Submitted by admin on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 10:53
Smaller communities in rural areas are always trying to attract workers and families. Tulsa, Oklahoma decided to try paying them to move, and it is apparently working. The City offers $10,000 in cash for "entrepreneurs, remote workers, and digital nomads." It's an idea so crazy it works! The funds can be used to offset moving expenses and monthly expenses during the first year of residency.
Submitted by admin on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 09:28
Community news and projects:
Submitted by admin on Wed, 08/26/2020 - 10:06
According to an article in
Wired magazine, it is becoming commonplace for law enforcement to "wiretap" your smart speaker by asking Amazon or Google for transcripts and timestamps of recorded activity. Police have to file a search warrant or subpoena to do so, but users of such devices may not be aware that what the tech companies are recording and storing could be used by law enforcement.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/23/2020 - 15:00
The corona virus and the need for so many to work from home has highlighted what I have been telling communities for nearly two decades: neighborhoods and rural roads are business districts.
It is too soon to tell what will happen once most businesses are open again and people return to work, but "return to work" may have an entirely different meaning as businesses realize employees can work productively from home at least part of the time.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/23/2020 - 14:49
A lot of people who used videoconferencing only lightly or never at all have acquired a crash course in it over the past month. Because Design Nine and WideOpen Networks have had staff distributed around the country for years, it was not a challenge for us.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/31/2020 - 11:48
OneWeb just filed for bankruptcy. The company planned to put hundreds of Internet satellites into low earth orbit (LEO) to provide high speed Internet service. OneWeb promised Internet speeds of several hundred Megabits, but only managed to get seventy satellites into orbit out of a planned six hundred by the end of 2020. All 500 employees are expected to be laid off within weeks.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/30/2020 - 10:59
I have been writing for years (decades, at this point) about how important symmetric bandwidth is to the business from home, work from home segment of the economy. It would appear that the lockdown we are currently experiencing and the huge surge in work from home needs has been illustrating just how important symmetric bandwidth is. Related to symmetric bandwidth is Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology, which provides end to end encryption of an Internet connection between two points (e.g. a home based worker and their corporate network).
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/23/2020 - 16:26
With the huge increase in people working from home, bandwidth has become an issue. There are numerous stories about Netflix and other streaming services degrading picture quality to ease the burden on networks. But it is not really a problem that Netflix is having. Netflix is reducing bandwidth to help local cable, DSL, and wireless networks cope. Netflix long ago pushed most of their content to locations directly connected to local networks--the problem is getting from the Netflix server already attached to a Comcast or Spectrum or Verizon network to the local customers.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/17/2020 - 11:28
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/16/2020 - 15:28
The news is filling up with stories about office workers trying to work from home. The most interesting thing I have seen is a report from the Utopia network out in the Salt Lake City area, which said that they have had a 20% increase in requests for fiber service in the last week.
No one is going to call for a new network connection in the middle of a crisis like this one unless their current network connection is not meeting their needs.
Submitted by admin on Tue, 02/18/2020 - 13:45
Submitted by admin on Tue, 02/18/2020 - 11:27
Hard to believe this story: a rental car provided by an app-based car sharing service called GIG Car Share stopped working when the car was driven into a rural part of northern California.
Community news and projects:
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/02/2020 - 10:32
Smartphone zombies are such a hazard to themselves and others that in Warsaw, Poland the city is installing "sidewalk traffic lights," which project large red or green swatches of light onto the pavement at street crossings. The smartphone zombies have their heads down and don't look up before crossing the street.
We may not have reached maximum stupidity, but we seem to be getting closer, as it appears we have people more interested in their smartphone than actually staying alive.
Community news and projects:
Apple TV+, according to MacRumors, has the highest quality streaming service available, with the average streaming speed (bandwidth required) reaching 29 Megabits/second. So if you have two people in a household watching two Apple TV+ programs on two different devices, you need somewhere north of 60 Meg of bandwidth.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/05/2019 - 10:07
Microsoft is developing a new glass-based storage technology that can hold many gigs of data on a small glass plate. We need something like this because all of the magnetic-based storage (e.g. hard drives) and DVD/CD disks eventually degrade and fail.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 10:37
Are Technica reports that AT&T is hiking prices for its TV service--formerly DirecTV--as much as 50%, depending on what package a customer has. The company has lost about 10% of its customer base for TV services in the past year, which reflects the continued growth in "cord cutting" of cable and satellite TV service.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/09/2019 - 13:45
I am a long time user of Apple computers, dating back to my first hand-on experience with the Apple Lisa in 1982. Ever since Steve Jobs died, it has been evident that software quality has not been a priority with the company.
Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/24/2019 - 10:22
As hard as some of the incumbents work to convince local elected officials that muni networks are a bad idea, more and more success stories are emerging over time.
Broadband Communities magazine has a great story about Fairlawn, Ohio's Gig fiber network.
Community news and projects:
Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/24/2019 - 10:22
As hard as some of the incumbents work to convince local elected officials that muni networks are a bad idea, more and more success stories are emerging over time.
Broadband Communities magazine has a great story about Fairlawn, Ohio's Gig fiber network.
Community news and projects:
Submitted by admin on Thu, 09/19/2019 - 11:01
The Roanoke Times has an excellent article about Danville, Virginia and its success in transforming the community from a traditional Southern mill town to an Information Economy powerhouse.
Community news and projects:
Pages