State of the Internet, Q1 2015
Wednesday’s Internet events illustrate the importance of the Akamai “State of the Internet” quarterly reports. Because of failures at the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, the Wall Street Journal…
Internet Use Nears Saturation
Here’s a rosy picture: the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s data shows that Internet use is effectively universal for some very significant US population groups: 96% of young adults (aged…
GTT’s Growing Pains Behind Over-Hyped Congestion Claims
Last Wednesday, I filed a story on claims by Free Press’s “Battle For the Net” that AT&T and other ISPs were causing massive Content Delivery Network (CDN) slowdowns at several…
Why LTE Unlicensed Outperforms Wi-Fi
The hottest issue in unlicensed wireless spectrum policy is the conflict between Wi-Fi and LTE Unlicensed (“LTE-U”). Some advocates are pressing for restrictions on LTE-U, even going to far as…
What happens if everybody uses Meerkat or Periscope at the same time?
Dear Engineer, I’ve been hearing a lot about personalized video streaming services, like Meerkat and Periscope, that will let you instantly live-stream your life. This sounds pretty cool, as I…
Delaware Internet as Fast as South Korea?
The Washington Post’s GovBeat blog has a nice summary of the latest “State of the Internet” report from Akamai. They’ve broken out US states and compared them to nations, a…
FCC Hearings: Where’s the Tech?
The five Congressional hearings on the FCC in the last week yielded surprisingly little technical content. While I’ve learned not to be optimistic about the ability of the nation’s “expert…
Does Your Broadband Internet Service Suck?
Much of the debate over Internet policy in the US presumes that our broadband services aren’t very good. Would there be a need for the FCC to pass the most…
Assessing Minimum Quality of Service
One of the models for harmonizing net neutrality principles with innovation imperatives allows broadband ISPs to offer customized delivery services to real-time and non-time-critical applications provided that the basic service…
Interesting Technologies Raise Interesting Questions — and Opportunities
Silicon Valley and its imitators around the world are always active on dozens of fronts that don’t break into the news cycle until they’ve gone through several cycles of innovation,…