government

Wired News has a piece on municipalities getting into the broadband fiber optics business, focusing most heavily on the project in Truckee, Calif. It talks about some of the hurdles these projects are running into, as a result of opposition from local telecommunications companies and a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Early this year, the Court ruled that states can block local utility districts from getting into the telecom business. A few states already do this, and the big Bell and cable companies are lobbying others to go down this path. Wired notes that the legislature in Pennsylvania is considering a … Read more

Remember how exciting it was the first time you went online to check out that new car or shirt you were thinking about buying? Now you can do it with the surgery you??re scheduling next month too.

The Hartford Courant has a piece (registration required) on how patients are increasingly tapping into doctors?? broadband Webcasts in order to get a taste of what??s waiting for them on the operating table. Many are finding it doesn??t look as bad as they feared, and are going ahead with procedures they were leery of.

This is a good example of … Read more

American company WebSky says it will set up a WiMax network in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the last decade we've seen cell phone networks leapfrog wired phones in countries that never laid a lot of copper wires. It's a good bet that we might see the same thing with broadband, as countries that are behind in cable and DSL penetration jump straight into WiMax.

The Korea Herald reports that KT -- the country's biggest telecom company -- will help build a broadband infrastructure in Iran (thanks to Om Malik for the link). The $26 million deal will see 100,000 broadband lines rolled out in Iran's 20 biggest cities by 2005, the paper says.

Another sign that South Korea is getting props for being leagues ahead of most of the rest of the world in making broadband part of everyday life. We wrote about the country's lessons for the U.S. here, and News.com editor Michael Kannellos visited the country … Read more

Vint Cerf, one of the Net's original creators, stopped by the Intel Developer Forum today to chat about future infrastructure headaches. One serious problem will be "flash crowds," he says ?? essentially localized traffic jams resulting from intense and sudden (and often unpredictable interest) in a particular node on the Net.

Companies like Akamai have been helping deal with these traffic jams for a while, and peer to peer software helps distribute content in efficient ways that evade bottlenecks. But as more and more devices get connected ?? think everyone wearing a Dick Tracy Internet watch, carrying a 3G … Read more

NASA has video of the Genesis space probe crashing into the desert after a parachute failed to open. (Requires Apple Computer's QuickTime). The mission was supposed to bring back solar particles for study. Here's hoping that something survived. At least nobody was hurt.

MSNBC is carrying a piece about SBC Communications building a fiber-to-the-premises project in Pabst Farm, Wisc. Video on demand, fast connections--everything you could want from the broadband of the future, right?

Maybe. In San Francisco's Mission Bay development, SBC also provides fiber directly to apartments. But when Jim Hu and I visited, we were surprised to find that consumers still only had the option to get Internet download speeds equivalent to DSL--for the same price as DSL. To the consumer, the fiber made no difference at all. There might be video-on-demand services, but the technology's blazing broadband potential … Read more

Newsweek has a nice scoop on TiVo and Netflix trying to team up to offer movies on-demand through the TiVo service and a broadband connection. No more waiting a pesky two days for that lovely red envelope to come.

Sure, that's progress. Who wouldn't want convenience? But part of the reason I love Netflix is forgetting what I put on my list, getting the DVDs in the mail and tearing them open to see what came. It's the same reason I would sign up for every free catalog I could find when I was 8. Yeah, that'… Read more

Verizon Communications said today that it's offering 3-megabits-per-second DSL speeds for $40 a month, hoping to attract those gamers and other speed demons who are salivating over cable's recent speed hikes.

Part of the good news here is that the market price point for the lower 1.5mbps tier appears to be locked in at about $30--even if SBC Communications pretends that that's a special, one-time-only offer that just happens to be renewed every time.