U.S. broadband adoption registers significant growth
by Stevie Smith - Jun 18 2009
Broadband Internet adoption rates are on the up in the United States, according to the results of a new survey published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project – but so is related pricing.
The organisation’s April survey found that 63 percent of adult Americans now have high-speed broadband connections, which represents a 15 percent year-on-year increase when gauged against figures from April 2008, and a 54 percent increase against American Life Project figures gathered since 2007.
Evidently consumer desire for high-speed broadband and the subsequent adoption boost outweighs accompanying price increases, which, according to survey respondents, have seen average monthly service bills rising from $34.50 USD in May of 2008 to $39.00 USD in April of 2009.
It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows.
It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.
The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon.
Opening the Wireless Internet: The Importance of Carterfone
It’s a fascinating case that carries huge implications for today. For decades, AT&T had prohibited consumers from attaching anything but its own phones to its network. In 1968, AT&T tried to bar the use of a Carterfone, which linked a mobile radio to a telephone.
But the FCC labeled AT&T’s move “unduly discriminatory†and allowed consumers the right to install devices of their choice. That decision enabled the creation of the fax machine and the Internet modem. Wu wrote: “The same rule for the wireless networks could…stimulate the development of new applications and free equipment designers to make the best phones possible.â€
Now it looks AT&T could be getting embroiled in another historic shift. And history, and perhaps popular opinion, do not seem to be on their side once again. Decades ago Carterfone changed the future of communications. Today, Google Voice could stand for another watershed moment.
Believe it or not, the Internet actually turns 40 this year; more specifically, its actual birthday points to Wednesday, as the first connection between two UCLA computers--pioneered by Len Kleinrock and his team of engineers--took place on that date back in 1969. Originally named Arpanet, the network was an experimental project for the U.S. Department of Defense, initially exchanging meaningless data.
To read the full timeline, read the AP list here. To learn more about Internet pioneer Len Kleinrock, head here.
As part of Intel's Sponsors of Tomorrow campaign it has teamed up with Sky to launch a new series of webisodes profiling the technologies and innovations set to shape the world of tomorrow.
U.S. Loosens Grip On ICANN, Domain Chaos To Follow?
The U.S. has relaxed its grip on the Internet, thanks to a new agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Widely hailed as an internationalization of Internet governance, the move could also make it more likely consumers will see a huge increase in Global Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).
Some businesses fear an ICANN proposal that could result in the creation of an unlimited number new gTLDs--things like .football, .sailing, and .softdrink. The additional new gTDs might require companies to purchase large numbers of new domain names to protect their trademarks.
This could represent a considerable expense for business and create a new and continuing game of cat-and-mouse between trademark owners and infringers.
How Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?
Finally, the World Wide Web will live up to its name. The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that Web sites written in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and other non-ASCII character sets will be able to have their Internet domain names displayed in their own languages truly makes the Web a global worldwide network.
For the past 40 years (the Internet turned 40 this week) the Internet and the Web have been the exclusive domain of English language addresses. For non-English speaking countries it has been the real world equivalent to forcing them to use English language stationary.
No longer will entire countries be forced to use Latin-based characters and their Web addresses and e-mail addresses will now be as recognizable as their telephone book. The move is being heralded by ICANN as the biggest technical change to the Internet since its birth.
A super high-speed global Internet devoted solely to science and education has just expanded to include half the countries of the world, and yes, you at home can be jealous.
The Taj network, funded by the National Science Foundation, now connects India, Singapore, Vietnam and Egypt to the larger Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) global infrastructure, and "dramatically improves existing U.S. network links with China and the Nordic region," according to an NSF statement.
Some data for geeks: The upgrade beefed up U.S.-China network service by a factor of 4, from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps.
GLORIAD's Taj Network is not the same as "Internet 2," a domestic project aimed at connecting U.S. scientists with one another.
With two months to go until the FCC is scheduled to unveil its plan for improving broadband service across the U.S., agency officials seem to be settling on relatively modest speeds for rural areas.
Officials at the Federal Communications Commission looking at setting a floor for Internet speed to which all Americans have access, particularly in rural areas which still rely on dial-up Internet service. FCC officials are looking at speeds in the 2-4 mbps range, said Blair Levin, a former telecom analyst who’s overseeing the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. Mbps, or megabits per second, represents the millions of bits per second that flow across Internet lines to your PC.
“That’s kind of the range. A lot of people say that we ought to have big goals of 100 mbps to every home. When you look at the countries who say they’re doing that, what they’re doing is offering 100 mbps to some homes,†Mr. Levin said Monday on the CSPAN show The Communicators, which airs this weekend.
2010-01-04 13:27:48 last modified: 2010-01-04 13:36:06
The state of the art circa 1989
In 1989. the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used its presence at an international computer visualization conference -- SIGGRAPH 1989 -- to paint a vision of distance bing eliminated by network and computing technology.
The Science by Satellite demo resulted in this video to showcase early attempts at what today we call 'telepresence'. Specifically, NCSA's founding director Larry Smarr (now director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) led the demo that linked conference rooms thousands of miles away in order to do real-time videoconferencing.
At the time, this was only possible via satellite, but the NCSA video demonstrated how scientific collaboration could be done in the future -- using transmission over high-speed optical fiber networks. Calit2's Smarr is featured in several segments of this video.
According to Sen. Al Gore, then-Chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, NCSA had demonstrated "what it might be like to have high-speed fiber-optic links between advanced computers in two different geographic locations."
Thank You Sid..... Your stuff is really informative. As you said internet plays an important role so that we can do business online nowadays.
The latest thing is that, Video conferencing becoming popular in both business and personal communications, so we do believe it is the next logical step in the evolution of business communications, and regardless of how quickly the economy improves, video conferencing solutions will continue to grow, simply because of the benefits and convenience they instill in business environments. cloudslam09is the premier international conference on cloud computing, networking, storage and analysis. The Cloud Slam Conference is global cloud computing event, covering latest trends and innovations in the world of cloud computing.
10 Fool-Proof Predictions for the Internet in 2020: Researchers expect more users, sensors. But will the 'Net be more secure?
Forty years after it was invented, the Internet is straining under the weight of cyber attacks, multimedia content and new mobile applications. In response, U.S. computer scientists are re-thinking every aspect of the Internet's architecture, from IP addresses to routing tables to overall Internet security.
There are many views about how to fix the Internet's architecture, but there's widespread agreement about many aspects of the future Internet. Here's our list of 10 fool-proof predictions for what the Internet will look like in a decade.
Federal Communications Commission officials laid out a series of priorities for U.S. broadband development, calling for faster broadband speeds to schools and technology to allow consumers to monitor their electricity usage at home via the Internet.
A recent government survey found that about 65% of U.S. households currently subscribe to high-speed Internet service. Consumers who don't subscribe usually say they either don't have a PC, find high-speed service too expensive or simply have no interest in subscribing.
Although some information about the plan has trickled out, few details have been released on the most anticipated issues in the plan. It still isn't known what the agency will propose to increase competition among Internet providers or how it will overhaul an $8 billion-a-year federal phone-subsidy program.
Claffy said the internet was born in the defense department and wasn't built for billions of users. IP addresses will run out in two years unless we move to the next generation architecture, she said.
She also posed concerns the web has gone largely unregulated, though we entrust it with our most personal data.
"This was invented in the 60s for a military test bed," Claffy said. "It was never intended to leak out of the lab and have you doing your banking on it, much less my medical stuff."
The National Broadband Plan that will be submitted to Congress March 17 already appears be impossibly broad and technologically difficult to roll out, based on what's known about the proposal so far, several analysts said Tuesday.
F.C.C. Plan to Widen Internet Access in U.S. Sets Up Battle
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.
The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.
According to F.C.C. officials briefed on the plan, the commission’s recommendations will include a subsidy for Internet providers to wire rural parts of the country now without access, a controversial auction of some broadcast spectrum to free up space for wireless devices, and the development of a new universal set-top box that connects to the Internet and cable service.
11 Ways Tomorrow's Internet Will Change Everything
In a long essay for cerebral Web magazine The Edge David Gelernter explores the future of the Internet, which he says is about to take on a far more significant role in human society. "No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now," he writes. His predictions--and warnings--have set off a wider debate about what the Internet does and how we interact with it.
The Cloud Will Take Over Gelernter sees cloud computing eclipsing personal machines. "Because your information will live in the Cloud and only make quick visits to your personal machines, all your machines will share the same information automatically; a new machine will be useful the instant you switch it on; a lost or stolen machine won't matter — the information it contains will evaporate instantly."
Web Will Kill Colleges Gelernter says classes will be exclusively online, with no need for a physical campus. "Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses)."
Complete Loss Of Privacy It's a possibility, warns Gelernter, that the total integration of our lives into Twitter-like programs "will make it even easier than it is today for software to learn the details of your life and predict your future actions. The potential damage to privacy is too large and important a problem to discuss here. Briefly, the question is whether the crushing blows to privacy from many sources over the last few decades will make us crumple and surrender, or fight harder to protect what remains."
The FCC’s National Broadband Plan and its Effects
Get ready for a broadband makeover. We look at how the National Broadband Plan would change the Internet, movies, gaming, phones, schools and more.
As of June 2009, America ranked 20th in household broadband penetration, at 60 percent. This put the US well behind countries like the UK (67%), Canada (76%), and South Korea (95%). The low broadband numbers in the US affect more people than just Joe consumer, too; Health care and public education are also suffering greatly due to a lack of deep broadband coverage.
Now that medical records are digital, you need a broadband infrastructure that can properly support communication between doctors, hospitals, and patients. And while most schools are connected to the Internet, connections in most public schools aren’t nearly as robust as they should be.
Furthermore, many schools are still without some form of wireless connectivity, so computers are still chained to desks in the computer lab or library.
Senator Joseph Lieberman has proposed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), a bill that would give the president the power to control or even shut down the Internet in emergency situations. Citing the need for cybersecurity, Lieberman said in a press release that the U.S.’s “economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies — cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.â€
The bill requires that U.S.-based companies such as Google and Yahoo, as well as broadband providers and software firms, comply with any and all measures that the government sees fit in an emergency.
The power and capacity of computers have grown exponentially, but that growth can't continue without improving the machine and the power to its backbone.
The world is almost out of IP addresses--or at least it's almost out of the IPv4 addresses that IT admins and users are most familiar with. Fortunately, IPv6 has been developed to exponentially expand the pool of available IP addresses while also providing a few other benefits.
To address issues with the current IP protocol in use (IPv4), and to add features to improve the protocol for the future, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has introduced IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6). Let's look at a few ways that IPv6 will come to the rescue and save the Internet.
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