Best Broadband

WiMax Service Will Need Affordable Handhelds Fast rwonline.com
Exploding Demand for Broadband Driving New Requirements for Carriers and Enterprises broadcastnewsroom.com
Huawei becoming bigger threat to established infrastructure vendors fiercewireless.com
TIA Weighs In On Improvements For Second Round of Broadband Stimulus Funding broadcastingcable.com
Hulu Delivers Record Video Views cable360.net
Rogers Unboxes ‘TV Everywhere’ lightreading.com
Is Apple Testing a New iPhone? internetnews.com
Droid Nears Its Million-Device Target gigaom.com
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Lazy cable installers have long draped coaxial over a customer’s hedges and across their lawn instead of being buried or strung properly from pole to home. According to the Baltimore Sun, a new law would require that lazily draped cabled must be buried within fifteen days of a request or the company involved will face a fine. According to the Sun, both Comcast and Verizon lobbyists are locally working to prevent the new law, which would also ban the laying of cable across roads, sheds, trees, or other traditionally lazy install approaches. The two companies are trying different tactics, with Verizon wiggling past with legalese:

While Comcast is arguing that the 15 day window is simply no fair:

Under the proposed law, violating the fifteen day period without negotiating an extension would cost a carrier between $100 and $250 a day. Leaving a wire improperly strung over trees or structures would cost between $500 and $1,000 a day.
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Despite the best efforts by creditors who didn’t like the bankruptcy conditions, Charter Communications has announced that the company has exited Chapter 11 after filing for bankruptcy back in March of this year. The bankruptcy process and reorganization eliminated about $8 billion of Charter’s $21 billion debt load. According to Charter CEO Neil Smit, the bankruptcy will help the company to “remain focused on further enhancing the customer experience.” Unfortunately for Charter, a lousy customer experience is one of the major reasons the company went bankrupt in the first place — Charter consistently coming in last place in nearly every survey that measures customer satisfaction among ISPs and TV operators.
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While Verizon gets most of the attention with their $23 billion investment in fiber to the home deployment, a significant chunk of the fiber to the home deployments in this country is being accomplished by roughly 700 smaller rural telcos, co-ops, and municipal operations. According to a new study by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA), a growing number of rural telcos are moving toward fiber to the node (like AT&T’s U-Verse platform), while many others are moving directly to fiber to the home:

According to the most recent data (pdf) from the Fiber To The Home Council, the total number of homes served by FTTH is now 4.4 million, or 4% of all homes. FTTH service now passes (no last mile drop) 15 million US homes, or 13% of all US Households.
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Mininova Deletes Most Torrents Under Court Threat techdirt.com
Broadband For All May Not Be As Urgent As Many Say businesscomputingworld.co.uk
The Internet is never neutral sun-sentinel.com
Neighbors’ fury as BT chairman is only person in village to get high-speed broadband dailymail.co.uk
French minister urges EU not to abandon digital archive market to US totaltele.com
Nokia could turn into mobile Internet service provider totaltele.com
Next gen receivers to be broadband gaming hybrids? wotsat.com
Dell offers early Wi-Fi support in Chrome OS techreport.com
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Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada last week opined that within the next ten years the game console will cease to exist — at least in its current form. We’re already seeing the life-cycles of gaming consoles extended courtesy of a constant stream of GUI and functionality upgrades delivered via broadband. The next step is making the console simply a dumb terminal with the network and remote servers doing the heavy lifting — a segment OnLive is trying to tap into (though it will still likely take half a decade or more for this to arrive). Combined with the huge rise in casual browser-based games and the success of digital distribution platforms like Valve’s Steam, Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, it’s pretty clear that broadband has changed everything. Just keep an eye on those looming broadband caps and overage charges.
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According to the Washington Post, AT&T’s chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi is upset with some comments made by White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin. In a recent blog post, McLaughlin noted that “if it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it.” McLaughlin is pretty obviously speaking generally about any restriction of data, be it by carrier or government. He’s pretty clearly not saying that cable companies are the same thing as the oppressive Chinese government, but apparently Mr. Cicconi couldn’t (or more likely wouldn’t) make the distinction:

Of course for Cicconi to get upset about misrepresentation is a bit funny, given that’s his full time job as a lobbyist. And if you’ve watched Cicconi work over the last decade in the broadband sector, he does it as well as anyone. Cicconi, so intent on advancing his desire to see Google regulated, recently tried to argue that Google hates nuns, so he’s not one to talk. You also have to recall that the network neutrality debate really began because of stupid comments made by AT&T’s CEO back in 2005, when he clumsily first stumbled into the idea of nickel and diming companies and customers who already pay plenty of money for bandwidth.
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A lawsuit filed last week in Bismark, North Dakota accuses Midcontinent Communications of burying cable on private property without getting the permission of property owners. According to the Associated Press, lawyers for the suit are looking for class action status. AT&T is currently working on a settlement that would pay locals 75 cents per foot of cable buried in roadway ditches on their land, with AT&T of course acknowledging no wrong doing. While the AT&T case involved only about twelve miles of cable or so — the Midcontinent case involves “hundreds and hundreds of miles” of cable, according to the attorney who’s working on both cases.
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Mexico’s MVS Plans Broadband Deal With Clearwire advfn.com
Creating demand ‘crucial to driving broadband’ computeach.co.uk
Pub fined 8,000 for customer’s illicit downloads guardian.co.uk
Next-gen, turf wars and rage over the UK Digital Economy Bill theinquirer.net
Rogers Raises Stakes In Cogeco Cable, Cogeco Inc. multichannel.com
India plans its own net snoop system theregister.co.uk
Console gaming on its last legs – The future is all about the network crunchgear.com
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