FCC may move to knock down state laws banning muni broadband

FCC head Tom Wheeler says the FCC may move to preempt state laws that make it difficult or impossible for local governments to create competitive broadband networks.

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"U-verse stinks"

"U-verse stinks." That's not me, that's Netflix, according an article from Lightwave. Here's the interesting quote from Netflix:


"The surprising news is that AT&T fiber-based U-verse has lower performance than many DSL ISPs, such as Frontier, CenturyLink & Windstream..."

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Death of TV: Part LXIII: Amazon announces Amazon Fire TV

Amazon announced yesterday their "Fire TV" product, which is a $99 Internet to TV box that follows in the footsteps of Apple TV, Roku boxes, and Google Chromecast. All of these products connect directly to a late model TV and give you easy access to a wide variety of Internet-based content. The Amazon Fire offers Netflix, Hulu, NBA, AOL, Showtime, iHeart radio, Amazon Prime shows and movies, and Pandora, among other offerings. The box also gives you access to Amazon cloud storage for your own pictures and videos.

Apple buys Radio Shack

In a surprise announcement this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the giant computer and phone maker has purchased the Radio Shack Corporation. Radio Shack has attracted a lot of attention recently for the company's clever "The eighties want their store back" ads that attempted to highlight Radio Shack's shift in marketing strategy. But industry analysts have been uncertain that the changes were enough to bring some momentum back to the company.

Fiber or die: The rural challenge

I was in a rural community recently that is already in crisis because of poor broadband service. What they told me is that new hires for businesses in the town simply won't live there. Instead, they are locating their families about an hour and a half away and enduring two to three hours of commuting each day to work.

Comcast wants to buy Time Warner

Comcast and Time Warner have agreed to merge, with Comcast buying Time Warner. Although this merger has to be approved by Federal regulators, the article suggests that since the two companies don't have overlapping territories, it may well be approved.

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How fiber supercharges economic development: Lafayette, Louisiana's success story

Broadband Communities magazine has a story that should be required reading for every community wondering if there is linkage between Gigabit fiber and economic development. Lafayette's municipal Gigabit fiber network has brought Hollywood special effects jobs to the community, more than a hundred, because the high performance Gigabit network lets Pixel Magic move the computer files back and forth between Lafayette and California quickly.

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Health applications are going to be the killer app

In the nineties, as the Internet became more popular, there was a long-running and often tedious discussion of what the "killer app" was going to be that would make everyone get Internet access. I always thought the whole discussion was a waste of time, because it was obvious to me that at that time, email WAS the killer app. People signed up for Internet access because they recognized the value of email for business use, personal use, or both.

Showdown and slowdown in Kansas over muni broadband

An old friend of mine once remarked, "In Texas, we have the best laws money can buy." Apparently, folks in Kansas can make the same statement, as a blatantly anti-muni broadband bill was introduced in the legislature last week. The bill was so stringent that it would have made the Kansas City/Google deal impossible, which is a good example of a public/private partnership that brings a lot of benefit to the residents and businesses of the city.

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Net Neutrality court decision: No telling how this will turn out

A couple of weeks ago, a U.S. Appeals Court told the FCC that their net neutrality rule was invalid. This has caused a huge debate among broadband industry folks about what comes next. The court ruling hinges on the way the FCC categorizes services like TV, phone, and Internet as either a "telecommunications service" or an "information service." To make things even more complicated, the FCC definition of "common carrier" also factors into the rules.

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Blackphone is a response to the NSA data capture

The Blackphone is a smartphone based on the Android OS, but with additional layers of security and encryption, giving Blackphone users secure use of email, messaging, and voice telephony.

It maybe that Snowden's leak of NSA data collection may turn out to have a silver lining, as we may see a market for these kinds of devices develop much faster than anyone would have thought.

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FCC net neutrality rules overturned....the Internet is not going to fill with tollgates

This CNet article is one of the best summaries of the foofaraw over the FCC net neutrality reversal.

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Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion

Google has purchased Nest, a maker of innovative thermostats and smoke detectors. The purchase is apparently for $3.2 billion.....which seems like an awful lot of money for a niche manufacturer of a niche product: "smart" thermostats. One has to wonder what Google has in mind for the technology it has just bought.

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WiFi sensors are tracking where you go

An article in the Wall Street Journal details a new business in Toronto that has placed WiFi sensors in major shopping and nightlife districts of the city. The sensors grab WiFi data from passing smartphones and builds profiles of what people are doing and where they are going.

The Internet is making us anxious

A new study suggests that being "connected" all the time takes a toll on our psyche. An experiment with hundreds of college students suggests that some cellphone users experience high levels of anxiety and lower academic performance because they cannot put the phone down.

Palm Coast FiberNET providing big benefits

MuniNetworks reports on the success of the City of Palm Coast's FiberNET project. The all fiber City-owned network is operated as a multi-service, multi-provider open network, and is delivering substantial savings to both public and private entities and businesses connected to the network. The project is in the black, and FiberNET is expected to pay back all of the initial City investment in less than six years.

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Microsoft moving agressively to encrypt customer data

My hat is off to Microsoft for their extremely aggressive efforts to encrypt customer data. In the wake of the Snowden leaks that revealed NSA collecting data from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and others, Microsoft has correctly recognized the serious impact that data collection could have on the company's bottom line, both in the U.S. and abroad.

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nDanville has a waiting list for fiber connections

nDanville, the first muni multi-service open network in the U.S., has waiting list for fiber connections, and a growing list of new jobs and businesses that are being drawn to the community because of the low cost, high performance fiber infrastructure. Design Nine helped the City plan and design the network, and the investment is beginning to pay off as manufacturers keep moving to the fiber-connected business parks.

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New Hampshire FastRoads adding customers

FastRoads is a Gigabit network designed and built by Design Nine for New Hampshire FastRoads LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Monadnock Economic Development Corporation. One of the surprises, as we add more customers, is the unexpected demand for the 50 Meg Internet service, which is turning out to be higher than expected.

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The empire strikes back

The big players on the Internet--Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others--are making changes in the way they push their data and services around the Internet. Stung by revelations that the NSA has been vacuuming up their customer data, these firms are adding new encryption to their data streams between data centers and between their data centers and customers. As they should.

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