A U.S. surveillance court has extended a controversial telephone records dragnet while the National Security Agency works to wind down the program on orders from Congress.Congress voted in June to rein in the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. telephone records, but the USA Freedom Act allowed for a six-month transition away from the program. On Monday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an FBI application to continue the records collection program until December.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The availability of really fast broadband in your neighborhood could increase your home’s value by more than 3 percent.High-speed fiber broadband service, with 1 Gbps download speeds, can add more than $5,400 to the value of an average U.S. home, according to a study commissioned by the Fiber to the Home Council Americas (FTTH), an advocacy group made up of fiber equipment vendors and broadband providers.That $5,400 figure is approximately equal to adding a new fireplace, half of a new bathroom or a quarter of a swimming pool, according to the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Carnegie Mellon University.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PayPal is fine-tuning its policies after a recently announced plan to make unsolicited prerecorded calls and texts to users drew questions and concerns from customers, regulators and consumer advocates.Earlier this month, PayPal generated controversy when it proposed amendments to its terms that would allow it make unsolicited calls for marketing and other purposes. The Federal Communications Commission told PayPal that the proposed terms, which would go into effect July 1, might violate federal laws because unsolicited robocalls are only legal if a company has obtained written or oral consent from consumers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When discussing the ongoing revitalization efforts in Detroit, it's hard to miss the name Dan Gilbert. The founder of Quicken Loans, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a Detroit native himself, Gilbert's investment firms have funded dozens of tech startups in the city and turned its defunct old buildings into shiny new workspaces that look like Silicon Valley transplants.Until last year, what Detroit lacked in this daunting task to become a tech hub was access to affordable, high-speed broadband, the kind that Google Fiber was famously bringing to other cities around the country. So, rather than pray for Google to arrive or incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to spontaneously change their pricing and services, Gilbert invested in two Quicken Loans employees who were crazy enough to suggest building a fiber network themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Americans with historically lower rates of Internet access are making progress in getting online, but there are still persistent disparities between rich and poor, and between English-speaking Asians and other ethnicities, according to data from the Pew Research Center released today.Roughly three-quarters of American households making less than $30,000 a year are online, compared to fully 97% of those making $75,000 and up. A similar 97% figure was found for English-speaking Asian households, compared to 81% for Hispanic households and 78% for those of non-Hispanic black people. (The number for white households was 85%.)+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco warns of default SSH keys shipped in three products + Wi-Fi router's 'pregnant women' setting sparks vendor rivalry in China +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Predictions from net neutrality opponents that regulations would choke off broadband investment haven’t come true, with several service providers announcing expansions in the four months since the U.S. Federal Communications Commission passed new rules, the agency’s chairman says.FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler defended the commission’s net neutrality rules Friday, saying that it would be “unthinkable” for the FCC to allow broadband providers to operate without consumer protection, interconnection and other basic rules. The FCC is focused on expanding broadband coverage and competition and increasing speeds across the U.S., he said, but the commission’s net neutrality rules won’t get in the way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If operators are to build 5G mobile networks with download speeds at 10Gbps and above, they are going to need a lot more spectrum—but getting it won’t be easy.The amount of spectrum allocated to 5G will determine how fast networks based on the technology will eventually become. Until recently, only frequencies below 6GHz have been considered for mobile networks, mostly because they are good for covering large areas. But there’s now a growing need to unlock new spectrum bands in the 6GHz to 100GHz range too, attendees at the LTE and 5G World Summit conferences in Amsterdam heard this week.The use of spectrum in these bands is immensely important for 5G networks to be able to offer multiple gigabits per second, Robert DiFazio, chief engineer at wireless R&D company InterDigital Communications, said. By raising communication speeds, they are also expected to help lower latency in mobile networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We've lost our collective ability to be patient. What used to be a virtue is now anathema because we have become so accustomed to having what we want when we want it, that we've simply forgotten what it's like to "wait it out."Need proof? We shifted our viewing habits to over-the-top video services quicker than it ever took us to walk to the nearest Blockbuster – yet many have already forgotten the formerly inconvenient task of walking, and now complain that an instance of buffering while streaming video means the service is "too slow." To wit, recent industry-sponsored research found that a poor experience such as buffering or poor-quality video drives almost 75% of viewers to give up in watching within the first four minutes of playback.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The slow, buffering video stream that you're seeing during some peak hours may not be caused by the technical limitations of the internet at all, according to a pro-net neutrality activist group.BattlefortheNet says it has new evidence to prove that ISPs are deliberately slowing the internet down at the interconnections between ISPs and other networks, such as Transit Providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), in order to leverage fees from those other networks."AT&T is not provisioning enough ports" to accept the traffic it is requesting, S. Derek Turner of Free Press told me.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies providing audiovisual content and apps over the Internet are becoming increasingly influential in Africa, to the point where traditional telecom operators are essentially being forced to accommodate them.A growing number of telecom company executives themselves believe that so-called over-the-top (OTT) service providers, delivering apps and multimedia content over the Web, will only increase in influence, according to an Ovum survey.The Digital Africa survey, presented at Ovum’s recent Connecting West Africa conference in Dakar, found that 35 percent of telecom company executives polled believed that OTT service providers will be very important in five years, compared to only 18 percent who think that they are very influential today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two trains made of fiber, copper and code are on a collision course, as the widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android’s lack of support for a central component in the newer standard.
DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it’s an acronym for “dynamic host configuration protocol,” and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google’s wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don’t support DHCPv6 for address assignment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Major internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Time Warner are intentionally slowing internet service for U.S. customers, according to the Guardian.The newspaper cites a study by BattleFortheNet, a pro-net neutrality activist internet group.Degraded service
The report, released on Monday, "looked at results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers," the Guardian says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With bottles of bubbly and a purification ceremony, a Google-backed undersea cable was given a warm welcome on a beach in Japan last week, a critical step in building the highest capacity data link in the Pacific ever created.The 9,000-kilometer FASTER cable will have a peak capacity of 60 terabytes per second (Tbps) when it enters operation next year, joining Japan with Oregon on the West Coast of the U.S.Apart from Google, the project is backed by telecom carriers KDDI of Japan, SingTel of Singapore, Global Transit of Malaysia, China Mobile International and China Telecom Global.At the landing site in Shima, Mie Prefecture, east of Osaka, a machine pulled the cable onto the beach from an offshore cable-laying ship while stacks of armored pipes, which shield the link from anchors near the shore, were piled nearby.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here's another use for graphene—wrap transistor wires with it and boost computer chip speeds.Scientists have discovered that replacing tantalum nitride, the existing wire sheathing material between transistors, with graphene allows chips to exchange data faster.It's yet another use for this super-material. I've written about graphene before in a post titled "Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips."Thin graphite material
If you're unfamiliar with this breakthrough material, graphene is the world's most conductive substance. It's better than copper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sprint says it has stopped throttling its heaviest data users on congested networks, in what appears to be the first tangible benefit of the Federal Communications Commision’s new net neutrality rules.Sprint had added a throttling clause for its top 5 percent of data users last year, saying they might see slower speeds in congested areas. But the carrier has now ended this policy, The Wall Street Journal reports, saying it wanted to steer clear of the FCC’s Open Internet Order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Communications Commission said it plans to fine AT&T Mobility $100M – the agency’s largest fine ever -- for severely slowing down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans.
The FCC’s investigation revealed that millions of AT&T customers were slowed for an average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video. And the company failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised, the FCC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Say it ain’t so: FBI probes alleged Cardinals-Astros hackEven America’s pastime isn’t safe from cybercrime: the FBI is investigating allegations that the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into computer systems belonging to rival baseball team the Houston Astros. The investigation centers on the baseball operations database, which is said to contain statistics, video and other vital information about players.Airbus joins the Internet satellite crowdCount European consortium Airbus in on the business of delivering Internet service via satellites, the Verge reports. It’s going to design and build 900 orbiters for Richard Branson’s OneWeb, which aims to provide LTE, 3G, and Wi-Fi to rural communities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Etsy is trying out a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding service that, if successful, could help the company grow its business by expanding the number and type of items available for sale on its site.Fund on Etsy, announced Tuesday, comes as Etsy faces pressure to deliver returns to shareholders as a publicly traded company. Etsy’s stock began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in April, but the company has yet to report a profit.The company grew its revenue by 56 percent last year to US$196 million, but it lost more than $15 million. In this year’s first quarter, it grew its revenue 44 percent year-on-year to more than $58 million, but it had a net loss of nearly $37 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Civil liberties faction walks out on facial recognition talksU.S. talks aimed at crafting rules on responsible use of facial recognition technology have fallen apart after a united front of civil rights and consumer groups walked out, saying the bare minimum of their demands on behalf of consumers aren’t being met. That position, accord to a statement issued by the coalition, is that “people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement—and identifying them by name—using facial recognition technology.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell has added Pluribus Networks to its lineup of disaggregation partners.Dell will now offer Pluribus’ Open Netvisor Linux operating system on its S6000-ON and S-4048-ON 10G/40G switches. This is an addition to the Cumulus Networks, Big Switch Networks, Midokura and VMware packages Dell already supports on those switches.Dell’s strategy is to make its merchant silicon-based hardware appealing to cloud providers who usually opt for bare metal switches running a variety of operating systems that they can easily replace or expand for scale or other requirements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here