Comcast is pulling fast ones with customer again, this time by making them subscribe to more service than they need. Users in the Bay Area are being told that they will be forced to migrate from $16.50/mo plans to a new $44.95/mo plan starting in just a few months. This… Continue reading
That's no misprint: as part of the conditions for buying out BellSouth, AT&T is offering up DSL for the price of dial-up. The service weighs in at a featherweight 768K down, 128K up and will be $5/mo more expensive in states not formerly served by BellSouth. AT&T will be chipping… Continue reading
Palo Alto is reconsidering plans to build a FTTH network in its city after stalling for several years. Several years after the initial pilot project to a handful of homes, the council voted to continue negotiations with the winning bidder for the project. It's unclear if the network would be… Continue reading
Australia announced that they're sick and tired of lacking decent broadband and they aren't going to take it anymore. Prime Minister John Howard unveiled a $1.68B US plan to deploy fiber and wireless connections to 99% of Australians with a minimum speed of 12Mbps. The wireless portion, which would serve… Continue reading
A new startup has managed to stir the pot on the 700MHz auction by proposing to build and maintain a national network for both public and commercial interests. Frontline Wireless wants to take the 24MHz of spectrum reserved for police, fire and other emergency use and make it available to… Continue reading
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?),… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading