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 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.

With 16.5% of the nation “underemployed” and economists gloomily doubting next-generation job creation, Washington is considering a number of strategies, including the President’s “jobs bill.” “Jobs,” President Obama insisted in his state of the union address, “must be our number one focus in 2010.”
But as Washington concentrates on employment, it also is considering a possibly job-killing set of new regulations on the communications sector. Known as “Net Neutrality,” these proposed new rules could, in their extreme form, prohibit many technologies and business plans used today on the Internet, not to …

Late last week, the National Telecommunications & Information Association and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service announced the rules for doling out the second round of broadband stimulus funding – totaling $4.8 billion. The Notices of Funds Availability (NoFA) contain significantly different rules from the first round funding restrictions.
As many trade publications have noted, the new NoFAs make it much easier to qualify for funding. However, while the agencies argue that the new rules make it easier to target specific priority areas, the more likely scenario will see …

Skype has just announced that they will start supporting 720P HD video conferencing at 1280×720 resolution in the newest Skype 4.2 beta software, which is a significant upgrade from the current 640×480 resolution.  This will of course require compatible cameras and within the next two months, consumers will soon be able to purchase Skype certified 720P webcams like the FaceVision TouchCam N1 for $70 (no microphone) or $100 (with microphone), or the FreeTalk HD Pro for $120 or HD Pro Plus for $140 from In Store Solutions.  Previously, dedicated 720P …

Some of the commonly held misconceptions about network congestion is that capacity can eliminate congestion or that congestion doesn’t exist during so-called low utilization periods. This article shows how these views are flawed.

In one of the more saddening displays of bad journalism, Ynetnews is reporting that “Israeli internet service providers block P2P traffic”.

We’ve had our turn knocking down the Berkman broadband study and even responded to Yochai Benkler’s response, but Mark Goldberg has done a great job of summarizing the latest brutal critiques.

Free Press’ Chris Riley responded to our dismantling of his anti-prioritization paper by claiming that we had no “proof” despite the fact that sound engineering theory was used to debunk their uninformed assertions. But we will oblige by providing scientific data on to eliminate all doubt.

The current FCC NPRM would prohibit paid peering agreements and harm small content providers while ensuring Google’s dominance on content distribution. Google is big enough to get free peering, but the NPRM would force their competitors to pay more for inferior transit access.