WWWorld.ru · Темы дня · Разделы дня · Интересы дня · 2012 · Свежие новости

In its latest snapshot of the broadband market, Federal Communications Commission finds that less than half of households have sufficient connection speeds. »

The software company is hustling to deliver an update that resolves a potentially disastrous security hole in its popular Reader and Acrobat apps. »

PC Magazine - Touting the fastest mass-market offering in the U.S., Verizon FiOS has launched a broadband product with speeds of 150-megabits-per-second (Mbps) downstream and 35 Mbps upstream. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

Appolicious - When it comes to net neutrality, there are already two kinds of Internet: wired and wireless. The wired Internet is the kind that runs through cables and into computers, and is generally seen by the Federal Communications Commission as something that needs protection from Internet service providers. If telecom companies had their way, they’d be allowed to “throttle” the Internet -- so if you wanted to stream Netflix (NFLX) movies, for example, because they take much more bandwidth, ISPs would love to be able to charge you more for the privilege. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

PC Magazine - Wired broadband is nearly 30 percent faster than wireless broadband within the same household, an Internet research company has found. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

For home users looking to enjoy the delights of a cord-free life, Wi-Fi is an obvious choice, but new research from Epitiro suggests that that convenience often means slower performance. »

PC World - A widely used open source library for simplifying Javascript-based Web application development has just gotten a performance jolt. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

AFP - Google on Tuesday ramped up Internet search speeds by letting people use speech or images to express what they want faster.
Yahoo! News: Internet News »

Samsung and Verizon Wireless will begin selling the first Long Term Evolution 4G tablet on Thursday. The Galaxy Tab, first introduced in November, is now equipped for 4G download speeds of five to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of two to five Mbps in 4G broadband areas. Verizon also announced an LTE netbook, Hewlett-Packard Pavilion's dm1-3010nr Entertainment PC, will go on sale the same day. First LTE Tablet on Market Powered by Android 3.1, Honeycomb, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is 8.6 millimeters thick, weighs 1.25 pounds, and will be available in metallic gray or glossy white at Verizon Wireless stores and online. It uses Adobe Flash 10.3, sports a Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core one-gigahertz application processor, a 10.1-inch HD touchscreen display with WXGA 1280x800 resolution, and a three-megapixel rear-facing camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat. The Tab 10.1 beats the market leader, Apple's iPad, to the 4G party. That may give the tablet an advantage since faster speeds enhance experiences such as downloading and watching movies. But it won't cut significantly into iPad sales, said consumer devices analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. "The vast majority of iPads sold do not have cellular connectivity, and it is unlikely that a competitor with faster cellular connectivity will change that dynamic much," said Greengart. "It is also important to note that Verizon Wireless is not selling the Tab with an unlimited data plan, so if you're going to use it to watch videos, you're going to hit your data limit very quickly." Verizon this month ended unlimited broadband data plans on all new contracts, with the cheapest rate of $30 now covering limited data per month. "Streaming Netflix over LTE is not a use case for this product," Greengart said. Jeff Orr of ABI Research noted that Motorola's Xoom, which was released in January, was marketed... newsfactor.com »

AP - The major providers of residential broadband services in the U.S. deliver Internet connections that are generally 80 percent to 90 percent of maximum advertised speeds, according to a government study released Tuesday. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

Reuters - Broadband speeds on average are within 80 percent of what major Internet service providers advertise, a big improvement from two years ago, according to a government study. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Broadband speeds on average are within 80 percent of what major Internet service providers advertise, a big improvement from two years ago, according to a government study. Reuters: Internet News »

A new report from the Federal Communications Commission released Tuesday demonstrates that most of the nation's major broadband ISPs using wire-line technologies are providing service close to what they're advertising. While there are some differences between technologies, DSL, cable and fiber-to-the-home are all delivering quality service generally consistent with what they advertise, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The broadband study examined service offerings from 13 of the largest U.S. broadband providers, which collectively account for approximately 86 percent of all U.S. wire-line broadband connections. The tests consisted of automated, direct measurements of the broadband performance delivered to the homes of thousands of volunteer broadband subscribers during March 2011. Though broadband performance generally decreases during the peak hours of 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., "most services still provide actual speeds that are 80 percent to 90 percent of advertised speeds, or better," which is "a significant improvement" over the FCC's findings from two years earlier, Genachowski said. The Need for Speed When it comes to delivering advertised download speeds during the peak period, fiber-to-the-home (114 percent) was the clear leader on average, followed by cable (93 percent), and DSL (82 percent). What's more, upload performance was generally better than download performance during peak periods -- with all technologies meeting their advertised upload speeds by 95 percent or better. Most ISPs delivered download speeds within 20 percent of advertised speeds, with modest declines during peak periods, the FCC reported. Moreover, during peak periods upload performance is much less affected than download performance. Cox Communications exceeded its advertised upload speed by the greatest percentage among the 13 providers tested by the FCC in cooperation with researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech. However, Verizon's fiber-to-the-home was the only service that exceeded both its advertised upload and download speeds. The "powerboost" performance enhancements available as part of many cable-based... newsfactor.com »

NewsFactor - A new report from the Federal Communications Commission released Tuesday demonstrates that most of the nation's major broadband ISPs using wire-line technologies are providing service close to what they're advertising. While there are some differences between technologies, DSL, cable and fiber-to-the-home are all delivering quality service generally consistent with what they advertise, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Yahoo! News: Internet News »

Israel is often referred to as "Startup Nation," thanks to its long history of high-tech breakthroughs produced by scrappy little companies. But in one critical area, the speed of Internet connections, Israel has fallen behind other tech-savvy countries. In the coming months, Israel's state-owned electric company hopes to change this by rolling out a nationwide, high-speed broadband network. Exploiting the small size of the densely populated country, the effort aims to put Israel at the forefront of the next generation of Internet technology. Experts say the fiber-optic lines can provide connections of 10 to 100 times current speeds, transforming the way the Internet is used in such areas as entertainment, business and health care. "All the developing countries that have a vision for 10 years ahead, or 20 years ahead, understand that the name of the game will be communications, broadband communications, very fast communications," said Tzvi Harpak, the electric company's senior vice president for logistics. The technology is known as "fiber to the home," or FTTH. Using fiber optic lines, it can provide connection speeds of 100 megabits to a blazing 1 gigabit per second. Today, the typical broadband user in the developed world connects at five to 10 megabits using older cable and DSL connections. Oliver Johnson, chief executive of British research firm Point Topic, said FTTH technology is the "gold standard" of the next generation of broadband service. Although cable and DSL lines can be upgraded to higher speeds, FTTH has smoother transmission of data and a much higher upside in terms of speed, he said. "It's easier to go higher. It's future-proofed," he said. The added bandwidth could transform the way the Internet is used. Massive video files will be downloaded instantly, opening the door for high-definition and 3D movies to be delivered more easily. Since the system will have equally fast upload speeds,... newsfactor.com »

In this tradition-rich city known for its crawfish touffe and zydeco stomps, high-speed Internet rules. Web videos upload in a few quick seconds. Surgeons review online pathology reports from their living rooms. University students share bulky research files with one another electronically at lightning speeds. More than 800 miles of fiber-optic cable hum invisibly underground in Lafayette, a city of 120,000, delivering Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, or 100 Mbps -- rare for even major cities. The cutting-edge connectivity in the heart of Cajun country is due not to a private telecom giant but to a public municipal service that offers higher speeds and often lower rates than the private sector. It hasn't come without a fight. From the time the cybernetwork was just a far-fetched concept, the city's two main private providers, Cox Communications and BellSouth (now AT&T), have fought the initiative every step of the way -- from an information campaign against the project to civil lawsuits. LUS Fiber, a subsidiary of Lafayette Utilities System, the city-owned power company, offers the speedy Internet service along with cable television and phone service. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city in 2007, allowing the project to proceed. "We expected some opposition. But no one has had the level of push-back we got here in Louisiana," LUS Fiber director Terry Huval says. Telecom companies "want to nip it in the bud to keep other municipalities from doing the same thing." The battle over broadband in Lafayette is part of a growing number of clashes across the USA that pit municipalities against telecom firms for the right to deliver Web access to homes and businesses. More than 150 local governments across the country have built or are planning to build cybernetworks, says Christopher Mitchell of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local... newsfactor.com »

Mike Trang likes to use his iPhone 4 as a GPS device, helping him get around in his job. Now and then, his younger cousins get ahold of it, and play some YouTube videos and games. But in the past few weeks, there has been none of that, because AT&T Inc. put a virtual wheel clamp on his phone. Web pages wouldn't load and maps wouldn't render. Forget about YouTube videos -- Trang's data speeds were reduced to dial-up levels. "It basically makes my phone useless," said Trang, an Orange County, Calif. property manager. The reason: AT&T considers Trang to be among the top 5 percent of the heaviest cellular data users in his area. Under a new policy, AT&T has started cutting their data speeds as part of an attempt to manage data usage on its network. So last month, AT&T "throttled" Trang's iPhone, slowing downloads by roughly 99 percent. That means a Web page that would normally take a second to load instead took almost two minutes. AT&T has some 17 million customers with "unlimited data" plans that can be subject to throttling, representing just under half of its smartphone users. It stopped signing up new customers for those plans in 2010, and warned last year that it would start slowing speeds for people who consume the most data. What's surprising people like Trang is how little data use it takes to reach that level -- sometimes less than AT&T gives people on its "limited" plans. Trang's iPhone was throttled just two weeks into his billing cycle, after he'd consumed 2.3 gigabytes of data. He pays $30 per month for "unlimited" data. Meanwhile, Dallas-based AT&T now sells a limited, or "tiered," plan that provides 3 gigabytes of data for the same price. Users report that if they call the company to ask or complain about the... newsfactor.com »

AT&T is redefining the term "unlimited data" for its legacy customers. Under the new policy introduced Thursday, some unlimited data subscribers will see their speeds throttled back whenever they exceed a fixed monthly cap. According to the wireless carrier, the reason why the new reduced speeds only apply to certain unlimited smartphone customers is because their data usage is significantly higher than those on tiered plans. "For example, in January, the top 5 percent of our unlimited data plan customers used an average of over 50 percent more data than the top 5 percent of customers on tiered plans," AT&T said in a statement. Customers with 3G smartphones operating under an "unlimited" plan will receive a text message when their data usage approaches 3 GB in a single billing cycle. Thereafter, the subscriber's data speeds will be reduced for the remainder of that billing cycle. "If you have a 4G LTE smartphone and still have an unlimited data plan, the same process applies at 5 GB of data usage, instead of 3 GB," AT&T said. The company already had been throttling back speeds on its "unlimited" customers who exceeded the top 5 percent of data usage in their respective markets. Some had complained that the cap was unclear because it varied from market to market and month to month, and the new fixed caps appear to be an attempt to clarify expectations. So Many Restrictions Data usage notifications like the ones AT&T describe are useful, said Lisa Pierce, the managing vice president for unified communications, network systems and services at Gartner. "But frankly," she said in an e-mail Thursday, "there are so many restrictions in place from most providers that we'll soon have to ask what 'limited' means!" AT&T attributed the change to an impending wireless spectrum crunch. Under its merger contract with T-Mobile, AT&T had... newsfactor.com »