Call me inverse Marty McFly, for today I'm writing from the faraway world of the 1980s.
Or at least that's the the era that comes to mind in my home base of Taos, N.M., since about 7:30 Wednesday evening, when one of CenturyLink's fiber-optic lines east of town was severed, knocking out virtually all cell phone service and much of the Internet access in town.… Read more
The cable industry insists that it's ready and able to compete with Google Fiber when it comes to delivering ultra high-speed broadband.
Indeed, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts last week showed off a 3Gbps cable broadband connection at the industry's annual trade show in Washington, D.C. That's three times faster than Google Fiber, which itself is nearly 150 times faster than the current average broadband connection in the U.S. Armed with that capability, he confidently welcomed Google's challenge to deliver ultra high-speed broadband to consumers.
"I hope there's a demand for (Google Fiber),&… Read more
One of the most closed-off countries in the world has finally started to roll out Internet for its citizens. The Cuban government has officially opened 118 public Internet centers across the country, according to the Associated Press.
Up until now, computers with Internet access were sparse on the island. Besides a few universities and employers offering access, some of the only places to get online were tourist hotels that charged up to $8 an hour for erratic Wi-Fi, according to the Associated Press.
The Cuban government estimates that only 2.9 percent of the country's citizens get online, according … Read more
AT&T has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people responsible for vandalizing its network in the heart of Silicon Valley.
In what appears to be coordinated acts of vandalism, fiber-optic cables near San Jose, Calif., were cut in two locations early Tuesday morning before shots were fired at electric transformers at a nearby PG&E substation. Damage to the underground cables, which are accessible by manhole covers, prevented residents of the city of Gilroy to the south from using landlines to make 911 calls for emergency service.
The … Read more
After years in the making, Google announced today that it has started connecting people in Kansas City, Kan., to its ultra high-speed fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Acting as guinea pigs of sorts, these locals will be the first people in the world who get to test out Google's new service and decide whether it lives up to the hype.
When Google first announced its nationwide Google Fiber project in 2010, around 1,100 U.S. towns and cities applied to get in on the deal. When Kansas City won out, Google Access General Manager Kevin Lo said, "new high-speed … Read more
Apparently Google has put some thought into this idea of bringing super-fast fiber-optic broadband to Kansas City.
The company has applied for a patent for "general edging systems and methods," which the application bills as "a low-impact, convenient, time-efficient and cost-saving optical fiber deployment technology."
The application describes a flat, perhaps bendable strip of "edging" that carries fiber-optic lines or coaxial cables tucked within. The edging could be slipped into a shallow slot, perhaps along a fence or driveway or dug into a lawn, or it could be camouflaged to fit into the garden … Read more
Google announced earlier this month that it was gearing up to start laying fiber-optic lines in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., to deliver very high-speed Internet access to residents. Now, the Web giant is setting it sights on Iowa, according to Data Center Knowledge.
"We are building a very small earth station project that is right next to our data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa," says Google spokesperson Jenna Wandres.
If all goes according to Google's plans, the antennas would receive feeds from broadcast networks and even be bundled with the high-speed fiber service, according … Read more
Researchers have used a single laser to transmit data at 26 terabits per second over an optical fiber cable, a data-transmission breakthrough that promises to come in useful for cloud computing and 3D TV transmissions.
The transmission is biggest volume of data ever carried by a laser beam, according to the group of scientists, led by Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. With the demonstration, which sent the equivalent of 200,000 high-resolution images across 50 kilometers in one second, the researchers said they had broken their own record of 10Tbps, set in 2010.
"To the best of our … Read more
There's some rough news for Topeka, Kan., the city that courted Google's ultra-high-speed municipal broadband project by changing its name to Google. The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant announced Wednesday that the lucky city that gets to be its broadband guinea pig not only isn't Topeka, but it's Kansas City, Kansas--just an hour's drive away. Ouch.
More than 1,100 communities had applied since the call for applicants was announced about a year ago. Kansas City will first see the new developments next year, and Google is already looking for additional communities to join the … Read more
Australia's dead-heat election over the weekend has left both the Labor and Coalition parties scrambling to try to form a government. Meanwhile, the National Broadband Network Co. suggests it may stop the early-stage roll-out of a fiber optic network across the country until it knows who will be heading the next government.
Labor backs the fiber-optic plan, while the Coalition party has pledged to ax the government-owned National Broadband Network and instead pursue a more austere network investment plan based on rolling out competitive backhaul, fixing ADSL2+ blackspots, and connecting underserved areas with wireless broadband.
Read more of "… Read more
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