As of today, April 1 2011, I am leaving Digital Society and moving to High Tech Forum. I would like to thank Jon Henke for this great opportunity to work with him and the rest of my Digital Society colleagues including Mike Turk, Nick Brown, James Delong, Brett Swanson, and Steve Effros.  It’s been a [...]

Netflix has added some manual control features to the quality of Netflix video streams for Canadian customers who want to stay within their usage caps.  To see how this might apply to some US broadband plans with 250 GB or 150 GB usage caps, I’ve generated the following table for daily and monthly allowances. The [...]

A company trying to sell products by scaring the public isn’t anything new, but this time there is the possibility of something good that may come of it.  Tawkon has released an unauthorized “radiation” application for jailbroken iPhones.  I’ve spent much time debunking the use of the term “radiation” in the context of wireless radio communications, but [...]

Intel launched their new 320 series line of Solid State Storage (SSD) 2.5 inch drives built on the latest 25 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process (Intel Press Release).  The new SSD drives bring double the capacity, double the sequential write speeds to 220 megabytes per second (MB/sec), and lower prices per GB. Note that the sequential [...]

Carl Bode of DSL Reports claims that AT&T admitted that their bandwidth usage meters were inaccurate. But AT&T actually said that they will continue ensuring meter accuracy.

Dennis Wharton of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is irked by the wireless industry comments to eliminate spectrum waste and he wants to draw attention to the wireless industry’s own dirty laundry.  Wharton points out that Dish Network and Time Warner Cable might be hoarding some of their auctioned spectrum to speculate on future [...]

Comodo, a company you probably never heard of which holds one of the many master keys to the Internet’s SSL X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) system, admitted that their root certificate authorities have been compromised by attackers.  Those attackers issued themselves SSL certificates for seven companies including Google, Skype, and Yahoo so they can fully masquerade [...]

The CTIA has released its survey results for 2010 (Year-End 2010 Top-Line Survey Results PDF).  The survey has some of the most comprehensive data on the wireless industry as it covers 95.5% of all wireless subscribers in the country so it should be a valuable resource for analysts. Here are some of the more interesting [...]

In a newly announced partnership with Sprint, Google potentially stands to gain 50 million US customers for its web integrated voice service, voice mail, and long distance calling.  In the context of Google’s growing dominance in smartphones with Android OS, Google is shaping up to be a significant player in the phone market.

Broadcast TV occupies 294 MHz of spectrum and much of that is wasted on inefficient radio architectures and video compression technologies. If we are serious about a national broadband plan, we should squeeze broadcast television down to 40 MHz and save 254 MHz of spectrum but still be able to broadcast 32 HD and 60 standard channels.