internet access

The worldwide Internet population is growing rapidly -- and that growth might have something to do with mobile devices.

Speaking today at the AllThingsD D11 Conference, Mary Meeker, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Meeker, reported that 2.4 billion people around the world are on the Internet -- an 8 percent year-over-year gain. Still, only 34 percent of the world's population is online. In the U.S., the Internet population penetration sits at 78 percent, according to Meeker.

Perhaps the biggest news from Meeker's presentation was the staggering growth in … Read more

How can the Internet be brought to areas that have no infrastructure for high-speed wireless? Beam the Wi-Fi networks down from flying objects, of course.

Google is reportedly working on creating wireless networks for more remote parts of the world, such as countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, with sky-bound balloons and blimps, according to Wired.

Dubbed "high-altitude platforms," these mechanisms will reportedly be able to connect roughly a billion more people to the Internet worldwide, according to Wired. The blimps signals are said to be able to reach people in areas that are hundreds of square … Read more

A couple of senators in Washington want to make sure people in the U.S. never have to pay taxes for Internet access.

Passed in 1998, the Internet Tax Freedom Act prevents federal, state, and local governments from collecting sales taxes on the use of e-mail and other types of Internet access. The bill is due to expire November of next year.

New legislation introduced yesterday by Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Dean Heller (Nev.) is designed to extend the ban indefinitely. The Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act would stop governments from imposing new taxes on Internet access.… Read more

Google's Eric Schmidt is back from his much-publicized trip to North Korea, and he's got a few details to share about his humanitarian mission.

The search giant's executive chairman had already revealed some of the reasoning behind his trip to reporters during a briefing a week and a half ago at the Beijing airport, saying that his private delegation urged North Korean officials to open up global Internet access if they wanted to strengthen their economy. The delegation was led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the U.N. … Read more

China has begun reinforcing its infamous firewall with new tech designed to prevent encrypted communication.

To prevent the more enterprising citizens of China from exploiting holes in the country's firewall through the use of virtual private networks and circumventors, the Chinese government is using new technology to block encryption, according to The Guardian.

The publication reports that both consumers and businesses are being hit by the new Internet barrier, which is able to "learn, discover and block" encrypted channels provided by VPN companies. According to one company that has a customer base in the Asian country, one … Read more

Not as many people in developing countries have access to the Internet as those in more developed areas of the world, but when they do get on the Web, they are more likely to join a social-networking site, according to a Pew Research Center report released today.

The report -- which looked at the state of social media globally based a survey of 21 nations -- found the majority of Internet users in Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, and India use social media.

"Once people in these countries are online, they generally become involved in social networks … Read more

Google is ready to start laying fiber-optic lines in Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan., for its Google Fiber project to catalyze the shift toward higher-speed Internet access.

Google announced the project two years ago and announced Kansas City as the lucky recipient of the 1-gigabit-per-second Internet access. It turns out it's not easy to deploy that fast a network for hundreds of thousands of people, though, and as Google works its way through the challenge, faster broadband is gradually arriving elsewhere, too.

Kevin Lo, general manager of Google Access, announced today that Google is done surveying and … Read more

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

Cool as she is, the iPhone 4S' new personal assistant Siri hasn't been able to tell me in a meaningful way which iPhone 4S offers the fastest data speeds. In the end, I resorted to the usual do-it-yourself approach: a real-world test. And the results were interesting.

Prior to the testing, I expected some big differences between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S (both GSM versions), since the iPhone 4S supports AT&T's faster HSDPA 14.4 network, which is capable of reaching an upload speed of 14.4Mbps and download speed of 5.8Mbps, theoretically twice the speeds of the iPhone 4.

This wasn't always the case, however, and sometimes it was quite the opposite. But first let's talk about how the testing was done.

How we test It's generally hard to figure out the way to get the best picture of how fast a mobile cellular Internet device's data rate is. The truth is that the speed of a cellular Internet connection varies a great deal from one location to another. It also depends on the server on which the app's data resides and sometimes even on the time of day.

For the testing, I used the Speedtest.net mobile app, which is the most popular app for the purpose. The app automatically connects to a nearby server to download and upload data. How busy the server is during the test affects the scores, but the app still offers a good representation of data speeds in a local area.

I gathered iPhone 4Ses from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, and tested the three smartphones against an iPhone 4 at a few well-known places in San Francisco: CNET's lobby, Union Square, and the Fisherman's Wharf area of Pier 39. I picked the first location for an obvious reason: it's the lobby of the building where I work, which is near the Financial District. The others are two of the most popular spots in the city, with lots of people using their phones. Also, I tested three 4G hot spots from various carriers for a comparison.

Keep in mind that these tests only evaluate data speeds for these phones in San Francisco and are not designed to be representative of data speeds you'll find in your area. However, they at least should show how the data speeds compare between each carrier version of the iPhone 4S, as well as the difference between AT&T's iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4.… Read more