Microsoft Closes Digital Divide! Heh, Just Kidding
Happy Prime Day! Here’s one special deal you don’t want to buy: Microsoft’s grand plan to bring high speed broadband to the less-populated fringe of rural America for peanuts. It…
Roslyn Layton Visits High Tech Forum
What are we losing by pretending that mobile broadband is a noncompetitive market that needs to be tightly managed by a Washington-based regulator? We can’t know that in the US because we only have the market we have. But data from other countries suggests that we’re not seeing the explosion in mobile apps development that we should expect.
Making the Internet of the Future Happen Today
With all the policy controversy around the Internet today it’s useful to take a step back and look at the overall trajectory. While the battles over privacy, security, and the…
Faster Internet up to Web Sites
The ISP can take traffic from a server to a user as fast as the speed of light, but if the web server is underpowered or overloaded with badly written tracking code, the user isn’t going to be happy.
American Broadband Policy: Information over Manipulation
While it’s true that Americans aren’t dancing in the streets over ISP customer service, it’s unrealistic to claim that replacing them with municipal utility providers will change this dynamic at all.
Senate Internet Hearings
As a technical matter, it is the case that the Internet is more like cable TV than the telephone network. While the Internet does support interpersonal communication, its primary role is publishing audio, video, pictures, and text. And like cable TV, it’s a platform in which advertising is a very important source of revenue.
Animating Rural Broadband
Subsidies aren’t going to alleviate rural America’s broadband woes all by themselves, but with a little planning and some new technology we can do a lot with a little.
Taking Wi-Fi to the Next Level
Once again, the Consumer Electronics Show highlighted augmented reality and Internet of Things devices and applications. Amazon Echo support was a common theme in IoT devices, and the headsets and…
DirecTV Now Too Good to be Legal
AT&T’s Monday announcement of the DirecTV Now streaming service drew nearly unanimous applause from tech pundits. This is a new business model for cable TV that harnesses some of the power of the broadband networks to provide personalized sports, entertainment, and news packages to TV viewers. But some are critical, albeit for strange reasons.
Happy Birthday, Internet: Richard Bennett talks with Don Nielson
The Internet was born 40 years ago in a demonstration connecting a wireless node in California with all the computers on ARPANET. Listen to the godfather.