speed

If a FlowRider Surf Machine is making an appearance at a car festival, Peugeot steps up to the plate. At this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K. (from July 11-14), the car manufacturer will debut the GTi Surfboard concept, based on its recent performance cars -- the 208 GTi, in particular, as well as the RCZ R and the Onyx concept vehicle.

Carved into a coupe franche ("clean cut") shape, the GTi board shows two distinct parts: the nose of the surfboard in wood, the original material for the craft before fiberglass and polyurethane came along. This wooden nose, Peugeot said, represents "emotion," and is carved with the Peugeot GTi logo. … Read more

While setting up gigabit infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive for many local communities, it appears that the cost users will have to pay for Gigabit Squared's high-speed Internet in Seattle won't be off the charts.

Gigabit Squared announced the pricing for its local fiber network in the Seattle area on Monday -- and, the monthly cost is actually cheaper than what people pay for Comcast broadband.

The fastest level of service from Gigabit Squared will cost $80 per month, which includes 1000 Mbps download and 1000 Mbps upload. The next level is $45 per month with 100 Mbps … Read more

AT&T has been crowned the leading mobile network provider in a new study from PC Magazine.

The news outlet on Monday posted the results of its mobile network research to determine which company -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon -- had the fastest speeds in the United States. PC Magazine, which analyzed results across 30 cities, found that AT&T had the top 4G LTE network with average download speeds of 16.7 megabits per second and average upload speeds exceeding 7.4 megabits per second.

Although Verizon and AT&T are considered the … Read more

In 2011, Loris Elementary School in Loris, S.C., was ranked 41st in the state among grammar schools with similar demographics. By 2012, it had risen to 19th.

What happened? According to the White House: technology.

Many of the students at Loris Elementary School are from low-income families that don't have the means to give their children all of today's high-tech devices, according to the Obama administration. That's why in 2012 the school decided to introduce a technology blended learning program complete with laptops, software, and Internet access. It's apparently made a difference.

President Barack Obama … Read more

Editor's note: See update at the bottom of this post.

A developer who provides iPhone hacks claims to have discovered code in iOS that suggests Apple is helping the top three U.S. wireless carriers throttle data speeds for all iPhone and iPad customers.

Joseph Brown, operator of the Web site iTweakiOS, claimed -- in a post that has since been taken down -- to have discovered code on iPhones and iPads operating on Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint that effectively caps the data speeds that can be achieved on the carriers' networks. Brown took snapshots of the … Read more

At the moment, sending data via fiber means blasting a light signal down the line. The farther you want the data to travel, the more power you need to put into the light beam. However, higher-power data signals can actually interact with the material of the fiber line, getting noise degradation into the signal.

The researchers, working out of Bell Laboratories and led by Xiang Liu, tried a technique similar to the way noise-cancelling headphones work to improve the data signal quality across longer distances.

Instead of one light beam, two beams that are mirror images of each other are sent through the fiber. Each beam will gather noise per usual, but that distortion will also be mirrored, so when the two beams are recombined at their destination, the noise is cancelled out. … 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

Most people probably associate Ethernet with a simple cable cinched with phone-like jacks. But, Ethernet is so much more.

It is the foundation for global Internet access and undoubtedly the world's most-used connectivity technology. In the annals of "techdom," Ethernet is a very big deal.

"Ethernet ranks highly among those technologies that impact day-to-day life on a global basis," IEEE Standards Association writes on its Web site. "Data center networks, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and now the smart grid, smart meters, personal medical devices, the Internet of Things, connected cars, and more -- Ethernet … Read more

Already known for its speed, Google just boosted Chrome's Web site rendering speed by another 5 percent.

The latest stable release of the browser, Chrome 27 (download for Windows, Mac, or Linux), received the small improvement by managing its resources better. To boil down the jargon, the browser's internal resource scheduler now favors more critical resources over preloaded sites.

Chrome engineer James Simonsen wrote in the company's blog announcing the update Tuesday that, across the hundreds of millions of people using Chrome, the amount of time saved equals around 510 years per week. But what we're … Read more