Tag: SPEED

If it takes hours to download files on your Wi-Fi network, you might want to try clearing out some of your furniture and turning off your radios. According to a new study from Bristol University in the U.K., wireless connections can be "significantly slowed" by interference from electronic devices, or by physical barriers, like walls, doors, and other household items. The study, led by Prof. ...

We knew the Chinese were serious about doing this whole high-speed railway thing, but we had no idea they were this serious. As Engadget reports, researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University are currently putting together a prototype maglev train that can average a speed of 500 to 600 kilometers-per-hour (310 to 372 mph), as well as a second, smaller train that will reportedly top out at a ...

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 ...

Internet connection speeds are the modern day weather; conversations about upload speeds are just as common as comments about last night's thunderstorm. USA Today writes that a new report from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) reveals that broadband speeds are significantly faster in some areas than in others. The average download speed for the U.S., reports CWA, is 5.2 megabits per ...

It may surprise you that beneath our gentle, gadget-loving exterior, there lies a closeted obsession with speed. Sure, we tend to talk about Twitter and have been known to spend hours debating the best instant-messaging client -- or the best sci-fi villain (it's so obviously IG-88) -- but we turn our heads just like the next person when a Ferrari F430 rolls by. In honor of our innate love of ...

Lots of folks have hobbies. For example, take Bob Maddox -- an artist and cabinetmaker from Oregon. Maddox likes to build stuff. Not that unusual of a hobby, right? But combine that with his love of pulse jet engines, and, well, you can see where this is going. Maddox recently reached speeds of 73 mph on a bicycle powered by dual pulse jet engines, according to Wired.com. His high-speed ...

When Paul Boutin of the New York Times' Gadget Wise blog wanted to convert his aging Toshiba laptop into a blazing-fast, blogging powerhouse, he took some unconventional steps in the name of performance. For starters, one of his five controversial ways to speed up your PC is uninstalling your antivirus software, which is definitely a bad idea. While we're on board with some of Boutin's other ...

Face it, kids. You missed the best time to be a teenager by around five or so years. As it stands now, technology is cutting into that adolescent fun, with device like Ford's MyKey and this one here ensuring that you're actually safe behind the wheel. In all seriousness, the terribly named Key2SafeDriving is a fine concept (at least in the parent's eye), as it fuses a cellphone jammer (of sorts) ...

Speed bumps are supposed to punish the speeders and minimally offend those abiding by the legal limits. But, as all drivers know, crossing the things sucks at any speed and, regardless of how brightly painted they are, they're easy to miss until you're finding out the hard way just what kind of suspension travel your ride offers. A smarter bump from designers Jae-yun Kim and Jong-Su Lee could be ...

Research conducted by Handheld Games Corp. shows that the second-generation iPod touch is considerably faster than its predecessor, and both generations of the iPhone, so say write-ups in TouchArcade and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Thomas Fessler, the CEO of Handheld Games, creators of the game TouchSports Tennis, explained to TouchArcade: "Where we can easily display two 1500 polygon tennis ...

Every so often, we get wind of some new "breakthrough" from a few guys / gals in a lab that promises to simply revolutionize the Web. A team from the University of Sydney is the latest bunch to do so, claiming that a piece of scratched glass (or a Photonic Integrated Circuit, if we're being proper) could enable Internet speeds 60 times faster than "current Australian networks." Essentially, the ...

Verizon's FiOS service has already been putting the heat on cable providers in the ISP realm, offering blisteringly fast downloads and impressive upload speeds at prices comparable to most cable providers. Depending on where you live, you can nab a connection at speeds up to 50 megabits downstream and 5 megabits up. Many cable providers have begun to catch up with Verizon in the quest for the ...