Video over the Internet is a relatively new phenomenon and it represents a fundamental paradigm shift in video distribution and even the architecture of the Internet. Video distribution migrated from a purely wireless medium (television) in the early 20th century to primarily a cable medium in the latter 20th century. While cable and other Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPD) still dominate video distribution in the early 21st century, we are beginning to see a new migration to the Internet. This has created a number of economic and engineering challenges that the Internet is only beginning to resolve.

In the category of onerous regulation, it appears that the Israeli Knesset has approved a new law that would mandate email portability despite the fact that email was never designed to be portable.  This is similar to a failed attempt in the United States when a freelance writer Gail Mortenson petitioned the FCC for an immediate [...]

The FCC cites the $41/month average cost of broadband as an obstacle to broadband adoption, yet broadband costs as little as $15/month and is 20 times faster than dial-up services. The real reason for lagging broadband adoption seems to be dirt cheap dial-up services, virtually free local calling, and the fact that dial-up is “good enough” for nearly all websites and email.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet has done some excellent investigative journalism on the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) scandal and the story gets more bizarre by the minute.  It’s an extremely complex fiasco that needs to be read to be believed, but the gist of the story goes as follows. It all started with a dubious “Alarming” report from [...]

The Internet is fundamentally biased against long distance communications by giving them much lower speed limits in data transmissions than short distance communications. But this is a good design feature because it encourages more efficient short range file transfers and this is precisely what has happened with Content Delivery Networks.

Google was quite upset that Apple didn’t approve of their Google Voice application on the iPhone due to the fact that Apple didn’t like Google replacing some core Apple iPhone functionality.  Now it seems that Google has just bought one of the best email applications on the iPhone called reMail only to kill it on [...]

Network bandwidth costs can vary tens or even hundreds of times depending on various factors. These factors must be taken into account for any comparison of broadband to be useful.

The main argument for this type of a network is to give high bandwidth applications a home to be tested because the theory was that broadband networks in the US were constricting applications to very low bandwidth. But does broadband really lag applications, or is it really the other way around?

What if those greedy telecoms and cable companies could learn to be good like Google and care more about making the Internet a better place with gigabit broadband than their profits? We decided to quantify the amount of “good” that would be done if ISPs could be more like Google and it wasn’t what most people would expect.

Google wants to show the rest of the nation how broadband should be operated, but they’re only going to deploy in ~2% of the easiest communities where the deployment costs are minimal. But this can’t possibly scale at 90% deployment level when costs can be several times greater.