Wireless mesh networks have never been practical for commercial deployment and they never will be. This article explains why mesh networks have such poor coverage and poor throughput performance.

In October 1517, Martin Luther nailed a paper with 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, an event often characterized as the start of the Protestant Reformation.

A senator criticized the FCC last week saying that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan was leading us to second tier status, but there are a few problems with this. For one thing, it’s based on the grossly exaggerated broadband speeds and prices of other nations. The other problem is that the FCC doesn’t control the purse strings.

Now it appears that Skype once again appears to be wielding their API terms of use as a weapon against competitors, is the FCC going to play API cop like they did in the Google Voice App case?

Google just announced that YouTube will now support “original” resolutions of up to “4096P”, but it’s actually a maximum of 3072P narrowscreen or 2304P widescreen. This announcement makes it sound as if our computers and broadband connection lags Google YouTube when YouTube is actually the weakest link. YouTube’s biggest problem is their over compressed “HD” video that looks nothing like HD video.

Now that the official BitTorrent client with uTP has moved past the beta stage, I decided to test it again to see if it made any improvements in reducing the damage it causes to other applications on the network. What I found was that not only did BitTorrent not improve in its network friendliness, it’s more destructive than ever.

A little while back Blizzard announced a new feature called Real ID that would allow individuals playing World of Warcraft and the forthcoming Star Craft II to see the real names of players they had added to their friends list. The move has been protested vehemently, specifically the fact that this new “feature” will be added into the official WoW forums as well.

The big copyright case this summer is not primarily about copyright – it is Barclay’s Capital, Inc. v. Theflyonthewall.com in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and it is about the state law tort of misappropriation of assets belonging to another.

The bigger lesson is that free is not necessarily good because destroying productive capability is a long-term mistake. It creates a variation on the old saw “Give a man a fish . . . Teach a man to fish” in which you take a man who can fish and sink his boat, and then feel good about yourself as you give him a sardine because you have eliminated nasty old self-interested markets from the system.

We were surprised to see that Anandtech only managed to get Wi-Fi performance of 7.2 Mbps downstream and 7.96 Mbps upstream using the SpeedTest.net app for iPhone OS. We ran our own tests and found that the iPhone 4 can sustain 20 Mbps over Wi-Fi. These are much better results, but they fall short of optimum 802.11g much less 802.11n.