Feed: DSLreports - front page - AggScore: 81.4

The weekend has finally arrived. Empty your head into the comment section below.
read comment(s)

• Is mobile broadband pricing finally starting to decline? fiercewireless.com
• Broadband stimulus grants delayed networkworld.com
• UK Digital Economy Bill As Bad As Expected; Digital Britain Minister Flat Out Lies About ISP Support techdirt.com
• Analysts: Nokia unlikely to snap up Palm fiercewireless.com
• NPR reporter blames - wait for it... the Internet for Ft. Hood rampage npr.org
• Air Canada Will Offer In-Flight Wi-Fi, Too gigaom.com
• Verizon Referral Program Offers Up To $600 In 'Reward Cards' multichannel.com
• Ebay closes Skype sale theinquirer.net
read comment(s)

While Comcast lobbyists tried their best to slow the encroachment of Verizon FiOS into their hometown of Philadelphia, the Philly city council authorized a citywide franchise back in February (you can read the agreement here (pdf) if you're into that kind of thing). As per the deal, Verizon has around seven years to wire the whole city, though these agreements (as with NYC and DC) often have loopholes that let Verizon extend deadlines or wiggle out of obligations should certain adoption numbers not be met. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, service this week went live in Chestnut Hill, South Philadelphia and North Philadelphia, near Girard College. Additional neighborhoods should come online this year, but Verizon isn't saying which ones. Verizon does keep a PA construction notice (pdf) on their website, but it's quite often outdated.


read comment(s)

There's been a flurry of rumors lately surrounding T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, and their desire to improve T-Mobile's fourth-place fortunes in the U.S. wireless market. Rumors recently suggested that Deutsche Telekom wanted to buy Sprint and merge the company with T-Mobile, despite some headache-inducing technical and network integration differences. When that rumor was debunked, a new rumor surfaced saying that Deutsche Telekom wanted to partner with Clearwire, funding Clear deployment in exchange for access to spectrum. This week, insiders tell the German Handelsblatt newspaper that Deutsche Telekom is still looking for a U.S. network investment partner, and is in fact considering some kind of deal with AT&T, MetroPCS and/or Clearwire.
read comment(s)

Apparently taking a page out of this month's advertising debate between AT&T and Verizon, Canadian carrier Telus has sued Rogers Communications for ads claiming that the Rogers wireless network is "the fastest and most reliable in the country." Telus and Bell Canada have of course just launched their new, $1 billion HSPA network, which offers speeds up to 21 Mbps to Canadian customers. As such, Telus demanded earlier this month that Rogers stop making advertising claims that they held the 3G speed edge -- a request Rogers ignored, since they too offer 21 Mbps HSPA+ service. "Telus has not submitted any data on their network performance and we look forward to vigorously defending our position in court," says Rogers.
read comment(s)

AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market -- something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL's employees, or about 2,300 workers.
read comment(s)

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC is seriously considering re-establishing some kind of open access rules, which would give new entrants access to incumbent infrastructure at reduced price. Open access was the central idea behind the 1996 telecom act, which required incumbent operators to share network access with smaller competitors in order to bolster competition as those upstarts grew into legitimate carriers. A combination of inconsistent regulation and incumbent lobbying ultimately resulted in the U.S. scrapping the idea, though other countries (like France) were able to make the idea work.

Last month, the FCC ruffled feathers when an FCC-funded study by the Harvard University's Berkman Center suggested that such open access policies, when supported by consistent regulation, resulted lower prices, improved broadband penetration, and better service for consumers. That study was quickly set upon by industry lobbyists and their various policy mouthpieces, notes the Washington Post. The National Cable And Telecommunications Association quickly attacked the report as both biased and unreliable:

Of course the National Cable and Telecommunications Association itself is no stranger to the idea of fitting the science to the political agenda, so their lamentations on the subject ring a little hollow. Given said companies spent millions of dollars and the better part of the last decade derailing the last effort to impose these kinds of sharing obligations, they're no doubt daunted by the possibility of having to do it all over again.
read comment(s)

For years the rumor has floated out there that either Verizon or AT&T would buy DirecTV in order to have direct control of the company's satellite TV operations. Sometimes these rumors are based in conjecture, but more often than not they're based on nothing whatsoever. With DirecTV prepared to get a new CEO (their last CEO just departed to be Rupert Murdoch's right-hand man at News Corp.), the rumors are apparently bubbling up once again. According to Reuters, representatives from both AT&T and Verizon have approached Liberty Media over the last few years about a sale, and the outlet cites sources who believe new CEO Michael White is little more than a "babysitter" until this endlessly-rumored deal can be accomplished.
read comment(s)

Broadband penetration continues to rise in EU iptv-news.com
Continued Network And Service Optimization The Key To Continued IPTV Growth IT Backbones
Maximum fine set at 50,000 for illegal file-sharing broadbandgenie.co.uk
Law Firm Contemplates Class Action Suit To Recompense Xbox Live Modders itproportal.com
MS denies Win 7 backdoor rumors theregister.co.uk
AOL will shed a third of its staff theinquirer.net
PS3 to go 3D in 2010, says Sony reghardware.co.uk
read comment(s)

Bigger U.S. Role in Broadband Is Likely wsj.com
DTV Coupon Redemption Ends With Over $1 Billion Worth Unused multichannel.com
Is Open Access Feasible in the U.S. Broadband Market? 4g-wirelessevolution.tmcnet.com
Kicking People Off The Internet Not Enough In South Korea, Copyright Lobbyists Demand More techdirt.com
Telcos will be the new channel theinquirer.net
T-Mobile offering prepaid BlackBerry fiercewireless.com
American Airlines Launches WiFi Widget examiner.com
Chrome OS Unveiled, Focused on Netbooks, the Cloud gigaom.com
read comment(s)

If you recall, back in May of 2008 we told you how the Comcast web portal was hacked by a group calling itself "Kryogenics," posting the usually gramatically incoherent shout out to their own supposed awesomeness and fellow nerd homies. The hack disrupted user access to the portal and the official Comcast forums for several hours, before Comcast tracked down the problem and the fix was propagated across DNS servers. According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, the three young men responsible for the hack have been indicted for "conspiring to disrupt service." The indictment claims the hack cost Comcast "a little less than $129,000," though each defendant could receive a maximum sentence of five years in jail, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and a $100 special assessment, on top of potential forced restitution to Comcast -- who certainly could use the money.

read comment(s)

The country of Finland recently declared they were making broadband a legal right, requiring that all 5.3 million of the country's residents be served by 1 Mbps service by next summer, and 100 Mbps service by 2015. That's a little easier to do in a country like Finland, which has just 5.3 million residents to our 300+ million, and doesn't have to deal with things like, well, Montana. Spain too this week has decided to make 1 Mbps broadband for all a legal right by 2011, expanding their universal service fund to help fund deployment into coverage gaps, according to Reuters:

1 Mbps may not be much, but even such base proclamations are more than the United States government has been capable of. That's expected to change in 90 days, when the FCC finally unveils their national broadband plan to Congress, who'll then have to vote to actually act on it. Like Spain, our plan will likely include using the Universal Service Fund (USF) to fund broadband, but given that program's history of dysfunction, that would be easier said than done. The FCC only recently decided that it might be a good idea to track how USF funds are actually used, if that gives you a good idea of the program's nature.

Smaller countries certainly have it a bit easier. In Finland, the estimated $287 million their broadband project will cost is dwarfed by both AT&T's ($7 billion) and Verizon's ($24 billion) next-gen upgrade plans here in the States. Even those sizable investments only reach a third or more of those carriers' total subscribers, and extending even 1 Mbps service to all U.S. consumers could be a multi-billion dollar endeavor. One that's plagued on all sides by a U.S. political system that has traditionally failed to foster competition through regulatory action, and frequently struggles to shake off the lobbying influence of the nation's largest carriers.
read comment(s)