speeds on average) is beating us in the broadband race. For one, most countries have much more competition in the broadband ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Elmo of Sesame Street fame joined FCC Chariman Julius Genachowski last week for a surreal discussion of the upcoming U.S. broadband plan. Fortunately, there's video. ...

Facebook's population officially outnumbers that of the entire United States, and Twitter has obviously become firmly established within pop culture. That being the case, the creation of specifically marketed social networks capitalizing on the online networking boom should be completely expected. Some of the demographically geared services cater to white collar professionals and others to nerdy ...

As part of its push for the adoption of its National Broadband Plan, the FCC has continually argued that Internet access, in today's economy, has become a necessity for anyone seeking to climb the rungs of society. Now, a newly published study shows just how important it is for the poorest American populations, in particular. The report, based on the first large scale study of public library ...

Share Last week, we told you about the FCC's ambitious new broadband plan. Now, a recent report indicates that increasing high-speed Internet access in the U.S. might be more crucial than previously thought. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. dropped from third to fifth in the World Economic Forum's latest rankings of national information technology systems. Sweden topped the ...

We knew that, under the Obama administration, the FCC would be undertaking a massive overhaul of our nation's broadband policies and systems. We're in desperate need of it, too. Recent studies have shown that most of Europe and Asia have drastically faster connections than the U.S. Even Latvia averages more than twice the download speed of the typical American "broadband" connection. To make ...

Japanese researchers discovered a way to transmit data, at broadband speeds, using the human body back in 2005. Now Korean scientists have improved on that demonstration by performing the same feat with using a set of slightly modified electrodes. Using low-frequency electromagnetic signals, which travel easily and safely across human skin and are free of the interference common to wireless ...

Share Have you ever had a sneaky suspicion that your broadband speed might not be as fast as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) claims? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will help you figure out if the wool has been pulled over your eyes. According to Wired, the FCC's new site Broadband.gov will let users test the speed of their broadband connection for free. The announcement of ...

The FCC won't unveil its long-awaited National Broadband Plan until next week, but it has already hinted at what would be one of its most intriguing items: free wireless access. As Reuters reports, the Commission was pretty mum on details, but did say in a statement that offering a "free or a very low cost wireless broadband service" to specific swaths of the population may significantly boost ...

Share Comcast proudly promotes its broadband services, which, it says, provide the "fastest Internet speeds." TimeWarner's "RoadRunner Turbo with PowerBoost" gives you an "extra burst of speed" while evading coyotes on the information superhighway. But do you know what it really means? Just how fast is "fast?" According to industry analysis from Forrester Research, only 41-percent of ...

Hoping to be selected as test sites for Google's upcoming high-speed fiber network, many cities have launched weird viral campaigns. According to an Associated Press report, Google set the nomination deadline for March 26th, and will announce the winners by the end of the year. Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, told the AP that Google wants ...

In anticipation of a sweeping new plan that aims to provide all Americans with broadband Internet access, the FCC has just released a report (PDF link) detailing Internet usage statistics with some fascinating results. The report reveals that 35-percent of Americans do not use broadband at home. But, only 4-percent of these people lack access to broadband where they live, meaning that 31-percent ...

We've been talking a lot recently about how the U.S. has gradually begun to lag behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to broadband Internet access. Now, a new study from the Commerce Department shows just how dire the situation has become. As the Huffington Post reports, about 40-percent of all Americans do not have high-speed Internet access in their homes. As you'd imagine, the ...