PERSONAL

A group of telephone companies trying to reach detente on the network interconnection fees they charge each other has come up with a plan that could effectively involve hiking broadband taxes. It's short on specifics, but says that DSL and cable Net subscribers (which are treated differently today) should both pay into the Universal Service Fund. That's the money that helps subsidize phone connections (but not broadband service) in rural areas, and has helped wire schools for the Net.

Teletruth, a group that has long criticized the phone companies for wasting money and imposing hidden fees that are … Read more

Rural India has entered the broadband revolution. Yesterday, Akshaya, a rural community in India launched a wireless broadband network that will serve geographic regions that otherwise couldn't even get access to traditional telephone lines or cellular service.

Wireless supporters have long talked about how the technology could be used to link the most remote regions of the world together. Thanks to technology advancements and falling prices on networking gear, building a network like this in a sparsely populated region has become economically feasible. As a result, areas like Akshaya can finally get access to phone and high speed Internet … Read more

Remember this, gamblers: Vegas is not automatically lucky, at least on the Internet. Cox confirmed last week that some 200,000 cable Net subscribers in Las Vegas, Gainsville, Fla., and smaller markets missed out on its recent speed increases. Those customers will probably have to wait until the end of the year for their turn.

The lagging customers are apparently on older cable networks, purchased by Cox recently, that can't yet support the higher speeds.

The i2hub project that I wrote about last spring is expanding. This is a file-swapping network similar to Kazaa or Gnutella, but running on the Internet2 campus network. That means students can download whole movies in half an hour or so, instead of a day or longer.

I'm a little surprised the network has lasted as long as it has, but it shows universities are genuinely conflicted on this issue. They aren't happy about copyright infringement, but they do support innovation by their students and free expression of ideas. I suspect schools will crack down on it this … Read more

Craigslist today sold 25 percent of its company to Ebay. It's impressive to see Craigslist, a company with fewer than 20 employees, survive (and become profitable) by remaining true to its roots. At a time when Google's image as a scrappy, focused search engine is being overshadowed by an interview in Playboy Magazine, it's good to know that Craig Newmark's stubbornness has paid off.

You can call Craigslist boring, since it's just a bunch of white pages with text links and fuzzy pictures. But something about its steady growth has turned it into a 45-city … Read more

Blogger Om Malik has the story on the California Sierra town of Truckee getting the go-ahead to build its broadband fiber optic network. More power to them, despite the opposition of the local cable companies.

We've written quite a bit about local fiber projects, and the Supreme Court decision that threatens to undermine the movement. In our broadband project, we called for Congress to clarify the law to ensure that other towns like Truckee can go ahead and give their residents more bandwidth than the cable or telcos are willing to provide today.

A Vonage representative told me today that one reason why some people were shut out of their Net phone service was due to a bad broadband connection on their end. The explanation was a response to why Vonage customers outside the four cities cited in the "delays" weren't getting service.

Whether you buy the argument or not (I'm naturally skeptical), she brought up a good point. The Internet is not as reliable as good old copper wires.

When was the last time your land line was out of service for hours at a time? Even cell … Read more

The United Kingdom, like the United States, has been looking hungrily at the broadband adoption rates in South Korea and elsewhere, wondering how an advanced country fell so far behind. But a new report from communications regulators Ofcom says things are looking up.

Broadband is now available to more than 88 percent of the British population, the report says. Average Net use has gone from two hours of dial-up in 1999 to 16 hours of broadband time per week this year. More than a third of Internet households there now have broadband, and the number is going up by about … Read more

Unstrung outlines a very, very important development in umbrella networking. A Trinity College Dublin team is apparently working on a way to install Bluetooth networking capacities in umbrellas, so that on rainy days, little mesh networks can spontaneously develop, with data hopping from handle to handle.

Soon we will see the world's first umbrella-enabled hacker.