Posts Tagged ‘telecom/news’

Broadcasters fighting back against wireless spectrum reform

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

As the wireless industry makes its case for more spectrum licenses, it’s facing stiff opposition from television broadcasters who warn that any reallocation of the band would be “terrible public policy.” TV brings “vast efficiencies to our national communications infrastructure,” eight broadcast groups led by Sinclair Media told the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, “through their ability to serve ‘one to many’ in small bandwidth segments, and those efficiencies cannot be achieved in any other way.” Ditto, add a slew of state broadcasting associations . “It would be a sad irony if, in response to false warnings of a looming broadband spectrum crisis,” dozens of them wrote to the FCC, “the Commission were to abort free, over the air, digital television service, which provides the most obvious savings of disposable income that consumers might use to adopt broadband.”

Pirate Bay moves to decentralized DHT protocol, kills tracker

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent tracker is down for good—but that’s by design. The Pirate Bay has been intermittently unavailable for last few months as copyright holders have pressured its various ISPs to cut off service to the site in the wake of Swedish court decisions against the site’s operators. Even though BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer network, it relies on .torrent files that are typically hosted on trackers—and The Pirate Bay’s tracker was one of the largest. When the site was down, the tracker was compromised, and the crew behind the Bay decided that the system relied too much on a single point of failure.

Verizon and AT&T continue slap fight over “Map for That” ads

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Verizon and AT&T are playing out their 3G coverage spat in court, with Verizon asserting that “the truth hurts” when it comes to AT&T’s 3G coverage. Verizon’s statement is just the latest in the legal battle that started earlier this month when AT&T filed a lawsuit over Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” ad campaign—the gloves are off, and it’s clear that both companies are willing to go to great lengths to push their own marketing agendas. If these two companies were five-year-olds, AT&T would be screaming “VERIZON STARTED IT!” The network began running ads in October—meant to directly target Apple’s and AT&T’s ” There’s an App for That ” ads—that showed a Verizon coverage map next to AT&T’s. Verizon’s map showed significantly more 3G coverage, and the ad stated ” There’s a Map for That ” with the implication that AT&T’s devices are no good if you can’t get any coverage out in the middle of Podunk City, Iowa. The ads even stated flat out that AT&T’s customers were “out of touch” where 3G coverage wasn’t available. Oh snap, Verizon!

Ars responds to Big Cable: TV networks nothing like an iPod

// November 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Yesterday, the cable industry’s top lobbyist made his case to the Ars audience about the virtues of selectable output control . Today, media historian and Ars author Matt Lasar explains why he’s not convinced—and why iPod upgrades aren’t a good analogy for what SOC backers want to do. ” Warning! Hollywood wants to break your TV!” ” No! We just want to give you more choices!” Good grief. Who could have imagined that a debate based on the kind of cables you shove into the back of your television set would get this hot? But here we are: Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Electronics Association inveighing against Hollywood in the Huffington Post , and Kyle McSlarrow of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association taking me to task for suggesting that a cable industry proposal to shut down analog streams could “hobble” some home theater systems. First, I’m sorry; I’ll never use the h-word again. But I’m concerned about what big cable and the Motion Picture Association of America propose. It could be bad not just for a few TV consumers, but for everybody.

Broadband stimulus cash going quickly—who’s making a grab?

// November 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Attention all broadband stimulus grant shoppers: the good news is that the Obama administration says it’s fast-tracking the schedule to fork out over seven billion dollars in high speed Internet stimulus money. The other news is that if you haven’t applied for this windfall yet, you’ve only got one more chance. Instead of handing out that dough in two additional rounds, as originally intended, the new plan is to do it in just one more—and it’s probably coming soon. “This will get the funds out the door faster to stimulate the economy and create jobs,”  declared Jonathan Adelstein, once with the Federal Communications Commission and now an administrator with the Rural Utilities Service. “It gives applicants and communities a greater opportunity to come together to form networks and find more creative ways to connect to the global economy through broadband.”

Verizon’s $350 early termination fee rubs senator wrong way

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Verizon has gotten on the bad side of US Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who publicly criticized the company this week for its decision to significantly jack up early termination fees (ETFs) for some customers. Not only did Klobuchar send a letter to Verizon president and CEO Lowell C. McAdam calling the move “anti-consumer and anti-competitive,” she also wrote the Federal Communications Commission asking for a review of the decision. Verizon has its reasons for the increase, however, and points out that customers are more than welcome to purchase devices at their full retail price with no threat of an ETF. Verizon announced last week that, beginning November 15, its early termination fees for customers buying “Advanced Devices” (smartphones) would double from $175 to $350. Every month that passes, that fee is reduced by $10. This means if you buy a Droid with a two-year contract with Verizon, but decide to switch providers after 12 months, you’ll find yourself shelling out $230 to Verizon for exiting the contract early—still higher than the entire old fee altogether.

Go: new open source programming language from Google

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Every computer programmer has a copious pile of opinions about how their programming language of choice could be improved. Who doesn’t want more syntactic sugar, better runtime performance, and faster compilation? That’s one of the reasons why there are so many programming languages. Creating a compiler is practically a rite of passage for computer science students, and half of the top vendors in the software industry eventually make their own programming language or extend an existing one to the point where it’s marginally recognizable. Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don’t fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection. The slim minority of language geeks who have rebelled against bracist tyranny and stumbled over to innovative languages like Haskell and Erlang are doomed to toil in relative obscurity.

More successor than sequel: hands on with Assassin’s Creed 2

// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

“It doesn’t really feel like a sequel,” Ubisoft’s Charles Randall told me as I sat down to play Assassin’s Creed 2 for the first time at a recent press event in Toronto. “It feels like a whole new game.” And that should be welcome news. Because while it wasn’t a terrible game by any stretch of the imagination, the first Assassin’s Creed certainly had its problems. At times it felt like the game’s ambitions were far greater than what the developers were actually able to create, leaving gamers with an ambitious but somewhat disappointing experience. And that’s something Ubisoft has worked very hard to fix in the sequel.

Big cable: move millions from phone subsidies to broadband

// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The cable industry is proposing a sweeping measure to simplify the nation’s subsidy system for rural phone service providers. Make it tougher for providers to get Universal Service Fund High Cost program subsidy money, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association recommends, in areas where an unsubsidized wireline service is available via a cable company or similar provider. Paying USF support to carriers who compete with unsubsidized wireline competitors “is both inequitable and inefficient, and can easily be addressed in a targeted fashion,” the NCTA wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. Millions could be saved—money potentially redirected to programs that boost broadband rollout and competition.

Intel Microserver latest to crowded physicalization party

// November 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Our recent look at the idea of using ARM processors to pack large numbers of low-power, high-density Web servers into very little physical space generated quite a bit of interest, and it seems that a lot of people are thinking along these lines. Indeed, every time we cover the so-called ” physicalization ” fad—i.e., placing multiple tiny systems in a rack unit, instead of running multiple virtual machines on a single 1U system—we get a fresh wave of feedback on just how seriously datacenter builders are taking this idea.

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