AT&T has announced an interesting “ZERO Draw” phone charger that draws no power when not charging a phone.

Free Press wants the FCC to mandate a dumb Internet because they claim that network prioritization technology makes networks unfair and inefficient. But the engineering shows that prioritized networks are actually more fair and more efficient.

If the FCC interprets the national broadband plan it sent to Congress today as an invitation to impose heavy burdens on the Internet, it will be against the better judgment of Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker. They reminded the commission that the Internet has reshaped American business and society precisely because it has been allowed to thrive without interference from the government.

When government gives away super valuable 700 MHz mobile spectrum, it gets wasted on wireless backhaul which could have used 5 GHz. While 700 MHz might save a little money on backhaul costs, it saves a lot more money on access and mobile networks. Commercial operators that paid billions of dollars for 700 MHz spectrum would never waste valuable spectrum like this.

If the FCC doesn’t want the Internet to become a vast wasteland for “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, it had better start working with broadband providers now to reserve bandwidth for the transformative applications of the future. So said Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban. He wants the Internet to be “a platform for amazing” and said that won’t happen if all of the video content now on TV is hogging Internet bandwidth.

The FCC today paved the way for Tuesday’s release of a national broadband plan by publicizing the executive summary for the plan. The good news is that aggressive regulatory burdens do not appear to be in the offing; the bad news is that the FCC did not rule out future intervention.

Often the discussion surrounding Internet usage caps also revolves around some sort of transparency. Generally speaking, no matter what ones stance on usage caps is, all can agree that being transparent about monthly bandwidth use should be apart of a subscribers user account with their ISP. Inlate 2009 Comcast answered this call by launching their Usage Meter service in Portland, Oregon.

The FCC is asking for a good way for consumers to monitor broadband performance and they have put out a public Request For Quotation (RFQ).  Well I’m going to suggest a more granular and complete method of network monitoring that doesn’t generate unnecessary traffic on the network, and one that does not require any third party tools to collect the information.  The current methods of installing Java and/or other tools and using small active measurement samples is inferior.
Every modern Operating System (OS) has built in …

See our article today at RealClearMarkets . . .
Entrepreneurial Innovation and the Internet
by Bret Swanson
As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities – $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises – the U.S. needs once again to call on its chief strategic asset: radical innovation.
One laboratory of growth will continue to be the Internet. The U.S. began the 2000’s with fewer than five million residential broadband lines and zero mobile …

Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.