comcast

On the first day of the iPhone 3G massive amounts of fanatics went home frustrated. Activation problems meant a lot of folks couldn't go home with a working iPhone. Some didn't even have a working phone at all, as the old phone got deactivated but the new one was not brought into working order. Meanwhile FCC goes Medieval on Comcast and announces the four freedoms of the Internet will be enforced. Listen now: Download today's podcast

iPhone 3G goes on sale http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-iphone-3g-goes-on-sale-plagued-by-activation-problems/ http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080711-launch-woes-turn-iphone-parousia-into-activation-apocalypse.html … Read more

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend sanctions against cable company Comcast for allegedly blocking access to file-sharing traffic, the Associated Press has reported.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet," the AP quoted Martin saying. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

The AP said Martin would circulate the order to his fellow commissioners on Friday, who will vote on the measure at an open meeting on August 1.

Comcast has been sharply criticized in recent months for slowing down peer-to-peer … Read more

Talk about an odd couple. Cable giant Comcast said Wednesday that it will work with Vonage to help ensure Vonage's Internet phone service works well over its broadband network.

The Comcast/Vonage alliance follows other similar announcements made with other Internet companies, as the cable operator tries to convince customers that it's not looking to kill competitive services that run over its network.

Last year, Comcast was discovered slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. At first the company denied it was filtering traffic. Then it admitted it had slowed down some types of traffic to manage congestion … Read more

It's being hailed as the greatest Wimbledon final in history. This is a tennis tournament that has been played since 1877, and supposedly yesterday's five-set match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal topped them all. I say supposedly because my Comcast + TiVo box decided that midway through the fifth set was a good time to stop recording the match. This is merely the latest but--since I'm one of the 12 tennis fans left in this country--certainly the most annoying of the bugs I've encountered with Comcast + TiVo service over the past month. If the promised software … Read more

Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet.

That is if Internet service providers can figure out how to keep up with the video-driven bandwidth demand on their networks. Peer-to-peer technology provider BitTorrent says it can help.

Video consumes more network resources than any other media distributed on the Web. Even poor-quality video from YouTube eats up more bandwidth than e-mail, music downloading, and voice over IP services. And when you throw full-length high-definition video into the mix, you're talking about even more bandwidth. Depending on the compression used, a single … Read more

Starbucks once had visions of turning its outlets into entertainment centers where customers sipped coffee and listened to the latest tunes. But that hasn't exactly worked out according to expectations. CNET News.com's Greg Sandoval explains.

Webware's Rafe Needleman spoke with the senior executive at Comcast charged with a new attempt to integrate television, the computer, and the phone.

And as one of the first software executives to battle Bill Gates, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor has seen many sides of Microsoft's co-founder. Take a listen to some of his recollections on the eve of Gates' final … Read more

In the Bay Area for the Connections conference this week, Comcast Interactive Media President Amy Banse stopped by the CNET Webware offices for a discussion on her division's Web strategy.

As was pointed out to me numerous times when I led our conversation into non-Web site territory (such as Net neutrality and customer support), Banse's Interactive group is quite separate from the Comcast video team, the Internet service provider business, and the telephone business.

It's her group that acquired the business-to-business video platform service ThePlatform, the movie ticket marketplace Fandango (which itself just acquired Movies.com), and … Read more

Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney's Walt Disney Internet Group.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.

"We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com," Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. "… Read more

Correction: This story misstated a quote from Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs and policy for Verizon. Tauke said that it was in the best interest for the FCC to make a decision on the Comcast/BitTorrent case. He did not say that it was in the best interest for the FCC to make a decision against Comcast.

LAS VEGAS--Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications said Tuesday that it's important for the Federal Communications Commission to take action in the Comcast debate over slowing down certain forms of peer-to-peer traffic in order to prove that … Read more