Over a year ago, we offered a handy guide for explaining net neutrality to your relatives. This holiday season, that conversation is a lot more fun. In the past 12 months, the FCC has issued the strongest open internet rules this country has ever seenāand the fun doesnāt stop there.
Here in the US, telecom giants like Verizon and AT&T fight for their share of customer data plans. But Japanās own telecom outfits are embroiled in an additional head-to-head: selling robots.
The FCC has approved AT&Tās $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV. That means the second-biggest cell carrier is officially merging with the biggest satellite TV provider.
How does Charter convince us that buying Time Warner Cable is good for people like you and me? Infuriatingly. One of the consumer benefits of the merger, according to Charter, is that theyāll actually obey the FCCās net neutrality rules if it passes. How gracious! Were they planning to disobey if they donāt get theirā¦
Since their inception 60 years ago, satellites have gone on to become an indispensable component of our modern high-tech civilization. But because theyāre reliable and practically invisible, we take their existence for granted. Hereās what would happen if all our satellites suddenly just disappeared.
America woke up to some frustrating news today. Charter, the fourth-largest cable company in America, wants to buy Time Warner Cable, the second-largest, as well as Bright House, the tenth-largest. If the deal goes through itās going to affect come 23 million internet customers directly. Not in a good way.
A semi-rural New Jersey community about 45 miles outside of New York City seems like an unlikely home for the most important breakthroughs in telecommunications of the 20th century. But thatās exactly what happened at Bell Labsā Holmdel facility in the 1960s.
Do you like vintage maps? Do you like the internet? Then you'll love this vintage-inspired world map of the underwater cables that connect the entire planet.
While Kansas City and others gloat about their gigabit internet from Google Fiber, a small internet service provider in Minnesota is about to offer stupid fast 10-gigabit connections to consumers. US Internet just announced that the new service will be available to 30,000 households in Minneapolis next summer. It'llā¦
Despite Harrison Ford's best attempts to enlighten us, Air Force One remains a mysterious place. Pretty much the only time you get to see the inside of the president's awesome airplane is when the White House photographer offers a peek. Ever notice how weird the phones look?
You've heard the cautionary tales about dialing 911 on your cell phone. A call about missing children in Illinois gets routed to Canada. A stroke victim in New York is only located after a grueling eight-hour search. Locating 911 calls in 2014 is a byzantine process that involves generating a fake phone numberābut aā¦
Nearly all of the world's international communication is dependent on undersea cables that carry information from coastal nation to coastal nation. This map shows how those cables connect the world, from massive continents to tiny islands.
While you weren't looking, the internet got super fast. I'm not talking Google Fiber fast. I'm talking Star Trek fast. Today, it's not just possible to download a movie in seconds. New technology makes it easy to download dozens of movies in fractions of a second. Fast is almost too slow a word to describe such speed.
A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC's net neutrality rules that would've made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework.
It can get a little bit annoying when people ramble on about how Facebook and Google are taking over the world. They're just websites! But when those websites start to buy up other things, say, the very cables that connect the people of the worldāwell that's actually pretty alarming.
New Yorkers whose smartphones are presumably dead from hurricane power outages-but still. When was the last time this happened in the industrialized world? 1993?
Ever wished your phone was a little more... intimate? Fabian Hemmert, a design researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, certainly does. "Mobile phones use so little of our sensory abilities," he says. "They are great for information exchange - text, video, and speech - but they provide no feeling ofā¦
Telenoid R1, the robot brainchild of designer Hiroshi Ishiguro, is what I imagine it would look like if Casper the Friendly Ghost got lucky with a sperm. It could also be the future of telepresence in Japan.
Every ISP's discussions of pricing plans, net neutrality or piracy invoke the same faceless villains: the bandwidth hogs. BenoƮt Felten, analyst and blogger, has been working in telecom for over a decade, and he wants proof these monsters even exist.
The chatter surrounding a Google Voice launch was downright feverish Thursday, prompting many to speculate the event was imminent. Details were sparse, and the launch didn't come, but Google is definitely ready to do something based on new info.
