-
Tech NewsNewsFrontier’s Bankruptcy Shows Why ISPs Shouldn’t Be in Charge of the Internet
Let’s state the obvious: Internet in the U.S. sucks. Unless you already have fiber, you’re probably stuck with cable, DSL, or no internet at all because no ISP wants to expand into your area. If you live in a rural area and are lucky to get some form of broadband, you’re probably paying an exorbitant … Continued
-
Tech NewsNewsAT&T Just Screwed Over DSL Customers and Rural America
As of Oct. 1, AT&T has stopped offering DSL as a new service, according to USA Today. Existing DSL subscribers, who connect to the internet via copper phone lines, will be grandfathered in. DSL is definitely old technology, but many people, especially in rural areas, still rely on it for internet access. Internet service providers … Continued
-
Tech NewsWhen Google Fiber Abandons Your City as a Failed Experiment
There’s a glob of stringy, black rubber spilling out of the street at the corner of Speed and Fernwood in Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood. A block away on Rosedale, the same spongy substance that covers most of Google Fiber’s buried lines in the city snakes in and out of the asphalt. Google Fiber, Alphabet’s gigabit broadband … Continued
-
Tech NewsNewsComcast Blames Nationwide Outage on ‘Fiber Cut’
If you’re a Comcast customer, you might have already realized your internet is borked today. That wave of sadness and despair you’re presumably experiencing seems to be the result of a few cut fiber cables, according to a tweet from Comcast. If it makes you feel any better, the company says it’s trying to fix it. … Continued
-
Tech NewsGoogle
Oregon’s Botched Google Tax Break Shows Why You Don’t Bend the Knee to Tech Giants
As city officials around the US continue to carve out incentives that might convince Amazon to build its new headquarters in their town, lawmakers in Oregon are having regrets about their own efforts to please Big Tech. A new bill there would repeal tax breaks that were intended to lure Google to deploy high-speed fiber—but ended … Continued
By Rhett Jones -
Tech News
Report Shows AT&T Ignores Poor Neighborhoods in Cleveland
There is a digital divide in America. Households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes are five times more likely not to have access to broadband than those in the top 20 percent. Yet this divide is often thought of as a rural versus urban divide. Yes, it’s expensive and difficult to run cables to … Continued
By Libby Watson -
Tech News
Comcast’s New Gigabit Service Isn’t the Internet of the Future You’ve Been Waiting For
Everybody wants faster internet. Instead of investing in better technology like fiber, however, providers like Comcast seem intent on trying to squeeze more out of their aging cable networks—and charging customers higher and higher fees for marginally better speeds. The latest example of this irksome trend comes from Chattanooga, Tennessee where Comcast will soon offer … Continued
-
Tech NewsHow to Build a Better Internet
I pay Time Warner Cable $70 a month for broadband that works 70-percent of the time. Just for fun, I recently upgraded to the company’s best, fastest service—300 Mbps—and guess what. After a year of speed tests, I can confidently say that I don’t get those speeds. Ever. This is all too common in the … Continued
-
Tech NewsGoogle
Google Wants to Make Landlines Relevant Again with Its New Fiber Phone
If you’re living with high-speed internet in one of Google’s Fiber cities, your landline telephone might yet live to see another day. Today, Google announced Fiber Phone, a cloud-based phone number you can use from any tablet, laptop, or phone—including a landline. It’s like Google Voice on bad steroids. The proposition is fairly straightforward. You … Continued
By Bryan Lufkin -
Tech News
Engineers Break Record for Fiber Optic Data Transmission Using New Breed of Laser
Think your fiber is fast? Think again: A team of engineers has smashed the world record for sending data down an optical fiber at room temperature when using a new breed of laser, achieving speeds of up to 57 Gbps. Researchers from University of Illinois have been using the vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser to push the … Continued
-
Tech NewsFormer Aereo CEO Wants To Blanket Your Home In Gigabit Internet
Aereo was the bad boy of the cord-cutting revolution, until it was declared unlawful by the Supreme Court and scrapped for parts. Undeterred by that monumental setback ex-CEO Chet Kanojia has another idea ready to challenge the status quo—and it’s a system called Starry. The Starry Station, pictured above, is part of that system, and … Continued
By Darren Orf -
Tech NewsGoogle
AT&T Is Rolling Out Gigabit Fiber to 38 New Cities
AT&T has been offering gigabit-speed fiber internet since 2013, but unless you got very lucky with the internet genie, you probably haven’t been in the service area. Starting today, 38 cities will have the chance to download their Steam games really quite fast. The pilot version started in Austin two years ago, and is currently … Continued
By Chris Mills -
Tech News
New York City Is Very Pissed About Verizon’s Failed FiOS Rollout
If you live in New York City, you most likely don’t have access to Verizon’s very 21st-century fiber optic internet service, FiOS. And you should be because Verizon told the city in a contract that it would deliver fiber to every household by 2014. As of today 75-percent of New York City is still without … Continued
-
Tech News
Comcast Treats City to Fiber After Suing It For Installing Fiber
Insulting news, residents of Chattanooga! Comcast will soon offer its 2 Gigabit-per-second fiber internet service to some 200,000 customers in the area. Why insulting? Because just a few years ago Comcast sued Chattanooga’s utility board for building a fiber network, forcing residents to use its own super slow internet instead. Comcast eventually lost the lawsuit … Continued
-
Tech NewsCould Humble Milkweed Replace Down Feathers In Your Outdoor Gear?
Down is the most effective commonly-available insulator for outdoors apparel. But, it’s also expensive, loses its ability to insulate when wet (if untreated) and — there’s no way around this — is horribly cruel to most of the ducks and geese who donate their underfeathers. Now, there may be a real alternative: milkweed. Top photo: … Continued
By Wes Siler -
Tech News
After Billions in Subsidies, The Final Verizon FiOS Map Is Bleak as Hell
As Verizon inches towards the end of its long-promised FiOS expansion, we can finally get a look at all the places these heavily trumpeted fiber cables have actually ended up. Behold the final(ish) Verizon FiOS Fiber map. It’s bleak as hell. The map itself comes from Fiber For All (you can see the full interactive … Continued
-
Tech NewsObama’s Plan to Loosen Comcast’s Stranglehold on Your Internet
President Obama glad-handed some network engineers in Cedar Falls, Iowa today. No, it was not a campaign stop. (He’s done running for president.) The commander-in-chief’s visit to the local utility office of Iowa’s first gigabit city is a mission statement: America needs more internet service providers that aren’t called Comcast. Oh, thank God. This mission … Continued
-
ScienceSpace & SpaceflightScientists Are Sending Data-Carrying Spiral Lasers Across Entire Cities
Twisted laser beams may just be the key to unlimited bandwidth in the future—and now a team of scientists has used them to beam data through the air, from one side of Vienna to the other. We’ve already seen twisted laser beams transmit data at speeds of over 1.6 terabits per second via fiber-optic cable. … Continued
