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…
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 every rural…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 FiOS.
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…
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:…
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.
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…
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.
It's not all about Google Fiber: Cincinnati Bell is now offering gigabit internet to customers in its home town, too.
Between the net neutrality debate and the Comcast/TWC merger, high-speed Internet access is getting more attention than ever. A lot of that attention is negative, and rightly so: Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty good job of divvying up the nation to leave most Americans…
Verizon says that it's doing its customers a big favor and boosting FiOS upload speeds to match the download speeds. That's great news if you're a FiOS customer and upload a lot. However, just because Verizon says things will get faster doesn't necessarily mean they will.
AT&T's plan to roll out next-gen fiber optic cables nationwide as a replacement for its traditional copper-based telephone networks is great in most respects—save for the fact that it won't support the government's special telephone service for national emergencies.
Google is planning to offer Wi-Fi networks in the cities where it supplies fiber internet, according to documents being circulated to the next 34 cities on Mountain View's broadband hit list.
This cute little green cable may look innocuous, but it can carry data along its core at a breathtaking 800Gbps.
