broadband posts

As the last few vestiges of sanity left the rocky outcrops of Mayor Bill Bunten's brain, he decreed: "Let our fair city (formerly known as Topeka) henceforth be known by the mad moniker GOOGLE, KANSAS!!"

Just kidding; he didn't say that exactly (probably). But Topeka is going to be called Google, for the entire month of March. Why? you ask -- or cry, or wail -- well, it's obvious if you think about it: Google's Fiber for Communities. We covered it last month, but never did we expect to see whole damn cities courting corporate masters. I mean, we all know that deals are made behind closed doors, but... 'Welcome to Google, Kansas'... really?

I am now eagerly awaiting Microsoft, Mass., in some run-down district that can't afford word processing software in its schools -- or perhaps Photoshop, replacing Podunk in Michigan... it's only a matter of time. Damn sell-outs.

[via NY Times]

As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

The economy isn't doing so hot these days, so you'd think that the additional cost of a high-speed connection would be the deciding factor for these folks, but it turns out that only a third of them cited cost as their reason for sticking with dial-up. 19% gave the mystifying answer that nothing -- not even a huge decrease in the cost -- would make them give up their dial-up. The study posited that they just don't spend enough time online to need it.

[via Slashdot]

Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what "excessive usage" really means?

Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn't alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won't tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.

Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, "excessive" in Comcast's terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Although Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.

We spoke to Dave earlier today (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he had to say:

"I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy."

Cheap commodity PCs aren't so much news as the are ubiqouitous. However, news that Wal-Mart is set to offer a cheap Windows PC with OpenOffice pre-installed could strike fear into the hearts of the Microsoft OFfice development team, already losing market share in minor ways to the open source competitor.

Ars Technica reports that Wal-Mart will soon offer a $298 PC built by Everex which will come pre-loaded with the Open Office productivity suite, something geeks have been log recommending as an alternative to Microsoft's overpriced and bloated MS Office.

Anything that puts quality open source software in the hands of the great unwashed has to be a good thing, right?

It's often argued that the U.S. is lagging behind in broadband adoption compared to other first-world countries around the globe. With broadband becoming an important tool for work, play and communication, that's a statement that could bode bad times ahead for a country which has always taken somewhat of a lead in technology; If it's true.

A new study which looks at the numbers in a different way, weighing in price, average income, education levels and population density tells a slightly different story. According to CNet, The Phoenix Institute claims, "we find that the United States generally meets expectations in its conversion of its national endowments into broadband subscriptions"

Comforting news or creative accounting?

If you happened to be in the offices of Vonage, Packet8, SunRocket, or any other VoIP provider today, you most likely were witness to some high-fives and knuckle-taps by their top executives. The reason for that is that the FCC has ruled/declared/said that VoIP providers should be treated the same as your friendly neighborhood telecom which, according to one FCC honcho, means that VoIP-ers will be able to get access to the local phone company's lines, especially those designated for long distance.

What does this all mean? Really not a whole lot at this point, but the fact that the FCC says that VoIP providers should be treated the same as other telecoms may induce more consumers to jump ship from their local phone provider and go VoIP. Chairman Kevin Martin says this will increase competition when it comes to the phone service market. However, we'll have to see a greater increase in consumers opting for broadband internet access before this decision will have some real impact to it.

Apparently Verizon didn't realize when they got into the broadband Internet business that they were getting into, well, the broadband Internet business. TechWeb is reporting that Verizon, which charges its customers $38 per month, thinks that companies like Google and Microsoft whose apps use up that bandwidth should chip in, too. The Verizon rep quoted in the article says that content providers like Google and Microsoft ultimately need broadband networks to reach customers, but is apparently blind to the fact that without content providers like Google and Microsoft, there would be no demand for that bandwidth in the first place. Head over to TechWeb for the full, and much more neutral, article.