Archive for June, 2007
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
Sprint Re-Thinking WiMax While DirecTV and EchoSTAR Jump Right In
It's a bad time to be Sprint. The wireless carrier has been taking a beating on the stock market over the indigestion caused from swallowing Nextel, possibly threatening its deployment of WiMax networks. Despite predictions calling for WiMax to be more popular than WiFi by 2010 (are you listening, Philadelphia?), Sprint max consider partnering more [...]
No Comments » - Posted in News by Jesse
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
Inexpensive Options Could Bring More Wireless Players
Look for your cable operator to think about getting into the WiFi market. A company called Tollgrade Communications is hawking a wireless access point that taps directly into the cable operator's fiber backbone, allowing them to turn each of their neighborhood nodes into a wireless transmitter. This could allow cable operators to offer wireless roaming [...]
No Comments » - Posted in News by Jesse
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
Comcast Promises 800 Channels of HDTV They Can’t Deliver
In a marketing ploy best suited to a used car salesman, Comcast announced they would be offering over 800 channels of HD content by 2009. Of course, it's very easy to get that many channels when you count pay-per-view channels in an endless loop as a single channel. It also ignored Comcast's immense bandwidth constraints. [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
US Plummets to 24th in Worldwide Broadband Penetration
In another sure sign of our national infrastructure being poorly handled and neglected by the incumbents and their failed promises of '96, the US is now ranked 24th in terms of broadband availability, surpassed by pretty much every nation in Western Europe as well as South Korea, Japan, Macau and Hong Kong. If current trends [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
No Love for Small Towns Seeking Broadband
There's about 2,000 towns with fewer than 60,000 residents that can't find companies to build city-wide WiFi networks. Despite many of them having issued RPFs, top-tier providers are set on chasing the big contracts in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia rather than Smallville, Kansas. Most of the cities are seeking these networks because existing cable and [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Verizon Accused of Ignoring Copper Infrastructure to Focus on FIOS
Some of Verizon's union workers are accusing the telco giant of letting its older copper lines rot while it builds fiber optics elsewhere. The accusers have alleged that training and repair equipment have been almost exclusively focused in areas where FIOS is being built out. Based on Verizon's history in Virginia, where the complaints emanate [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Is “A la carte” Cable Coming Soon?
A new bill in the House, introduced as a way to force the offering of "family-friendly" content, also includes provisions for being able to cancel one channel at a time to save the cost of distribution. The bill would require such a new tier of content to not show any TV-MA or TV-14 content between [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Legislation, News by Jesse
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Net Neutrality Still Under Assault
In a move that surprised pretty much nobody, AT&T's CEO, Ed Whitacre, took a few more potshots at Net Neutrality in a speech that used alarming candor. Referring to getting anti-neutrality legislation passed, he said it's not 'cashing in', it's 'deregulation'. It seems that his replacement is taking a similar tack, wanting to double-dip content [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Monday, June 11th, 2007
White City Community Council Meeting - June 6, 2007
The day before the meeting, I got a call from the chair of the Council to offer the spot on the agenda I had been speaking. It was pretty short notice, but I was glad to have some real time to speak to them about bringing UTOPIA to the neighborhood. I quickly put together a [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events by Jesse
Monday, June 11th, 2007
Salt Lake City Lacks Broadband Vision
Salt Lake City is home to major fiber optic cables, a renowned university… and a city government that has no idea what to do to get better broadband. Three years after rejecting UTOPIA membership, candidates to succeed Rocky Anderson as mayor can't say what exactly they'll do about increasing speeds or lowering prices. It seems [...]
