And how about a giant Boofuckityyah against Verizon and Comcast for their shitty capping and pricing. Unfortunately for all but a few of us this only applies to New York.
Cablevision, a cable ISP based in the New York area, claims to have taken the residential US Internet speed record by rolling out 101Mbps service across the New York area in the next two weeks. Just to sweeten the deal, Cablevision has priced the service at $99.95 per month—and won’t use explicit data caps.
Since other high-speed providers like Comcast and Verizon currently offer a maximum of 50Mbps speeds (and both charge about $140 for it, though Verizon offers a cheaper deal in Virginia and New York), the Cablevision rollout sounds like a great deal. It also shows the power of competition; while much of the country has zero or one 50Mbps option, New York will now have two.
The fact that the upgrade can be offered at far less than both Verizon and Comcast are charging, and that it can be done without the data caps Time Warner Cable said it needed in order to fund such upgrades, suggests that US Internet could be much better than it is.
The fact wasn’t lost on groups like Free Press, which have already praised Cablevision. “It does, however, beg the question why Cablevision can offer fast access with reportedly no caps or overage fees, when others claim such a plan would cause the sky to fall and an exaflood to break the Internet,” said S. Derek Turner, the group’s research director. “We hope this new announcement will put an end to the bandwidth bogeyman.”
Assuming the service works as advertised, it will certainly boost Cablevision’s image, which (among the much-loathed cable industry) is already pretty good.
The move also reminds us just how cost-effective these DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts have been. While Verizon has to lay new fiber to FiOS homes and AT&T runs fiber into the neighborhoods to power its U-verse system, cable companies have a monstrous hybrid fiber coax (HFC) pipe that requires inexpensive headend upgrades for far faster service.
Yes I was lazy and just copied it over for your convenience.
Over at Hugs for Monsters it’s Jersey boy owner/visual artist Joe Lifrieri isn’t putting up with coding his site for arcane web browsers or the users that still refuse to upgrade. The target is IE6 users who really should upgrade to ANYTHING really.
I have a mac which means I’m using a flavor of -NIX for my operating system. To all you PC users shut the fuck up. I’m not installing Microsoft Silverlight. I try and stay out of bed with as many companies as possible. Sure everyone switches sheets, but I’ll be damned if I leave this world due to a venereal disease. This is just another clue that the software running our government needs to be removed from the commercial world. I’m sure the bleeding costs behind the investment on one side and the lobbying on the other are staggering.
Considering everyone one else is going to be yapping about it we’ll just move along until all the smoke clears. Today’s story is brought to us by the powers who didn’t have the foresight to invest in infrastructure. AT&T is going to be forcing customers into a monthly bandwidth cap. In plain english you can only use so much internet in a month before they charge you more. Is this far? I think not. Currently its only going to be Reno, Nevada. That isn’t going to last long seeing what crap Comcast is pulling.
“Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and that’s, “FUCK COMCAST”.
Reports are stating that download day for Firefox 3 was successful with over 8 million downloads. They’re still pouring over the data before passing it off to Guinness, but it’s looking like they’ve made the record books. This is good since they’ve already found a major flaw in Firefox 3 that they’re keeping secret. Expect an update soon for that bug fix!
Have you ever wanted to just modify a Google map instead of going through a long process of screen grabs and working in Paint or Photoshop? Well QuikMaps is a free mashup that allows you to do so. They also include tons of custom icons, text labeling, and other tools that makes it my new favorite map maker.
Of course companies wouldn’t want congress to make net neutrality law. They’d love to keep it as FCC regulation!
“Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications said Tuesday that it’s important for the Federal Communications Commission to take action against Comcast for slowing down some peer-to-peer traffic to prove that legislation is not necessary when it comes to Net neutrality.
Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The company claimed it had singled out peer-to-peer, file-sharing traffic, because it was eating up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which caused degradation across the rest of its customers.
Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the blogosphere filled with criticism. And as a result the FCC has been examining whether Comcast violated any of the agency’s Net neutrality principles. A hearing was held earlier this year, and the FCC is expected to make a ruling on the matter sometime this summer.”
“Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications, according to a report from Cisco Systems..
Increased use of video and social networking has created what Cisco calls ‘visual networking’, which is raising traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 per cent of the traffic coursing through the world’s IP networks by 2012.
The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 per cent CAGR over the same period.
Cisco reckons that traffic volumes will be measured in exabytes (one billion gigabytes) by 2012 and will reach 552 exabytes by that time.
Soon after 2012 we will have to adopt zettabytes (one thousand billion gigabytes) to express traffic volumes.
The report is based on Cisco’s own predictions and aggregates analysis from several market research firms.”
Firefox 3 is out in the wild. Go download it within the next 24 hours to help set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day. Rock and roll.
It’s not surprising that big companies hate Net Neutrality. Its the cornerstone concept of the internet model! Around here we try and track the issue as we do anything else. Most of the time we catch the big stories, but love it when something smaller shows itself. Well this is a big deal, but little is known about it. Its time to spread the word.
“I’ve worked in industry for many years, and I have no doubt that these kinds of plans are being made. But it will only happen if we let it. If you are a reporter, or know a reporter, there’s a huge story here.
Also, I urge everyone to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and donate to the cause of net neutrality. They’ve been fighting the good fight against usurpation of the internet by monied interests since dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or thereabouts…). And while you’re at it, buy Cory Doctorow’s bestseller, LITTLE BROTHER, a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride that deals with these kinds of issues.
I have said before, and I truly believe, that equal access to the internet is not just a First Amendment issue, but also a Second Amendment issue. The founders intended to create a power balance between and among the different actors in our democracy. The power people hold over our government is not through handguns and assault rifles; it is through our ability to share information and join forces to hold the powerful accountable to us.”
I firmly believe that child abusers and sexual predators need to be killed slowly. What I don’t agree with is limiting the internet. They’ll take an inch now, then block everything later. Soon America will be like China when it comes to blocked sites. Do you really want that to happen?
Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.
The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.
The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million customers between them.
At first I didn’t get into Second Life. I just didn’t get it. After breaking my primary MMO addictions I was able to step back to gain an outside perspective. Of all the MMOs that currently survive those that don’t require an initial investment work, and those that are free overall stay. NASA is another organization that seems to be taking advantage of The World of Second Life.
NASA is trying all manner of Web 2.0 software to promote its science to the tech-savvy crowd. Months ago, the media director at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab began sending out Twitter messages, or 140-character digital notes, about the Phoenix Lander mission to Mars. Now, NASA has created a so-called cybertwin for the Phoenix rover in the virtual world Second Life.
Even though the term “cybertwin” sounds very Web 1.0, the technology is based on techniques in artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing. Instead of tapping NASA’s media director for answers, the Phoenix cybertwin calls on a database of knowledge that’s been programmed by scientists from JPL. That way, people can ask questions of the Phoenix chat bot to receive quasi-personalized responses about the rover’s mission. (The cybertwin was developed by Australia-based start-up MyCyberTwin.)
As you might expect, the cybertwin comes off like a robot.
Q: What is your purpose?
[16:21] Phoenix: I’ll be using instruments to probe the northern polar site’s soil and ice and I’m here with three main objectives: to study the history of water on Mars, to determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life, and to study the Martian weather.
Q: What is your schedule?
[16:21] Phoenix: I have some pre-programmed commands but mostly I will wait for commands from Earth that arrive in the Martian morning and send my results back in the afternoon. So far I have had commands including the deployment of my robotic arm.
It’s hard to gauge whether the Second Life bot will resonate with the virtual community, considering that NASA Web 2.0 promotions can be a mixed bag. So far, the Twitter page has drawn thousands of followers, but Facebook is another story. The Phoenix Lander page on Facebook has only 16 fans. Turns out, social networks can be a lonely place, just like in space.
You can find the Phoenix cybertwin on the NASA Island in Second Life via this address.
