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8
April 2009 |
Old-school bus king Greyhound today is rolling out new BoltBus-type upgrades to its service, including free WiFi, additional legroom, and power outlets on its New York-Montreal and New York-Toronto routes, and the company plans to offer the same amenities on its Boston-New York routes before the end of the month.
Greyhound, the parent company of Bolt, is switching to Prevost X3-45 buses for this service, the same vehicles they use for Bolt. The move is part of a larger plan to upgrade its entire fleet.
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8
April 2009 |
Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) now passes 15 million US homes, or 13% of all US homes, according to data released today from research firm RVA. That’s an increase of about 28% from a year ago.
The number of homes connected to FTTH is now about 4.4 million, or 4% of all homes, RVA said, a nearly 52% increase from a year earlier and a 17% increase in the last six months.
About 2.6 million Americans subscribe to a video service through FTTH, RVA said, an increase of 65% from a year earlier and up 21% in the la... |
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8
April 2009 |
With a new iPhone model unofficially scheduled to launch in June, AT&T has already started implementing massive and widespread upgrades to its 3G network in anticipation of a "tenfold increase" in bandwidth usage.
While full details of the next iPhone model remain incomplete, a few factors might help explain why AT&T is expecting such a huge spike in bandwidth in conjunction with the upcoming iPhone release.
For starters, the next iPhone model will by all accounts support video recording. Apple, of ... |
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7
April 2009 |
The Egyptian authorities have announced plans to loosen the restrictions on the use of GPS devices within the country. The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) has lifted a ban on civilian use of GPS which had blocked the (official) import of most mid to high end mobile and smartphones.
However, the NTRA will still need to authorise each type of GPS device imported into the country and will control any local manufacturing of the devices, it announced on its website at the weekend.
W... |
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7
April 2009 |
Australia announced a A$43 billion (about R278 billion) national broadband network on Tuesday, in what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described as the biggest infrastructure project in the country's history.
Rudd surprised the market by scrapping a tender process for private firms to build a network worth A$10-A$15 billion, instead opting for a more ambitious proposal with the government retaining control.
Labelling Australia a "broadband backwater," Rudd said the government understood the importance a nat... |
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7
April 2009 |
Australia's government will build a A$43 billion ($31 billion) high-speed broadband network, leading a new private-public company, after rejecting bids by companies that it said failed to offer value for money.
In a surprise move, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Tuesday the government would ask private companies to join the country's biggest infrastructure project to build a network that would be up to 100 times faster than the current network.
Australia has slower and more expensive Internet servic... |
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7
April 2009 |
Orange UK has sharply reduced the cost of its basic mobile data package - which the network operator says is aimed at small business users. The current tariffs of £5.00 for 10MB and £6.38 for 250MB have been swept away with a single £4.25 tariff which offers 500MB of data downloads.
“In today’s economy, businesses and their employees need a break. We know everybody’s working hard so there’s enough capacity in our new data bundle to combine work with some fun such as social networking and entertainment th... |
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7
April 2009 |
Between 35,000 and 40,000 attempts to access child pornography sites via BT Retail's broadband network are blocked every day, it was revealed today.
Extrapolated to the entire UK broadband market*, the figures mean there are more than 58 million attempts to access sites on the Internet Watch Foundation's (IWF) blocklist annually. The list is not published, but the IWF says there are typically between 800 and 1,200 URLs on it at any one time.
BT released the figures today in response to a Register inqu... |
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6
April 2009 |
Senators Olympia Snowe and Bill Nelson introduced the m-SPAM Act last week, which would strictly prohibit commercial text messages to wireless numbers listed on the Do Not Call registry. The bill would also give the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission more authority to regulate unwanted text messages.
"Mobile spam invades both a consumer's cell phone and monthly bill," Snowe said in a statement. "There is also increasing concern that mobile spam will become more than just an an... |
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6
April 2009 |
Internet service providers are to keep records of emails and online phone calls under controversial new government regulations that come into force today.
ISPs will be legally obliged to store details of emails and internet telephony for 12 months as a potential tool to aid criminal investigations. Although the content of emails and calls will not be held, ISPs will be asked to record the date, time, duration and recipients of online communications.
The new regulations are contained in an EC directive... |
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6
April 2009 |
The text messaging boom has hit the US with force. And, the prevalence of messaging handsets launched at CTIA Wireless 2009 is a sign of the times. So, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that American sent a record number of SMS text messages in 2008 - but we just can’t help being impressed. American sent over 1 trillion text messages in 2008!
Compared to the 363 billion text messages sent in the US during 2007, it seems that the US has seriously ramped up per-person use of text messages. Carriers ar... |
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3
April 2009 |
Just two days after announcing an application for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch, Skype has hit a roadblock. On Thursday, Deutsche Telekom, a German wireless provider, banned use of the application on the iPhone and said anyone caught using it will face a contract suspension.
Skype, owned by eBay, has more than 405 million registered users who communicate for free by voice, video calls, and instant messages.
Deutsche Telekom, which has exclusive rights to the iPhone in Germany through its T-Mobile busi... |
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3
April 2009 |
If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.
Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.
The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for th... |
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2
April 2009 |
Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as the country's new anti-piracy law came into effect, reports suggest.
Sweden's new policy - the Local IPRED law - allows copyright holders to force internet service providers (ISP) to reveal details of users sharing files.
According to figures released by the government statistics agency - Statistics Sweden - 8% of the entire population use peer-to-peer sharing.
Popular BitTorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, is also based in Sweden.
The new law, which i... |
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2
April 2009 |
In a strategy that's likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable (TWC) is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets.
In April, Time Warner Cable will begin collecting information on its customers' Internet use in the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio and in Rochester, N.Y. Consumption billing will begin in those cities later this summ... |
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