comcast

Comcast and Time Warner Cable are looking to help bankroll a new joint venture between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to deliver 4G wireless services, according to a report in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal.

According to unnamed sources, the companies are discussing a plan to provide funding for a new wireless company that would be operated by Sprint Nextel and Clearwire. The new company would use network spectrum and assets from both companies to form a nationwide wireless network using WiMax.

Last summer, Sprint and Clearwire announced they'd be working together to build a nationwide network. In November, they … Read more

I think we're going to have to call WiMax dead. After all, the CEO of a WiMax network said it's a "disaster." Ouch. In other news, Sony decided it's not cool to charge $50 to get rid of something you never wanted to begin with, Comcast maybe does and maybe doesn't want to put a camera in your set-top box, and Tom's gonna win himself an X Prize. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Breaking: Sony won't charge $50 to remove Bloatware http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/sony-pay-an-ext.html … Read more

q&a BitTorrent's CEO wants to make peace with cable operator Comcast.

The two companies have been at opposite ends of a raging debate over how network operators should manage their networks. Last year, Comcast admitted that it had been "throttling" or slowing down Internet traffic using a peer-to-peer protocol originally created by BitTorrent's founder Bram Cohen. The cable operator argued it had targeted the protocol because the peer-to-peer traffic was overwhelming its network resources.

The situation has ignited a firestorm of protest from broadband subscribers and Net neutrality supporters who say that Comcast has … Read more

With discontent still festering over Comcast's admitted slowing of file-sharing uploads, the cable industry's chief on Thursday set out to do a little damage control.

Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said he's "amused" that in all the coverage of the Comcast-BitTorrent spat, no one's talking about the cable industry's role in getting high-speed Internet service to millions of American households and, by extension, enabling online applications and services to take off.

"One of the ironies is that most of these applications depended on cable's rollout of … Read more

This post was updated at 9:08 a.m. PDT to add some remarks about the hearing from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Those zany regulators at the Federal Communications Commission sure like to keep us guessing.

A few weeks ago, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told reporters that he wasn't planning a follow-up hearing at Stanford University on "network management" issues raised in large part by Comcast's slowing of BitTorrent file-sharing traffic.

Sure, rumors on the blogosphere had suggested otherwise, but Martin brushed them aside, saying they may have started because he was planning to speak to an Internet law confab at its law school. (… Read more

Web creator rejects net tracking http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7299875.stm

BT confesses lies over secret Phorm experiments http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/17/bt_phorm_lies/

Yahoo Buzz is a game-changer for social media http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ yahoo_buzz_is_a_game_changer.php

Google says Microsoft’s Yahoo buy might hurt Internet http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/ idUSPEK15292020080317

Flickr Video beta due in April http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9895044-80.html

Firefox 3 goes on a diet, eats less memory than IE and Opera http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html

LimeWire digital music … Read more

NEW YORK CITY--You've heard about the controversy over Comcast throttling back BitTorrent traffic on its network. But did you know that before the news exploded in the media, Comcast's chief technology officer was actually advising and working with BitTorrent?

That's what BitTorrent's CEO Doug Walker told me Friday when we sat down for a one-on-one interview at the Distributed Computing Industry Association's P2P Market Conference here.

According to Walker, Tony Werner, Comcast's CTO, was acting as an advisor to BitTorrent before the hoopla over traffic shaping even came to light.

"The funny thing … Read more

In the long and arduous battle between P2P file sharing services and ISPs, the former have done all they can to stay on top, while the latter have done all they can to eliminate them as quickly as possible. And just when I started losing hope, Verizon, for once, made me feel just a little bit better about ISPs. Will it last? I doubt it.

According to Verizon, it will do everything in its power to ensure that P2P downloading is brought into the new century and given the kind of treatment it has deserved for years. The company researched P2P file sharing and found that when an ISP cooperates with an P2P file sharer, they can speed downloads by a whopping 60 percent.

"This test signifies a turning point in the history of peer-to-peer technology and ISPs," said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. "It will definitely show ISPs that the problem is not peer-to-peer technology, the problem is how you deploy it. It is possible to deploy P2P to their advantage."

But perhaps what's most important to this test is that Verizon is pledging availability of some of its infrastructure information to P2P file sharing services to increase the efficiency of both services.… Read more

A real-world Internet test reveals that "intelligent" routing of peer-to-peer traffic can drastically reduce network utilization and speed up downloads for subscribers, according to a new study.

Verizon Communications, which participated in the study headed by researchers at Yale University, plans to release the data on Friday at the Distributed Computing Industry Association's P2P Market Conference in New York City.

Using network topology data from Verizon and Telefonica, Yale University tested a software enhancement to the peer-to-peer protocol that it developed with software developer Pando Networks.

What the researchers discovered was that when using the so-called P4P … Read more