Best Broadband

Mobile broadband 75% slower than advertised mobilechoiceuk.com
Three Startups That Want to Deliver a Fat Mobile Pipe salon.com
J.D. Power: Verizon Business No. 1 in Customer Satisfaction cable360.net
Nortel’s LTE Patent Goldmine lightreading.com
Analysts Doubt Future of Comcast’s WiMAX Offering newsfactor.com
Forrester: Worst May Be Over for U.S. Tech Market wirelessweek.com
European Commission gives Carphone the nod to snap up Tiscali broadbandgenie.co.uk
Trapeze Invents Location-Based Security networkworld.com
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While broadband video service Joost had an ambitious launch, the operation has since landed with a thud at the feet of more popular alternatives such as Hulu, which is now the second most popular Internet video site behind YouTube. Founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom of Skype and Kazaa fame, the service hoped to revolutionize the broadband video industry, but struggled with slow broadband speeds, internal turmoil and a contractually-limited catalog. Last winter, Joost ditched their P2P approach for a more Hulu-esque flash-based website approach, though it didn’t help. The company has since been shopping itself around to cable and satellite operators, and now has announced they’re shuttering their consumer service entirely — instead focusing on developing video services for existing ISPs.
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Most line sharing regulation was gutted by the FCC’s deregulation of the DSL industry back in 2005, but some agreements remain grandfathered. Baby bells often argue that the markets they serve are just so gosh-darned competitive now, they should no longer be mandated to share network access with competitors at protected, affordable rates&#46 The problem has been that the carriers often game this “forbearance” request process to get what they want from the agency, usually to the detriment of smaller competitors.

In many instances, baby bell lawyers consistently modify their request after it gets submitted, giving smaller competitors with fewer legal resources and FCC lawyers no time to keep up. Baby bell lawyers also like to pull their request for regulatory relief at the last second if it looks like it’s not going to be approved, which is something Verizon recently did after the FCC already spent $150,000 in man hours reviewing the request.

A new order (pdf) changes things, as Commissioner Copps explores in a statement:

The FCC still hasn’t fixed their “deemed granted” rule, which gives baby bells automatic approval if the agency can’t agree on a decision within one year plus a 90 day extension (easier to do if you keep changing your request). That’s been a particular annoyance to small carriers for years. Of course to grant relief from regulation the FCC has to know how competitive a market is before granting the request — something they really only pretend to do given they don’t have accurate competition data.

Once you understand how dysfunctional the FCC has been, and how easily baby bell lobbyists have been able to game the system — it becomes fairly clear why we’ve consistently ranked in the middle of the pack when it comes to broadband speed, penetration, and price. It also becomes clear just how big of a job new FCC boss Julius Genachowski has when it comes to crafting a functional national broadband policy.
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If you recall, AT&T recently took heavy criticism for changing their wireless TOS to prohibit video streaming, then telling us those changes were a mistake before reverting to an older TOS that also banned streaming. The carrier also crippled the iPhone Slingbox application, telling the press the application “could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network.” So a number people are now wondering why AT&T has no problem with Major League Baseball streaming games via AT&T’s 3G network. Consumer Group Free Press quickly jumped into the fray, alleging that AT&T was violating network neutrality:

AT&T responded by first denying they’re crippling any apps (which they are) and insisting it was an issue of fairness:

AT&T doesn’t even bother to answer the question, nor do they explain what goes into deciding which wireless applications get official approval. While AT&T’s decision is certainly somewhat based upon bandwidth constraints, capacity is sometimes falsely used to defend anti-competitive tactics on the content front (metered billing used to protect TV revenues comes to mind). One possibility is AT&T may not appreciate Slingbox functionality competing with future U-Verse DVR to iPhone ambitions. Another is Sling didn’t pay enough to be treated “fairly.”

AT&T’s admission of a strained wireless network amused Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner, who blogged that he thought AT&T was engaged in a double standard. AT&T plans to spend billions in 2009 on capacity upgrades, after which they’ll have less of an excuse for being arbitrarily selective about which streaming video applications are acceptable — and which ones usher forth wireless network armageddon.
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According to a new survey commissioned by the Fiber To The Home Council, home sellers who have fiber to the home connections unsurprisingly have a market advantage when it comes to selling their houses. According to the survey, 82% of home buyers who’ve had FTTH elsewhere rank FTTH as the leading real estate amenity, a number that drops to 70% among those who’ve never had fiber. The complete list puts FTTH (and broadband in general) ahead of community security, fitness services, pools, golf courses or other amenities — which aren’t to be confused with necessities, like oh — a roof that doesn’t leak. “The message to the real estate market is to put a sign on the lawn and a line in your ad saying, ‘This place has fiber,’” said Joe Savage, president of the Fiber-to-the-Home Council.
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Over at the Apple blog, Dave Greenbaum laments the rise in frequently unreasonable caps and meters in an age of increasing bandwidth use, and hopes Apple gets involved in the debate in order to protect its “brand.” Greenbaum’s particularly annoyed with his ISP in Lawrence, Kansas, Sunflower broadband, who imposes monthly caps as low as 3GB a month with overages as high as $2.00 per gigabyte. At their website, Sunflower defends the practice by saying that 49.46% of their customers use less than 1 GBs of bandwidth a month, and 86.98% use less than 10GB. Or at least that was the case in 2007, the year Sunflower is pulling their statistics from.
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It has been interesting to watch cable industry executives talk about online video lately, few really understanding that broadband and piracy have changed video forever, and that there’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle. Some execs, like Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, seem to think they can simply take the existing business model (with its bi-annual rate hikes) and move it online. One of the more vocal opponents to free online video is Rainbow Media CEO Josh Sapan, who thinks the idea insults paying customers:

Asked whether there would be disenfranchised video consumers who don’t necessarily want to subscribe to cable in order to get online video service (Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s current plan), Sapan insists it’s “a teeny number” and “really minuscule.” Two things most “cable guys” seem to have in common is an unwavering belief in the infallible power of cable to ward off online video, and the belief that they still actually have control in the face of 50Mbps connections, a growing number of video alternatives, video-streaming game consoles, and piracy.
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Infamous BitTorrent tracker and portal The Pirate Bay this morning announced that the company is being purchased by a Swedish company named the Global Gaming Factory. The Pirate Bay tells Torrent Freak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own, instead using a third party tracker with torrents hosted elsewhere. In a post over at the Pirate Bay blog, the folks behind the site contend that “if the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it.” In a statement, the new owners say they “would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”
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The Pirate Bay Has Been Bought By A Public Company techdirt.com
Broadband Plan Focus Of Genachowski’s First Public Meeting As Chairman multichannel.com
Is Broadband a Civil Right? huffingtonpost.com
Parliament to probe Digital Britain plan zdnet.co.uk
Chatty workers actually are best telecommuters msnbc.com
The EU Stabs Apple in the Back seekingalpha.com
Palm Pre sold 300,000 in June theinquirer.net

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According to a post over at the Dev Team blog, the group has already managed to jailbreak the new iPhone 3GS — but they’re not releasing it yet. Why not? Apple. The team expects that Apple is coming out with a 3.0.1 firmware release shortly that will fix the iBoot-family bug the group use to accomplish it. “We can jailbreak the 3GS right now,” says an anonymous poster at the blog. “But making our jailbreak public at this point in time would benefit relatively few people.”
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