Tag: NATIONAL BROADBAND PLAN

The final details surrounding the Obama administration's auction of wireless spectrum, potentially doubling that available for broadband, were announced by the president at a speech in Michigan on Thursday. The plan could net up to $27.8 billion dollars over the next ten years, with roughly a third of it going to reduce the budget deficit. It's the rest of the plan, though, where the really ...

With hopes of keeping Internet service providers honest (and hopefully improving consumer broadband education), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is asking broadband customers to help test connection speeds. According to the AP, as part of a study, the FCC wants to install routers that measure broadband speeds in the homes of 10,000 volunteers across the country, part of the large-scale ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The FCC is expected to present its national broadband plan to Congress this month, and the program will reportedly cost $25 billion. The FCC is hoping to help finance the proposition by auctioning frequencies, or "underutilized spectrums," to various wireless broadband services. [From: Yahoo! News] Twitter users tweeted more than ...

In good news from the Census Bureau, broadband Internet has spread across the U.S. like wildfire. We may still be paying more for slower speeds, but it appears that access to the Internet, and particularly broadband, is actually increasing at an incredible rate. According to the latest Census Bureau report, as cited in USA Today, 62-percent of Americans have Internet access in the home, up from ...

Hey, what do you know? All those meetings over the proposed National Broadband Plan has amounted to something: a "yeah, we should probably hit this up." Today, the FCC has kicked off an immensely ambitious project to bring "high-speed internet access to every corner of the United States." $7.2 billion of the economic stimulus package has already been allocated for the task, but it'll be ages ...