broadband

The Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to bring its subsidy programs for low income families into the 21st century by offering funds for basic broadband service for financially disadvantaged Americans.

In its January open meeting Tuesday, the FCC adopted an order that will eliminate the FCC's Link Up program, which offers a one-time $30 credit for the installation of landlines or activation fee for cell phones. And it announced a new pilot program that will direct universal service funds collected for these subsidy programs to offer subsidies for basic broadband service.

The commission also pledged to root out waste, … Read more

Windows 8 users will face fewer headaches managing their Wi-Fi and cellular connections, says Microsoft.

Setting up and maintaining Wi-Fi and 3G/4G connections in Windows is frequently a challenge. Wi-Fi users often bump into conflicts between the software provided by the third-party vendor and the software built into Windows. And mobile broadband users sometimes have to scramble to find the right drivers for their cellular setup.

In the latest Building Windows 8 blog, Billy Anders, a group program manager on Microsoft's devices and networking team, explained how Microsoft has tweaked the mobile experience in Windows 8 to help … Read more

Buried among the gadgets, superthin screen OLED TVs, and all the other products we saw at CES this year was something not terribly sexy-looking, but something that will potentially affect millions of people living in rural America.

It's Exede, a new satellite broadband service from ViaSat that just launched this week. Yes, you heard right, satellite, those contraptions that orbit the earth, and until now a very sluggish way to receive Internet service (satellite has frequently been referred to as the Internet service of "last resort").

However, thanks to the launch of ViaSat-1, a next-generation satellite system … Read more

You're one of the 2.1 billion people actively using the Internet.

Looking at the state of the online world throughout 2011, traffic site Pingdom found that the number of Internet users has jumped from a mere 360 million at the end of 2000 and now accounts for 30 percent of the planet's population.

Sweeping across the continents, Asia holds 922 million Internet users, Europe has 476 million, and North America is in third place with 271 million. Drilling down to individual countries, China is on top with 485 million people using the Internet, more than 36 percent … Read more

LAS VEGAS--More music, more magic, more memory, more movies.

That's the marketing message Dish is serving up here at CES, introducing a new kangaroo-themed, whole-home HD DVR system called the Hopper that includes a 2TB drive and can record up to six programs simultaneously while pushing content out to accompanying "Joey" boxes in up to three additional rooms.

The company has also announced a new high-speed Broadband service with partner ViaSat that will launch in the "first quarter." It's called Dish Broadband and it will allegedly provide up to 12 Mbps download and up … Read more

Although some countries around the world argue that Internet access is a fundamental right, one of the "fathers of the Internet," Vint Cerf, doesn't see it that way.

"Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself," Cerf, who is also a Google's chief Internet evangelist, wrote yesterday in an editorial in The New York Times. "There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture … Read more

The number of mobile phone subscriptions has reached 5.9 billion, an impressive figure in a world of 7 billion people.

Surveying the mobile and online landscape in 2011 for a year-end report (PDF), the International Telecommunications Union found that mobile phone subscriptions have now penetrated 87 percent of the entire world and 79 percent of all developing countries.

Among all those mobile phone users, mobile broadband subscriptions number almost 1.2 billion. Such subscriptions have jumped 45 percent each year for the past four year and now outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions by 2 to 1.

To push forward with … Read more

Looking for cheap 3G service for your laptop? It doesn't get much cheaper than this: Walmart has the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go Ovation MC760 for $59.88 shipped (plus sales tax).

As recently as a year ago, this USB modem sold for $149.99.

What I like, and have always liked, about Virgin's 3G options is the lack of contracts and monthly minimums. You pay for airtime as you need it.

That's a huge plus over modems from the likes of Sprint and Verizon, which typically lock you into two-year contracts. (As it happens, Virgin Mobile is actually … Read more

Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable will stop reselling Clearwire's 4G wireless service following their agreement to hand off their unused mobile spectrum to Verizon Wireless for $3.6 billion, CNET has learned.

Part of the Verizon deal gives the cable companies the right to resell Verizon's wireless service, which will become the cable providers' exclusive partner once the spectrum aspect of the agreement goes through, said Time Warner Cable spokesman Alexander Dudley.

Both companies will slowly wind down their Clearwire business over the next six months, and plan to move their existing customers to other options. … Read more