government

But bring some snacks for the wait. CED Magazine has a column on the Bells getting interested in high-quality video over DSL, particularly if ADSL2+ comes along. One of the driving factors may be high-quality compression codecs like Microsoft's Windows Media 9 and MPEG-4 AVC.

But for context, let's go back to one of my own 1999 stories about SBC's "Project Pronto" investments: "This is going to make streaming video real," Steve Dimmett, vice president of marketing for SBC, told me. "This is going to be video on demand."

The Bells … Read more

Ma Bell head Dave Dorman sat down with us for an hour today to talk about how he's turning the company around after the collapse of its cable business, the sale of the wireless business, and his own withdrawal from the traditional consumer phone business. The future is VoIP, he says. On the business side, he's got twenty-some billion dollars of revenue from data and wholesale products, and that's still looking good. But forget about consumer infrastructure, he's happy to work with the cable companies from now on.

That means that on the consumer side, the … Read more

Electronic Arts says it has sold more than 1.3 million copies of Madden NFL 2005, and signed up 315,000 new accounts for online play, in the game's first week of release. This online tournament biz has been one of broadband's quiet success stories (and is helping change the culture of mainstream gaming). You hear a lot more about EverQuest and Counter-Strike in the gaming community, but in fact there are now hundreds of thousands of regular sports fans joining online game groups who wouldn't be caught dead swinging a +1 sword online.

A representative from the New York Times late Thursday contacted me with some breaking news. The venerable paper of record was posting rare video clips and interviews from inside Iraq's Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf.

For people following the war, this was a glimpse inside the last hold-out of radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army. While news reports today differ over whether the militants have given up one of the holiest Shiite shrines, the video clips were a testament to how the Web can offer a parallel, multi-dimensional element to the news.

The media has been … Read more

According to research firm Parks Associates, ISPs have helped install more than 1 million home networks for their customers, and are on track to reach 2 million by the end of this year.

That's a drop in the bucket, I'd say. There are now 29 million households with broadband in the U.S. Google is temporarily failing to find me what proportion of those have a little Wi-Fi hub going, but I'd bet it's far higher than 2 million. Wi-Fi is simple plug and play these days, and there's not much role for ISPs to … Read more

Much broadband gaming news. The new version of Valve's Counter-Strike, for a while the most popular online computer game in the world, hit the Net last night. The developers used BitTorrent to help distribute the game, easing demand on their own servers, according to Broadband Reports.

Valve's been having a string of bad luck. Last year, a hacker broke in and stole source code for much of their upcoming release Half-Life 2 (which is about as eagerly anticipated as the average new Beatles album). This week, they apparently uploaded the entire script for Half-Life 2 along with some … Read more

A group of programmers has retuned the iTunes software so you can search for and download MP3 files from people on your network (if they're also using iTunes). At the average college, that's probably, oh, seven billion billion tracks available at any given time. Apple and the record labels aren't going to be happy about this one.

The software is called OurTunes, and follows a similar concept called MyTunes that got blocked by Apple a few months ago.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal said today that file-sharing software is legal, as long as the developer doesn't have any control over the trades like Napster did. That's terrible news for record companies and movie studios, which still see millions of songs and movies traded every day.

But it might be welcome news for broadband companies and subscribers. If you talk to ISPs, they'll privately tell you that most of the traffic that flows over their networks (by volume) is still peer to peer swaps. And a lot of porn, but that's another story. The … Read more

Ma Bell today struck deals with all the big name cable conglomerates in hopes of dealing its CallVantage VoIP (voice over IP) service to broadband customers. The company is pinning its hopes on broadband as a last-ditch effort to say in its bread-and-butter voice services business.

I can't help noticing the irony in this. AT&T under C. Michael Armstrong went on a cable acquisition spree during the boom years, sweeping up TCI and then MediaOne to become the largest cable provider. Armstrong went for broke, and in retrospect he had the right idea, but ate crow because … Read more