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Bandwidth

As expected, The Pirate Bay returns

The Pirate Bay, the highly controversial BitTorrent search engine, re-emerged Tuesday in typically defiant fashion after Hollywood film studios helped trigger a day-long blackout of the site.

The Web site, which is targeted for elimination by content owners nearly the world over, presumably has found a new bandwidth provider. The service, which has helped millions of people locate and eventually download scores of pirated films, had been temporarily subdued Monday after German authorities ordered its then-Internet host to cease providing Web access to the site.

On Tuesday morning, the Pirate Bay posted a photo of a cat and a note--in … Read more

Light and quick downloading

Small enough to run off a USB key, but powerful enough to download any torrent in a jiffy (if it's got enough seeders), uTorrent 2.0 is easy on the eyes and smart on your network. The memory footprint for uTorrent is very small, and system resources are barely touched. While you're torrenting, you shouldn't be surprised to find that other programs that use your Internet connection slow down, but the latest version of uTorrent has an answer to that. Called uTorrent Protocol, or uTP, it's a built-in throttling that detects network congestion and slows down … Read more

Comcast launches bandwidth meter pilot

Comcast on Tuesday announced the launch of a pilot program for its Internet customers to keep track of how much bandwidth they're using. The company is finally introducing a Web-based metering program, which will let users check these numbers from any browser.

This comes a little more than a year after Comcast began enforcing a strict 250GB cap on download bandwidth, exiling those who went over twice for an entire year before being able to get Internet service again. In the interim the company had offered no official tool for customers to see how close they were getting to … Read more

Rutger Hauer to Hollywood: Don't fear tech

Rutger Hauer has seen things you people wouldn't believe.

The Dutch actor, who issued some of the best-known lines in sci-fi history in his role as a murderous artificial life form in Ridley Scott's 1982 film "Blade Runner," has a vision of the future that's laden with technology. He's different than many in Hollywood in that he doesn't think digital technology will destroy filmmaking.

On the contrary; at a time when the major film studios are wringing their hands over online piracy and the growing ease with which pirated movies can be shared … Read more

Test your ISP's speed

All Internet service providers try to tout the speed you get if you give them your money and it's easy enough to compare speeds with dollars and find the best value. But do you really get the speeds they advertise? Here's how to test to see how fast your ISP really is, and research the speeds of your provider's competitors.

Speed tests abound on the Internet. Some are more complicated than others and their accuracy can be questionable. I like the speed test at dslreports.com. You don't even have to know what kind of service … Read more

Apple, Google Voice, and number portability

There's quite a bit of finger pointing about why Apple banned the Google Voice application from the iPhone store. And now that the FCC is officially investigating we can be assured it will end up in a legal morass.

In trying to figure out what exactly is at the heart of the problem (don't say Apple's "control issues"), I heard an interesting perspective on this brouhaha from Todd Barr, vice president of marketing at Bandwidth.com, a nationwide CLEC voice carrier that sells voice and data services to businesses. (Note: Fellow CNET blogger Matt Asay … Read more

Bandwidth.com's investment in FreePBX paying dividends

In 2008, Todd Barr left Red Hat to try his hand at an open-source start-up. Now, one and a half years later, Barr is doing just that, hoping to turn the telephony world upside down at Bandwidth.com, a company that operates a proprietary voice network, but is betting a great deal on the open-source FreePBX project.

This shouldn't be surprising, given the increasingly intertwined fates of proprietary and open-source software. But it's interesting to watch Bandwidth.com--a 10-year-old company that sells business voice and data services--incorporate open source into its strategy. After all, the company recently built … Read more

Comcast's consumer usage meter still in the labs

Comcast's Web-based broadband meter, which was rumored to be released back in January, is still not available to consumers. According to a Comcast representative whom I spoke with earlier Tuesday, it's still not ready for prime time, and is undergoing further employee trials before being released to the public.

Once released, the meter will let customers of Comcast's high-speed Internet service monitor how much of their 250GB monthly bandwidth quota has been used. This will help keep them from going over that limit--something that results in a termination of their service upon the second offense.

Comcast imposed … Read more

Cable's numbers don't add up for metered billing

For an industry that's supposedly struggling to keep up with customer demand for more bandwidth, the nation's two largest cable operators seem to be doing pretty well.

This week Comcast and Time Warner Cable each reported strong earnings, in spite of the fact that Time Warner has said recently that it needs a new business model to handle growing broadband demand.

Comcast beat analysts' expectations and increased profits 5.4 percent to $778 million. Time Warner Cable's profits fell 32 percent, but this was mostly due to costs associated with the split from its former parent company, … Read more