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ICANN and the Registrars
ICANN, the organization that runs the domain name system for the Internet, is a strange organzation that mainly operates outside public view. It manages several tasks that are necessary to ensure that names, addresses, and other designators that the Internet depends on are unambiguous and consistent around the world. This is a task that Jon Postel once performed for ARPANET in his spare time, but as the Internet has commercialized and grown, this job has become enormous, so ICANN was formed to take it over. Like much of the Internet, domain name management is a multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven process, or should be. This is not just because of some Woodstock generation vision about peace and harmony (although the greybeards of IETF [...]
High-Speed Broadband as Public Utility? Not so fast…
Richard Bennett, our fair editor, has published an excellent piece in Governing.com, taking issue with assertions made by Susan Crawford in her new book “Captive Audience” and echoed by some others, calling for high-speed broadband service to be regulated as a public utility, as in the energy sector: Broadband service is many things, but a “natural monopoly” is not one of [...]
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U. S. Broadband Speed Slightly Better in Latest Akamai Report
Akamai published the Q4 2012 edition of their State of the Internet report yesterday, and it’s pretty much as expected: the trends that have been evident since 2010 are continuing. Globally, Internet connections are growing incrementally faster, and we see this trend in the U. S. The U. S. has picked up one place in the “Average Peak Connection Speed” [...]
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More Articles
Richard Bennett on “The Reality of US Broadband Performance”
Our fair editor has a great piece in TechCrunch, debunking the arguments constantly peddled by Susan Crawford and others about inferior US broadband networks — the supposedly overpriced and shoddy service we get from rapacious providers. If only we could [...]
Exploiting Boston
Predictably, the terrorist attack of the Boston Marathon brought the hucksters out of the woodwork more or less immediately. One of the first stories – and still the worst one, aside from Alex Jones’ “false flag” paranoid fantasy – was [...]
Global Broadband Woes
The New York Times reports that broadband networks in Germany fail to deliver advertised speeds: BERLIN — A government study released Thursday supports what many German consumers have long suspected: Internet broadband service is much slower than advertised. The study [...]
Smartphone Dominance
A picture paints a thousand words. [H/T Fortune]
PBS News Hour Broadband Series
Quick note: I discuss broadband networks on the PBS News Hour today (Thursday.) They’re doing a three-part series on the state of U. S. broadband with a lot of focus on Chattanooga, Tennessee, so I put things in perspective. The [...]
How to Kill Wi-Fi
As we all know, Wi-Fi is a killer technology that’s been enormously important to innovators, consumers, and the Internet. It’s a very humble technology that only tries to replace Ethernet cables as a means of connecting to a local network, [...]
FCC to move on 5 GHz, but no faster nor further than NTIA
At its February 20 meeting, the FCC will likely adopt a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking as a first step toward increasing the amount of spectrum available in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed devices. Up to 195 MHz might be [...]
The Whole Picture of American Broadband
I’m happy with the volume (if not necessarily the quality) of reaction to the report on the state of American broadband networks we just released this week at ITIF, The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand. The report [...]
A crucial engineering fact I’m not hearing from municipal TV white space proponents
Here it is: At 600 MHz, interference travels farther than it does at higher frequencies, all else equal. The corollary to this, which you hear much more often from white space proponents, is that coverage extends farther at 600 MHz [...]
IP Investment, Economic Growth and the FCC
Alton Drew has an interesting post today at his Law and Politics of Broadband blog – his takeaways from a panel discussion he attended at Georgetown University on regulation and transition to Internet Protocol networks. The panel focused on the [...]
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