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The naming of winning bidders in the broadband stimulus grant/loan program will be delayed by a month or so, according to the heads of the relevant government agencies. The self-imposed deadline had been early November, but NTIA head Larry Strickling said Tuesday: "We're going to take a few more weeks here to get this right...I will not fund a bad application." That came in a Senate Commerce Committee's Communications Subcommittee oversight hearing on the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) and Rural Utilities Services' (RUS) broadband stimulus grant and loan programs under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. The committee heard...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...

Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country's national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday. According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection. Just more than a year ago, Finland said it would make a 100Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday's announcement is considered an intermediate step. France,...

Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. On Wednesday, the Ministry announced the new goal as an intermediary step. Some variation will be allowed, if connectivity can be arranged through mobile phone networks.

Broadband task force status report says current government funding won't be enough to achieve universal adoption The FCC says 3 million to 6 million people are "unserved" by basic broadand service, and that current government funding won't be enough to get broadband to all of them. "[C]urrent mechanisms, such as Universal Service and stimulus grants, are insufficient to achieve national purposes," according to a status report Tuesday from members of the FCC's broadband task force. The government has allocated $7.2 billion in stimulus grants and loans for broadband, while the FCC is considering expanding the Universal Service Fund (which telecom...

SNIPPET: "When including about $10.5 billion in matching funds committed by the applicants, the total price tag for the proposed broadband projects topped $38 billion. The Recovery Act provided a total of $7.2 billion to the two agencies to expand broadband services, of which NTIA will use $4.7 billion, largely to deploy broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas, and RUS will invest $2.5 billion to facilitate broadband deployment in primarily rural communities. Approximately $2.4 billion from RUS and up to $1.6 billion from NTIA is available in this first grant round."

The federal government is spending $7.2 billion over the next year to bring better broadband to the masses, a lofty goal by any measure. But the feds are making it loftier than it needs ...

One gets the feeling that if Dallas Mavericks owner and HDNet CEO Mark Cuban wasn't absolutely terrified of broadband video, he wouldn't be constantly ranting about how broadband video is going to fail. Cuban's spent the last five years urging ISPs to block P2P, supporting the cable industry's vision of net neutrality (as in: none), insisting the Internet is dead, lamenting broadband video's shortcomings and generally pouting a lot. Apparently, Cuban believes that if he scares his readership enough, the inevitable advertising revenue losses cable TV will someday feel from online video won't actually happen. This week on the Mark...

StimulatingBroadband.com 07/09/09 A federal agency program first announced online on Monday, July 6, to recruit volunteer reviewers to make approval and denial decisions on the first round of approximately $ 1.6 billion in Recovery Act broadband stimulus competitive grant applications has set-off a firestorm of protest. The program is being launched by the National Information and Telecommunications Administration (NTIA), of the US Department of Commerce. A description of the volunteer reviewer solicitation program was posted at: Call for Reviewers Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, part of the joint federal agency site BroadbandUSA.gov. NTIA states its its Call that the agency "...is...

Wattsburg, Pa. — Vice President Joe Biden visited a small town on the outskirts of Erie today to talk to rural folks about federal stimulus money that can be used to expand broadband access to the Internet for rural areas that typically have poor connections. Apparently stimulus money and broadband are not all that interesting to the local folk here: Only around 100 or so people have showed up so far to hear Biden talk at noon at Seneca High School off Route 8 in Wattsburg. The room looked so sparse that about 30 or so chairs were removed by...

WASHINGTON -- Obama administration officials will announce rules Wednesday for handing out $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, but some companies already are raising concerns about how long it could take to award the money. Officials are expected to detail how they plan to distribute $4.7 billion in broadband money from the Commerce Department in grants and $2.5 billion from the Agriculture Department in grants or loans.

Doug King publishes his keyboard music online and his wife, Marjorie, sells home-made pottery to customers in Iceland, China and New Zealand. But doing business from their rural Dane County house is virtually impossible without high-speed Internet. "We got to the point where we’re simply unable to do business" using the dial-up Internet their phone company provides, King said. The couple finally signed up for a wireless modem from Verizon, which in the last year has sought to build nine cell towers in rural Dane County to keep up with growing demand. But wireless service isn’t available everywhere, either, leaving...

Analysts say the value of the Internet means providers can sell bandwidth much like utility companies sell electricity or municipalities sell water. Time Warner Cable's expansion of its bandwidth cap testing marks the evolution of the Internet to a utility, like water and energy, where people pay for what they use. People who have used the Internet for years have grown accustomed to paying one monthly price for unlimited access. However, that model is no longer sustainable as the increasing number of devices and people place higher demands on bandwidth, a finite commodity. Without controls, Internet users could experience "brownouts"...

Cable and telephone companies are gearing up for a fight as regulators begin work Wednesday on a national broadband strategy that could bring major changes to how Internet services are delivered to American homes. The $787 billion government stimulus package requires the Federal Communications Commission to provide a road map for how potentially billions of future taxpayer dollars should be spent to build or upgrade Internet lines across the U.S. The agency will map out how the U.S. can ensure that every American not only has access to broadband, but has service that runs much faster than what's available today....

Obama's $8B Broadband Plan Launches Tuesday Next Tuesday, the White House will launch its high-speed Internet plan using more than $8 billion in stimulus funds. Leaders from the Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture and Federal Communications Commission will meet to discuss how the different agencies will use the funds to rural and other areas that don't currently have high-speed, or broadband, access to the Web. There are separate programs at the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration and the USDA's Rural Utilities Service that fund construction of new high-speed Internet networks. They are mostly focused on rural areas...

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - A new study is revealing, what some may consider, startling information about Utahans and what they do online. New research shows Utah is number one in the nation for online pornography subscriptions. The research is just coming out Tuesday, from a study done by Harvard Business School Professor Benjamin Edelman, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. It tracks subscriptions to online pornography sites by states. The study measures the online porn subscriptions per thousand people, per thousand homes with internet users, per thousand homes with broadband users, and also when accounting for...

The House Democrats' $825 billion legislation released on Thursday was supposedly intended to "stimulate" the economy. Backers claimed that speedy approval was vital because the nation is in "a crisis not seen since the Great Depression" and "the economy is shutting down." That's the rhetoric. But in reality, Democrats are using the 258-page legislation to sneak Net neutrality rules in through the back door. The so-called stimulus package hands out billions of dollars in grants for broadband and wireless development, primarily in what are called "unserved" and "underserved" areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce is charged with writing checks-with-many-zeros-on-them to...

Under an Obama administration, some form of broadband stimulus package is coming—and $6 billion is already being kicked around as a starting point. But if you build it, will they come? Pew's Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won't, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is. One important component of any broadband stimulus would be availability, with many pundits hoping for a scheme similar to the universal service scheme that wired even rural America for phone service decades ago. In summing up its recent research on broadband, Pew's Associate Director...

Mobile broadband users in Stockholm will soon be able to surf the internet on a new high speed 4G network, following the signing of a deal between Ericsson and TeliaSonera. The order from Finnish-Swedish telecom provider TeliaSonera marks the first commercial deployment of Ericsson’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) network technology and will provide mobile internet users with data speeds up to ten times faster than those offered on current networks. "LTE brings the highest possible performance and network capacity, which is needed to meet the needs of the fast growing group of mobile broadband users around the world,” said Ericsson’s...

Every household in the country will be guaranteed access to broadband internet, according to a draft report by Lord Carter on the future of the telecoms and media industries.Lord Carter, the communications minister, will propose a "universal service commitment" to broadband - akin to the guarantee offered on postal services and fixed-line telephones - that by 2012 would provide minimum download speeds of 2 megabits per second to every household that wants it, according to people who have seen a draft of his report, entitled Digital Britain. Such speeds enable people to watch video online, including the BBC iPlayer.The...

President-elect Barack Obama's ambitious economic recovery plan has a goal to create 3 million American jobs in the next two years. Broadband is a part of the answer. Broadband has the potential to transform our country. It will create jobs in the growth sectors of our economy — jobs that are driving the collaboration and interaction economy. Obama deserves our full support as he looks to revitalize our economy. An economic stimulus package that focuses on infrastructure must put America's broadband infrastructure at the head of the list. We have the opportunity to bring broadband to those who do not...

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

License Plates for the Internet - The Blueprints for Obama's Assault on the Internet The report's recommendations emphasize taking away cybersecurity from DHS in order to create a special department to oversee cybersecurity. It recommends ending the division between civilian and national security systems. And calls for establishing "international norms" when it comes to the internet. And it focuses a good deal on identity verification, not just for Federal employees, but for ordinary Americans as well. The report urges a move away from passwords, and toward physical identity verification, via a device that would verify an individual's identity. And calls...

While U.S. broadband providers continue to boost speeds for their subscribers, they still are falling behind the broadband deployment efforts of many other nations, according to survey of 230,000 U.S. Internet users. The survey, conducted by the Communications Workers of America, indicates also that population density can be a factor in providing broadband " Rhode Island, the smallest state geographically in the union, has the fastest median download speed with 6.8 Mbps while Alaska, the largest, has the slowest at 0.8 Mbps. Internet users in the survey took the CWA's Speed Matters Speed Test. The median download speed in the...

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The technological and economical development of Scandinavia (including Finland) is today more groundbreking than anywhere else in the world. The investments being made in relation to population size is mind-boggling. Despite a mere population of 25 million inhabitants, the combined GDP of the Scandinavian countries today ridicules that of a Russia often viewed to be a "reborn" super power "on the go" (combined Scandinavian GDP is actually 125% that of of Russia - and the gap is widening!!) But, let's focus on telecommunications here; Five bidders have paid €226 million ($346 million) for fourth generation (4G), super-fast mobile telephony licences,...

Other than Time Warner's single-city foray into monthly data caps, consumption-based billing has mostly been little ISPs with little monopolies, and given the market, we thought it'd stay that way. Broadband Reports is, uh, reporting that now Comcast is mulling monthly caps (which Comcast's PR guy confirms, though not the details)—something like 250GB, and then $1.50 for every GB over that. According to their source, the idea has "a lot of momentum" and it'll start rolling out in the next two months. The other part is that they're going to start ramping up DMCA notices to pirate assholes, with a...

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years. Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system....

NEW YORK (AP) - Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q) (Q) on Thursday introduced DSL plans with faster download speeds, including one that is the fastest DSL service from a major U.S. phone company. Qwest is charging $104.99 per month for a download speed of 20 megabits per second. For 12 mbps, it is charging $51.99 per month. The prices are $5 lower when combined with local phone service. The plans will be available in 23 of Qwest's top markets, the company said. By the end of the year, they will be available to 2 million customers. Download speeds on DSL,...

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ? That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up...

Web could collapse as video demand soars By Lewis Carter Last Updated: 2:52am BST 07/04/2008 The internet could grind to a halt within two years under the pressure of booming demand for online video, experts have warned. Last year it was said that YouTube consumed as much capacity as the entire internet took up in 2000 Soaring visitor numbers to video websites such as YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer are putting the copper wires, which underpin parts of the internet, under severe strain. Experts warn that unless billions of pounds is spent on upgrading the web's infrastructure, it could slow...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 18, 2008 STATEMENT BY FCC CHAIRMAN KEVIN J. MARTIN Washington, D.C. –FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin today announced the close of Auction 73 (the 700 MHz auction). The auction began on January 24, 2008, and closed today after 261 rounds of bidding. The FCC auction raised a record $19.592 billion and helped advance new open platform policies. Auction 73 Raised More Money Than Any Auction has Ever Raised The $19.592 billion in revenue raised in the 700 MHz auction is significantly more than raised in any past FCC auction. In comparison, the 2006 Advanced Wireless...

Excerpt - NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- AT&T Inc. (T) raised the price of its high-speed Internet service by $5 a month. The San Antonio telecommunications giant will raise rates for its bottom three tiers of DSL service in the 13 states which made up SBC Communications. The price for the lowest priced service - 768 kilobits per second - is now $20. The 1.5-megabit-per-second service is now $25, and the 3-mbps service is $30. The move comes after Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said last month the softening economy was affecting its DSL service in certain markets. ~ snip...

"What's shocking about the report isn't what it covers (or that Ars is cited in footnotes 126 and 211), but what it leaves out: it doesn't contain a single extended discussion of the fact that the US has been slipping in a worldwide broadband rankings throughout the decade. That hugely significant fact doesn't mean that the current approach isn't working or that the US is becoming a Luddite paradise, but it does suggest that there are other approaches to be considered, approaches that have proved successful in real-world conditions. As broadband continues to be a key driver of economic opportunity...

NEW DELHI: Internet users in India struggled with slow surfing speeds and companies tapped redundancy systems to overcome a disruption to international connectivity. The problem was caused due to the breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. An anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged Indian-owned FLAG cable and also SEA-ME-WE on Wednesday morning and urgent repair teams had set sail for the location. An official of Reliance group, which owns FLAG, said the repair will take about 10 days. But some mission-critical operations can sometimes suffer. Wednesday's disruption in SEA-ME-WE and Indian-owned FLAG cables had not been resolved...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The first round of the much-anticipated Federal Communications Commission auction of communications airwaves drew $2.4 billion in prospective bids before closing at midday Thursday, according to the agency. Nearly half the money, some $1.04 billion, was bid by one participant seeking a national license for a swath of 22 megahertz of radio spectrum. The bidding for a second national license of 10 megahertz topped out at $472 million in the first round. Both these bids are believed to be the minimum bid allowed in the first round for these chunks of spectrum. The information was...

NEW YORK (AP) - A satellite due to launch in three years promises to expand high-speed Internet services to rural Americans who cannot get access through cable or phone companies. ViaSat Inc. (VSAT) bills its forthcoming ViaSat-1 satellite as the world's highest-capacity broadband satellite. The company said the new satellite should provide at least 10 times the capacity of those in orbit today, largely by using the spectrum more efficiently. That means each customer could get faster speeds and more customers could be served in any given area, Chief Executive Mark Dankberg said. He said satellite broadband providers have been...

I am in a discussion with Sprint and the Illinois Commerce Commission on the taxes that appear on my bill for my Sprint Pentech PX-500 broadband card for my laptop. I am paying $0.57 for Federal 9-1-1 taxes and $0.75 for local 9-1-1 tax. This isn't a bank-breaker, but it's the principle. The card cannot "dial" 9-1-1 and it lacks GPS chipset for Phase 2 wireless E9-1-1 location requirements. Because of this, I contend that I should not be paying taxes for a device that CANNOT use the services for which I'm being taxed. It would be the rough analog...

A church in southern Sweden has refused to allow a wireless broadband antenna to be installed on its tower, after fears were raised that parishoners would stay home surfing for porn instead of attending services. The proposal to install broadband equipment at the church in Hylletofta, 200 kilometres east of Gothenburg, would have brought high speed internet access to the community, where residents currently have to struggle with dial-up connections. But the Church of Sweden decided that the ability to download high quality images and videos could harm the morals of the local population. "The diocese has formally taken the...

Excerpt - ~ snip ~ It is very doubtful, almost impossible, that we'll catch up to those countries ahead of us in broadband penetration. They are too far ahead and our native demand is simply less because our Internet economies are developing more slowly. Absent some miracle, the game is already over. As I wrote two weeks ago, the situation is likely to improve somewhat over the next year or two as the telephone companies sacrifice a little to lock us in before we switch to DOCSIS 3 cable modems and the cable companies, in turn, offer incentives to jump...

I've been having trouble with my broadband Internet service lately. It cuts out frequently. The calls to customer service have gotten longer. The actual speed of the service isn't close to what was advertised. And the price has gone up twice in a year. I'd like to take my business elsewhere. But I can't. Even though I live in a large metropolitan area, my local cable company is the only option for broadband at my condo. The local phone company has yet to wire my building for DSL. Satellite broadband -- which costs more for slower speeds -- isn't an...

WASHINGTON - If they're lucky, Americans have two choices for getting high-speed Internet access: the local cable company or the local telephone company. Hoping to increase competition, regulators have promised that a third choice will become available when TV broadcasters abandon part of the airwaves as part of the digital revolution.But a proposal previewed this week by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission suggests that dreams of a "third pipe" for broadband is really a pipe dream.A critical provision that some say is needed to attract a new broadband competitor did not make it into the draft.Some technology companies...

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels are now hers for the taking.

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection. Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed. But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm,...

So-called high-speed Internet broadband connection speeds are "pathetic" compared with other industrialized nations, a communications union report claimed. The study was commissioned by the Communications Workers of America in Washington in a bid to get the Federal Communications Commission to redefine what constitutes true high speed, USA Today reported Tuesday. The study found Japanese Internet users enjoy speeds of 661 megabits per second, South Korea averages 45 mps, France has 17 mps, and Canada has an average 7 mps. The median U.S. speed was 1.97 mps, the study said. "We have pathetic speeds compared to the rest of the world,"...

Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Monday announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country.Howard said Optus, the Australian offshoot of Singapore telco Singtel, had been awarded a 958-million-dollar contract to build a broadband network in the bush with rural finance company Elders. The joint venture, known as OPEL, would contribute a further 900 million US dollars to provide broadband of at least 12 megabits per second by June 2009."What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very...

HOUSTON - The former chief of Enron Corp.'s high-speed Internet unit, who turned government witness and testified in the trial of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling and company founder Kenneth Lay, was sentenced Monday to 27 months in prison. It's been nearly three years since Kenneth Rice, 48, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to help federal prosecutors on other cases related to the energy giant's collapse. His sentencing was postponed as he cooperated with prosecutors. Before sentencing, Rice apologized for his role in the corporate scandal that wiped out thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in market...

Excerpt - NEW YORK - Without any sort of fanfare, AT&T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, half the price of its cheapest advertised plan. The DSL, or digital subscriber line, plan introduced Saturday is part of the concessions made by AT&T to the Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved last December. The $10 offer is available to customers in the 22-state AT&T service region, which includes former BellSouth areas, who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband, spokesman Michael Coe confirmed Monday. Local phone service and...

A potential collaboration between Telenor and Telia could result in extremely high speed broadband for 1.8 million Swedish households. Computer Sweden magazine reports that Telenor has invited Telia for talks about the new vdsl2 technology. The cost of developing a vdsl2 network in Sweden is estimated at 10 billion kronor ($1.5 billion). "The best thing would be for Telia, Telenor and Tele 2 to reach an agreement on how best to finance the investment," Telenor's Swedish CEO Johan Lindgren told Computer Sweden. If implemented, the system is expected to grant almost two million Swedish households access to a broadband capacity...