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
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading