Items tagged with ISP
There's a lot of funny business taking place on the web's back end these days. Just ask Netflix, the popular streaming video service, which reluctantly inked a mulit-year agreement with Comcast to ensure that its video would be delivered to Comcast's subscribers without a speed degradation. Prior to inking the deal...
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Is the FCC trolling ISPs (on our behalf)? The agency is considering raising the standard minimum speed for what is considered “high-speed Internet”, which would potentially force ISPs to work faster to roll out better service to more areas. Currently, broadband Internet speed is defined as 4Mbps, but according to an anonymous FCC...
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Google’s push for gigabit Internet service has, directly or indirectly, created pressure on ISPs to explore the same, and Cox is the latest company to dip its toe in the gigabit waters and plans to get the service out to its first residential customers as early as Q4 this year. According to the Wall Street...
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No need to brace yourself for this one, but in case you were wondering, Americans are typically dissatisfied with their cable and Internet service providers (ISPs). That won't be shocking to most, but lest there was any doubt, numbers from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index show that cable companies and ISPs are...
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More or less as expected, the FCC voted to advance the new net neutrality rules that would allow ISPs to charge certain web companies more for “fast lanes” for content. It’s a decision that net neutrality advocates are unhappy with because they see it as an unhealthy compromise, while net neutrality...
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The future of television is upon us. With pay-TV transforming, slowly but surely, service providers have little choice but to come to grips with the realities surrounding their business. More and more individuals are growing up on a steady entertainment diet of Netflix and YouTube, and once they grab jobs and own...
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The FCC has confirmed that it will hold a May 15 vote on a new set of policies governing net neutrality and ISP behavior -- but according to the Wall Street Journal, the commission's proposed regulation will effectively kill the idea of a level playing field. The Wall Street Journal reports that the proposed rules would prevent ISPs from blocking...
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It looks like rumors that hit the Web a couple of months ago have proven true: Comcast has just upgraded its Blast package from 50Mbps to 105Mbps - an increase of 6.25MB/s to 13.13MB/s in megabyte terms. As a free upgrade, this kind of jump is nothing short of "awesome", although some might balk at the lack of an...
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Over the past 12 months, Netflix performance has been dropping steadily across most of the major ISPs. Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have all recorded significant performance drop-offs. The issue has been particularly acute on Verizon, where measured bandwidth rates have fallen a high of 2.3Mbps in October 2013 to 0.97Mbps in January,...
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The fight over net neutrality is ongoing, and the most recent punch thrown took the form of a letter that several U.S. senators, including Senator Al Franken, wrote to new FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to act quickly to fight back against a recent court ruling that vacated the anti-discrimination and...
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Over the past few weeks, net neutrality has seen serious challenges from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Verizon won a court case in which the FCC's rules on net neutrality were effectively gutted, while AT&T introduced a new pricing plan for content providers called Sponsored Data, which pushes companies like...
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Not all ISPs are built alike, a fact that's been proven time and time again ever since the broadband era began. But today, that matters more than ever. We're streaming video, music, and in some cases, even games. We need reliable Internet, and we need an ISP that's willing to deliver that.
Finding a good ISP isn't...
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You’d think that if you lived in Mountain View, home of Google, you’d have killer Internet access. And if you were living there several years ago you’d be right, as the search giant installed free WiFi all over the city in 2006. It was no doubt a delightful perk, at least until last year when the...
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Google is shaking up the ISP field in a big way with its Google Fiber service, and some of the fruit it has shaken loose pertains to AT&T launching a competing service in Austin, which Google has slated as one of the cities to get its gigabit Internet and TV service soon. AT&T is launching a 100% fiber network...
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Months after Google surprisingly selected Provo, Utah as one of the first cities to get the Google Fiber treatment, and weeks after the city officially closed the deal with Google, the search giant-come-ISP said in a blog post that service is coming by the end of the year. Before that happens, though, Google needs to upgrade Provo’s...
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Anyone who has tried to host their own website from home likely knows all-too-well the hassles that ISPs can cause. Simply put, ISPs generally don't want you to do that, preferring you to move up to a business package (aka: more expensive). Not surprisingly, the EFF doesn't like these rules, which seem to exist only to upsell you a product,...
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At the moment, the rollout of gigabit Internet services, arguably spearheaded by Google last summer, has been modest. However, as we discussed just last week, it does seem to be picking up in pace, and with a fantastic side-effect: other ISPs are taking notice, and that's bound to mean good things for the consumer...
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We've covered the NSA revelations and subsequent government petitions at some length, but here's a new twist to the story of the government's pervasive monitoring program -- a view of the activity from an ISP's perspective. According to Pete Ashdown, the CEO of XMission, a Utah ISP, the company received its first FISA...
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When Google first unveiled its 1Gbit fiber Internet service last summer, it seemed unlikely that such speeds would become common anytime soon. However, there was great hope that with Google's pressure, other ISPs would be pushed towards offering their own 1Gbit services. This past April, we did see some evidence of...
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Whether or not Google launched its Google Fiber Internet service as a legitimate business venture or as a massive trolling measure to shake up the broadband market (as some believe), its effect has been evident in how ISPs are competing. Leveraging a partnership with the city of Seattle and its fiber optic network...
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You know, this is finally starting to feel like a trend. And it's certainly a trend we're happy to get behind. The trend of high(er)-speed Internet is seemingly sweeping the developed world, with fiber-based solutions and ISPs offering 1Gbps+ speeds becoming less of an exception compared to yesteryear. Now, even customers Down Under will soon...
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A few years ago, when Google was determining which city to launch its pilot Google Fiber program, cities all over the country went all-out trying to persuade the search giant to bring all that fantastical bandwidth to their neck of the woods. And with good reason: Google Fiber offers gigabit Internet speeds and even TV service, all at prices...
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