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.

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

Amtrak is actively blocking downloads and video streams – going so far as to prevent YouTube embeds in pages you load, and redirecting links to downloads.

A lot of people like to claim ISPs are only interested in network management as a pretense for preventing competition with their video offering. Yet here is a perfect example of a privately owned network choosing to manage congestion by limiting downloads and video – absent any competing video service.

Conventional wisdom says that more innovation for applications on the Internet must involve much more bandwidth. But once we understand the economics of video on the Internet, we quickly begin to understand why applications will never be high bandwidth.

The FCC and the John S. and James. L. Knight Foundation today are hosting a “digital inclusion” summit in order to draw attention to America’s push for expanding high-speed Internet access. The summit is being held a week before the FCC’s scheduled release of a national broadband plan. Speakers will include: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski; Commissioners Meredith Attwell Baker, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn; and members of Congress. Keep a browser open here for live updates.

The shift to the Internet video distribution presents a formidable engineering challenge for the Internet because of the massive bandwidth requirements of unicast video distribution.  Unlike broadcast communication technologies where data is transmitted once to many people, unicasting requires a new data transmission for each recipient.  So while a 15 megabit per second (Mbps) HD television show being broadcast to 100,000 people in a city only requires 15 Mbps of network capacity, a 2.25 Mbps YouTube video being unicast to 100,000 people over the Internet would require 225,000 Mbps which is …

Microsoft’s VP Scott Charney made quite a few headlines this week at RSA’s security conference when he suggested that perhaps an Internet tax is needed to fight malware.  Predictably, this incited quite a few rebuttals that perhaps Microsoft should pay for the malware infestations since it’s primarily a Microsoft Windows problem.  I view both ideas silly because there are alternatives for dealing with malware without an Internet tax and Windows isn’t the only vulnerable operating system since most of the modern day hacks happen because of bad user behavior.
But there …

Free Press is asking the FCC to consider a number of changes to the NPRM Net Neutrality regulations which they claim will “promote investment”. But once we examine their proposal in detail, we find that it will produce just the opposite and devastate the U.S. economy.

Leo Laporte who started off as a popular radio and TV tech guy is now one of the more popular Internet tech personalities.  Laporte is someone who has always helped the average person with their technology troubles, but Jennifer was one lady he had to give some tough love advice.

What started off as a typical helpline call from a lady named “Jennifer” turned into a really embarrassing story of deceit, theft, and rationalization.  Jennifer came on the line needing help with her Wi-Fi Access …

John Markoff of the New York Times has penned an interesting piece on the changing nature and decentralization of the Internet.  It reiterates the point I made in yesterday’s post on The fundamental shift to Internet video delivery which is the driving technical and economic force behind these profound changes to the Internet.  Markoff talked extensively about the migration to the edge of the network where content providers and broadband networks like Comcast directly connect to each other over private peering agreements and bypass traditional Tier 1 Internet core providers …