bandwidth

When the late Steve Jobs introduced iOS 5 during his last keynote address in June, he touted iCloud as something that "just works" and that users would have nothing to learn. As it turns out, he was right, but only on his first point.

Not only is there a lot to learn about iCloud, but users have little control over it once they start. So before you jump in, it's important to know a few things about it.… Read more

Your home's Internet router is an idiot. It is the one device you have that, theoretically, could accurately tell you how fast your Internet connection is over time, and who in your house is using up the bandwidth. But it does none of that.

It's not in the name of simplicity, either. The software that's baked into demented routers is not, for the most part, user-friendly. It's just dumb, because dumb is cheap.

Adventurous geeks who have the right hardware can upgrade a router by reprogramming it with an open-source replacement operating environment, like DD-WRT or … Read more

The war of words over usage-based pricing on Internet service continues to heat up.

AT&T General Counsel Wayne Watts fired off a response to an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) by Netflix General Counsel David Hyman criticizing the need to charge consumers a different price based on the amount of data they consume at home.

The piece, which ran on Friday, said bandwidth pricing was "bad news for consumers and threatens to slow down the innovation powering today's Internet economy."

Watts, however, argued that the continued need to invest capital in … Read more

A new program developed by a Duke University grad student promises to double the battery life of cell phones and other mobile devices by tweaking how they tap into Wi-Fi networks.

As described by its creator Justin Manweiler in a Duke Today story, downloading videos and other hefty content via Wi-Fi can cause a huge drain on the battery of a mobile device. This drain can be especially severe in crowded cities and other locations where multiple devices have to battle for available bandwidth.

So in an example cited by the story, downloading a movie in midtown Manhattan chews up … Read more

With more of Apple's Mac line slated to include Thunderbolt and the availability of some Thunderbolt devices, Apple has been releasing Thunderbolt-related software and firmware updates to tackle bugs. In addition, Apple has made available a Thunderbolt cable, which is required but not included with some Thunderbolt devices like the Promise Pegasus RAID drive. Some people may be curious about the need for the special cable, and they may be taken aback by its steep $49 price tag.

When a signal is transferred digitally over an electrical wire, it is done in individual bits (ones and zeros) that are … Read more

Netflix has unveiled a new feature that lets mobile users change their video quality as a way to manage how much bandwidth they use under their mobile data plans.

The feature, called simply "Manage Video Quality," is specifically aimed at 3G and 4G users concerned about bumping into the caps on their data plans.

Since March, the feature has been available universally in Canada, where the data caps tend to be lower. Over the past week or so, Netflix has rolled out the feature in the United States, but only on a limited test basis, so many members … Read more

Vimeo, one of the few online video hosting services to both survive and thrive in a YouTube-dominated world, announced at the CES 2011 show in Las Vegas today that it will now allow members of its paid Vimeo Plus service to upload videos of up to 5GB in size. That's enough for a 2.5-hour-long movie in high definition.

The announcement comes at a time when Vimeo is trying to make itself a friendlier destination for long-form content as well as for living room viewing. This fall, Vimeo launched "Couch Mode," a big-screen-friendly version of its video … Read more

Engineers from the University of Washington are working to optimize network bandwidth consumption during video calls. The aim is to bring the data rate down to 30kbps while optimizing video signals such that they are clear enough for deaf or hard-of-hearing users to decipher sign language.

Led by the MobileASL team, the video compression project increases image quality around the face and hands to better allow users to understand the semantics of the American Sign Language (ASL). The technology also uses the motion sensor to detect if the person is signing in order to reduce battery drain during video calls. … Read more

To deal with the flow of information over the next 10 years, the capacity of the Internet will need to increase by a factor of a thousand, according to VeriSign.

The U.S. security company, which administers one of the root servers of the Internet, has started a project to deal with the expected increase in bandwidth demand.

Project Apollo was announced by VeriSign in March, with the aim of strengthening the .com and .net domains. The company's chief technology officer, Ken Silva, talked to CNET sister site ZDNet UK to give details of how VeriSign plans to increase … Read more