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.

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 …

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 the iPhone and probably bring it to Google Android.
It would seem that competition in mobile phone platforms is alive and intense and it will all play itself out, and it doesn’t seem that government intervention …

Wyoming wireless operator Brett Glass has 20 questions for the FCC on Net Neutrality.

I had some interesting back-and-forth discussions by e-mail this week about people donating money to charity using text messages. The inquiries involved various allegations about cellular carriers and what they were doing with donations given via text. Here are the questions we got, and the answers we were given by friends in the cellular industry.

A new study by researchers at the University of South Florida in Tampa found that radio waves from cell phones can prevent or reverse Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced his intentions to support a new regulation in the city of San Francisco that would require all cell phone retailers to post radiation levels next to each cell phone at a price . While the specifics of the regulation hasn’t been announced, it’s possible that the city will require maximum Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) levels to be posted which will be a very misleading and unnecessary form of fear mongering.

A study spanning four Scandinavian countries with a population of 16 million people found no increase in brain cancer rates resulting from the use in cell phones. The results were published at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Sam Diaz made some great points in his blog posting “Bill aims to limit wireless early termination fees; Do we need this?” Senator Amy Klobucher (D-Minn) has put forth a bill that aims to limit the size of Early Termination Fees (ETF), but why?

Wireless networks are vastly different from wired networks in terms of the underlying technology and economics that support these networks. Wireless networks have always been regulated differently, so why is that being changed now?