Items tagged with Internet
If you’re one of the millions of Americans stuck at home right now due to COVID-19/coronavirus, some of you may have noticed that your broadband speeds have taken a hit in the past few weeks. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that an influx of workers “telecommuting” instead of working from the office, and...
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It goes without saying the coronavirus is claiming lives, wrecking world financial markets, and shutting down amusement parks and sporting events around the country. AT&T has taken the noble stance of removing data caps on its broadband plans -- at least temporarily -- and now Comcast is responding in its own way to...
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Many Americans feel like the state of broadband Internet service in the United States isn't that great. In addittion, in many areas there is only one broadband Internet provider, leaving consumers with no choice but to pay exorbitant fees to carriers like Comcast, Verizon and a select few others. While much of America struggles with broadband
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Comcast has announced that it has completed an investigation that found there was an error in its billing software that led to customers being incorrectly charged for exceeding their data allotments. Comcast says that the customers who were charged by mistake will be given bill credits and an additional $50...
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Some of you reading this may not find it shocking that Comcast is being fined millions of dollars for running afoul of consumer protections. Comcast is a major ISP, after all, and there are no shortages of customer complaints to be found on the web. But would you be surprised to learn that it broke the law hundreds of...
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High-speed internet and robust infrastructure is often the life blood of growing communities looking to attract high tech business and satisfy citizens. In most cases, however, residents and businesses only have access to one, or at the most two, broadband internet providers. You'll usually have access to broadband...
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The Chrome Dev Summit 2018 event is underway now, and one of the big focuses of the event is making the web faster and smoother. One of the ways Google's Chromium team is going to make this happen is with a new tool called Squoosh, a powerful image compression tool that launches almost instantly and offers a simple...
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Some of Google's major services unexpectedly went offline for a period of time on Monday, apparently resulting from a tiny ISP in Nigeria inadvertently hijacking certain internet traffic. Referred to as a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijack, traffic that should have found its way to Google's servers instead pinged...
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Comcast has laid claim to the title of "nation's largest provider of gigabit broadband" with the announcement that nearly 58 million homes and business have access to its gigabit internet service. Comcast claims its rollout to be the fastest deployment of gigabit speeds to the most locations in the country; Xfinity...
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If you've noticed that your streaming media feeds seem a bit slower lately, you are not alone. Others have noticed that online videos suddenly seem to be buffering more often and arriving on devices looking a little blurry. Maybe websites appear to be taking longer to load. If so, it could be because your Internet...
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Charter is not making many friends in high places in New York. Just the opposite, the New York State Public Service Commission announced it has revoked its approval of a 2016 merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable (TWC) due to Charter, doing business as Spectrum, wavering on promises it made...
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The European Union's Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted in favor of draft legislation that would overhaul Europe's copyright rules. However, the concern from several Internet pioneers, civil liberties groups, and others who oppose the legislation fear that it will ultimately be a tool for surveillance and...
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Over the past week, we've reported quite a bit about the rise of cord-cutting and how big cable and satellite TV companies are adapting to the changing landscape. Comcast in particular lost 96,000 customers last quarter, and is looking for new ways to stop defectors from moving to cheaper alternatives.
Last week...
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Each year on April 1 we are a bit skeptical about some of the stuff we read because some of it isn’t real. Cloudflare, the same company that uses a wall of lava lamps to generate encryption keys, swears that its new 1.1.1.1 consumer DNS service is the real deal. The promise is that the new DNS service is the fastest...
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What happened yesterday was outrageous. Officials at the FCC voted 3-2 to repeal net neutrality rules enacted during the previous administration, stripping away consumer protections against ISP abuse. The vote ignored a public outcry that had grown loud and clear leading up to the vote, one that included voices from...
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AT&T is testing out a new way of delivering ultra-fast Internet connectivity to customers that is on par with fiber-optic networks, only AT&T's solution is over the air. Called "Project AirGig," this first-of-its-kind system consists of a contraption that clamps onto existing power poles, negating the need to build...
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The net neutrality debate is hard upon us, but not everyone understands what's at stake. Most tech-savvy folks understand the issues and have a thoughtful position based on their understanding of the technology and how it's used. But some have no position, mainly because they simply don't follow the tech press on a daily basis. This may be
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Verizon has announced that it will begin its rollout of 5G services to customers in certain U.S. markets next year. However, this isn't lightning fast 5G wireless for your smartphone to connect to while you are out and about. Verizon plans to use this 5G wireless service to provide faster internet access to homes and...
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Chairman Ajit Pai, is set to vote on whether it should dismantle net neutrality rules that were put in place under the Obama administration. As this has become a political issue, the FCC is assuredly going to proceed with Pai's plan to withdraw the rules, after...
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Google is all about adding tools to Chrome to prevent annoying things from happening while you surf the web. Chrome already has a bunch of tools to help protect you when you are surfing the web, like telling you when traffic is HTTPS secure, blocking pop-ups, and stopping annoying autoplay videos. In coming versions...
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One of the main problems with rolling out super-fast fiber optic internet services to people around the country is cost. Google has found this out the hard way with its Google Fiber deployments being axed in some areas and TV service cut out of the picture in all new markets. Finishing out the "last mile" of those...
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Microsoft is celebrating now that that its undersea cable between the United States and Spain has been completed. The cable is called the Marea subsea cable, with Marea being the Spanish word for tide. Microsoft and partners ran the cable between the US and Spain to help upgrade the global internet infrastructure to...
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