Posted 10/10/08 at 08:08:38 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The small town of Monticello, Minnesota has emerged victorious in its legal battle against TDS Telecom. Unimpressed by the DSL and cable services being offered by TDS Telecom, the town with a population of 10,000 people decided to build a fiber network on its own.

But this riled up the telecom company’s feathers. TDS quickly adopted a browbeating approach and filed a suit against the town over the proposed fiber network. The company argued that revenue bonds can not be used for something – broadband internet – that isn’t actually a “utility”.
 
The court has dismissed TDS’ suit. The Judge said that the town has full authority to fund the project with bonds (worth $26.4 million).

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9

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Internet, broadband, legal, dsl, law suit, tds telecom, monticello

Posted 08/27/08 at 10:24:20 AM by Chris Moody

It seems that in the rapidly approaching future I may have to pay extra to my ISP to download my collection of Steam based games when I upgrade my PC or wipe a hard drive. Forget about streaming movies over the net. In fact, best keep your quality internet time to surfing text pages, email without pictures, and IMing. Okay, not quite that bad, but close, if some ISPs have their say about it.
The Associated Press covered a story in which a man in New York changed from his cable company to his phone company based on the offer of a year of free service on a two-year contract, an attractive deal. Soon afterr Frontier Communications quietly updated its policies saying it would limit internet activity each month to 5GB. That’s the same figure that several other companies are trying out.

This story is particularly interesting because it’s a phone company trying the cap, not a cable company. Since in this man’s particular area the cable company is Time Warner, which is trying a pilot program in Beaumont Texas with a 5GB cap on its cable service for new users, it might not help to switch even if he can get out of his phone company contract. That is a scenario that we could see repeated in many areas if this catches on.

These scenarios are tough sells to customer that aren’t interested in having additional fees tacked on to their bills, especially after the fact. If consumers are left without a choice because all of their area ISPs are capping their downloads, it’s customers that lose out and it becomes pretty easy for ISPs to charge more money for less service. 5GB of data isn’t much at all.

Do you think this will backfire on ISPs? Sound off below.

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18

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broadband, cable, ISP, bandwidth, dsl, cap.

Posted 08/14/08 at 10:30:16 PM by Mark Edward Soper

eWeek brings two pieces of sobering news on the broadband front to our attention this week: much slower median speeds than other advanced nations, and a big shortfall in new customers.

The US may think of itself as a broadband leader, but that's a perception that doesn't fit the facts, suggests a new report from the Communication Workers of America (link in PDF format). Their SpeedMatters.org website offers a free upload/download test, and the data from that test was used to compare US broadband speeds with typical speeds for other countries. According to SpeedMatters, the US is 15th in the world in broadband speed, with a median speed of 2.3Mbps, compared to world leader Japan at 63Mbps, South Korea at 49Mbps, Finland at 21Mbps, France at 17Mbps, and even Canada at 7.6Mbps. Median upload speed in the US is just 435Kbps (corrected 8-15-08).

Don't blame me, by the way. I use Insight's 10.0 (10Mbps) broadband service, and the SpeedMatters test clocked my download speed at 9347Kbps, and my upload speed at 952Kbps, both very close to the rated maximum. The problem is that 10Mbps or faster speeds (Insight also offers 20Mbps service at an extra charge) are not typical in today's marketplace.

To learn more about why the US is sucking wind in the Broadband Olympics, and what's happening to new broadband customer demand, catch us after the break.

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26

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broadband, cable, dsl, CWA, speedmatters.org, speed test

Posted 10/01/04 at 12:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

In the PDF archive of the October 2004 issue, you can find:

• The 10 Best Utilities You've Never Heard Of!
• Doomr 3 Engine Tech-splanation!
• Desktop Deathmatch!
• Exclusive How-To: Make WinXP work like Windows Longhorn in 4 easy steps!
• Ask the Doctor
• Rig of the Month
• The Watchdog
• And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

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0

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vista, windows, broadband, cable, benchmark, Verizon, pdf archive, October, doom 3, 2004, longhorn, dsl