The simplest way to establish the quality of your DSL connection is to look at the Telecom Wholesale website – www.telecomwholesale.co.nz/maps and enter your address. You will instantly see whether you’re served from an exchange or cabinet, and whether your home is covered by ADSL+ and/or VDSL2 services.
Good background on xDSL, and the map is a stunner.
“Has the public interest been served in the teapot tape affair?; and an Australian journalist on reporting the Pike River disaster.”
Totally rhetorical that first question.
In the past, non-practicing entities (NPEs) ??? firms that license patents without producing goods ??? have facilitated technology markets and increased rents for small inventors. Is this also true for today???s NPEs? Or are they ???patent trolls??? who opportunistically litigate over software patents with unpredictable boundaries? Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives.
Yet another exclusive legislative right gamed and abused by greed.
Speaking at an Industry Partnership panel this week, Arris Chairman and CEO Bob Stanzione stated that the cable industry’s cost to deliver each bit is plummeting very quickly with the rise of DOCSIS 3.0. According to Stanzione, costs are decreasing at a rate that is roughly inversely proportional to traffic increases — meaning that if downstream traffic consumption is jumping upward at a rate of 50%, the cost to deliver that traffic is headed downward at approximately the same rate. That runs in stark contrast to ISPs looking to bill by the byte, some of whom have tried to unsuccessfully argue that flat rate pricing simply isn’t a sustainable business model in the face of growing traffic.
Oh, dear, no scarcity, no margin. Perhaps they’ll have to resurrect “bandwidth hogs” to justify charging extra.
Modern music is one huge buffet from which modern kids can pick and choose any bits they like from the past 50 years. Everything is accessible and nothing is fresh. Music just isn’t that important any more – or so it seems.
In our consumer segment, cable customers account for the majority of our revenue,” VM said in the report, going on to specify that “cable broadband internet is more profitable than our television services”.
“Easier piping stuff than providing it, says Virgin Media” Well, that’s obvious isn’t it.
First, it defines a “domestic domain name” as a domain name “that isregistered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain nameregistry, or other domain name registration authority, that is locatedwithin a judicial district of the United States.” Since every dot-com,dot-net, and dot-org domain is managed by a domain name registry in theU.S., the law effectively asserts jurisdiction over tens of millions ofdomain names regardless of where the registrant actually resides.
Read it and weep.
According to figures out today from Gartner, more than 50 percent of all smartphones bought by consumers in Q3 were built on the Android OS. That growth has been at all other platforms??? expense: the figures indicate that every other smartphone platform has declined in marketshare over a year ago.
The BBC is a public broadcaster, and its charter sets out the requirement for everything it does to meet a “public value test.” Ofcom, the independent regulator that oversees the BBC, is charged with “[making] sure that people in the UK get the best from their communications services and are protected from scams and sharp practices, while ensuring that competition can thrive”.
So what did Ofcom do? Naturally, it listened to the public, ignored the uncompetitive rent-seeking proposals from the commercial sector, adhered to EU law, and rejected the proposal.
Well, that’s what they did in a parallel universe. In this universe, Ofcom accepted the self-serving arguments of the companies they’re meant to be regulating, ignored the public whose interests they were meant to be safeguarding, and gave the BBC what it asked for.
Why did it do this? It’s a secret.
But not any more.
Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a seven-inch slate,” Phillips said. “It does nothing very well, save video playback, running various Android apps, and making the business of Amazon shopping alarmingly fun and easy.
Exactly. And I don’t think the iPad snobbery, “lacks polish” is going to be a barrier at $US200.
Hamish MacEwan 