broadband

Internet now active with 2.1 billion users

You're one of the 2.1 billion people actively using the Internet.

Looking at the state of the online world throughout 2011, traffic site Pingdom found that the number of Internet users has jumped from a mere 360 million at the end of 2000 and now accounts for 30 percent of the planet's population.

Sweeping across the continents, Asia holds 922 million Internet users, Europe has 476 million, and North America is in third place with 271 million. Drilling down to individual countries, China is on top with 485 million people using the Internet, more than 36 percent … Read more

Dish aims high with new Hopper DVR, high-speed satellite broadband service

LAS VEGAS--More music, more magic, more memory, more movies.

That's the marketing message Dish is serving up here at CES, introducing a new kangaroo-themed, whole-home HD DVR system called the Hopper that includes a 2TB drive and can record up to six programs simultaneously while pushing content out to accompanying "Joey" boxes in up to three additional rooms.

The company has also announced a new high-speed Broadband service with partner ViaSat that will launch in the "first quarter." It's called Dish Broadband and it will allegedly provide up to 12 Mbps download and up … Read more

Vint Cerf: Internet access isn't a human right

Although some countries around the world argue that Internet access is a fundamental right, one of the "fathers of the Internet," Vint Cerf, doesn't see it that way.

"Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself," Cerf, who is also a Google's chief Internet evangelist, wrote yesterday in an editorial in The New York Times. "There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture … Read more

2011 ends with almost 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions

The number of mobile phone subscriptions has reached 5.9 billion, an impressive figure in a world of 7 billion people.

Surveying the mobile and online landscape in 2011 for a year-end report (PDF), the International Telecommunications Union found that mobile phone subscriptions have now penetrated 87 percent of the entire world and 79 percent of all developing countries.

Among all those mobile phone users, mobile broadband subscriptions number almost 1.2 billion. Such subscriptions have jumped 45 percent each year for the past four year and now outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions by 2 to 1.

To push forward with … Read more

Get a Virgin Mobile Prepaid 3G Modem for $59.88

Looking for cheap 3G service for your laptop? It doesn't get much cheaper than this: Walmart has the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go Ovation MC760 for $59.88 shipped (plus sales tax).

As recently as a year ago, this USB modem sold for $149.99.

What I like, and have always liked, about Virgin's 3G options is the lack of contracts and monthly minimums. You pay for airtime as you need it.

That's a huge plus over modems from the likes of Sprint and Verizon, which typically lock you into two-year contracts. (As it happens, Virgin Mobile is actually … Read more

Comcast, Time Warner preparing to bid farewell to Clearwire

Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable will stop reselling Clearwire's 4G wireless service following their agreement to hand off their unused mobile spectrum to Verizon Wireless for $3.6 billion, CNET has learned.

Part of the Verizon deal gives the cable companies the right to resell Verizon's wireless service, which will become the cable providers' exclusive partner once the spectrum aspect of the agreement goes through, said Time Warner Cable spokesman Alexander Dudley.

Both companies will slowly wind down their Clearwire business over the next six months, and plan to move their existing customers to other options. … Read more

The 404 940: Where we go down on Siri (podcast)

Don't forget to update your Facebook status update for the last time before Anonymous nukes the whole site tomorrow. Remember, remember the fifth of November. Leaked from today's 404 Podcast episode: Siri goes down, Google does a barrel roll, Kevin Rose goes Oink, and who are the 35 million people still using AOL dial-up?… Read more

AT&T backs another panicky report on data capacity

Americans are racing to move the business (and play) of our daily lives on to wireless networks so quickly that the networks may not be able to keep up much longer. At least that's what one new industry-backed report threatens warns.

The new report is out today from the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California at San Diego. The paper and its author, UCSD fellow and infrastructure expert Michael Kleeman, lay out some dizzying figures on the growing stresses placed on mobile networks--including those below and in the box to the right.

To keep up with demand, U.S. wireless networks have traditionally doubled their capacity every 30 months, but this trend may not keep up with future demand... the volume of data traffic on U.S. networks is expected to increase by 1,800 percent over the next four years.

The report says the inevitable result of demand outstripping capacity so dramatically will be painful network congestion.

"We must understand and accept the trade-offs we will face for the convenience of accessing limited wireless capacity," report author Kleeman says in a statement. "Alternatively, as citizens we need to dramatically lower our expectations for wireless services in the future."… Read more

FCC defends regulations targeting broadband providers

WASHINGTON, DC--A Federal Communications Commission official defended his agency's controversial proposal to require broadband providers to report glitches, arguing that it would help with cybersecurity and network reliability.

"We don't get any data at all on some of the most pressing problems," Jeffery Goldthorp, the FCC's associate bureau chief for cybersecurity and homeland security, said yesterday at the Online Trust Alliance's conference here yesterday.

In May, the FCC announced that it wanted more data from broadband providers, saying it "would enable the FCC to track and analyze information on outages affecting 911 service … Read more

Mobile phone data usage ripe for Wi-Fi offload

LA DEFENSE, France--"Mobile devices"? Smartphones and tablets might better be called just wireless devices, because people use them while out and about comparatively rarely.

So said Olivier Baujard, Deutsche Telekom's chief technology officer, speaking here at the Broadband World Forum. He based his conclusion on data from the Netherlands, where 45 percent of traffic is from home, 45 percent is from work, and only 10 percent is while "walking, driving a car, taking a bus, or things like that."

"It's more a wireless experience than a true mobile experience," Baujard said. &… Read more