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Posts tagged ISP
Global Geek News Podcast #58
Mar 9th
Here are the shownotes for episode #58 for the Global Geek News Podcast.
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Stories:
- Amazon terminates Colorado based associates over new taxes
- Music biz hopes to stop piracy by tempting ISPs with millions
- Ubisoft’s DRM servers go down, only pirates can play games
- Sony’s great new idea: Game demos that are less fun over time
- Study links violent video games to violent thoughts
- Microsoft talks Windows Phone 7 Series: XNA, Silverlight and no backwards compatibility
- How big were the Winter Olympics online?
- Internet Explorer 8 still not playing well with over 2,000 popular sites
- Google Chrome gains as IE and Firefox lose
- 27% of e-reader owners wish they had waited for the iPad
- Notebooks, iPad like tablets to be 70% of PCs by 2012
Tips of the Week:
- 6 Critical WordPress plugins you should have installed
- Save water damaged books, docs, photos by putting them in the freezer
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Host: Jeremy Bray & Wesley Faulkner
For more news, check out the Global Geek News Blog
Global Geek News Podcast #44
Nov 10th
Here are the shownotes for episode #44 for the Global Geek News Podcast.
Help support us with a $5/mo subscription!
Stories:
- nVidia denies x86 chip rumors, pushes Fermi back to 2010
- Got friends? Now you can thank Facebook
- Myspace traffic drop costs News Corp. $100 million
- Sony’s PSPgo sells 28,000 units in Japan on launch day, physical media points and laughs
- Inventor of cell phones say they have become too complicated
- Apple’s hypocrisy continues, approves Mein Kampf for the App Store
- Why you should think twice before dating an iPhone user
- Comcast’s new throttling plan uses triggers to throttle bandwidth
- Secret anti-piracy treaty turns ISPs into cops or pirates
- Anti-piracy group throws in the towel, pirates walk free
Tip of the week: 100 Open Technology Courses
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Host: Jeremy Bray & Wesley Faulkner
For more news, check out the Global Geek News Blog
Cisco Forecasts Increase in Internet Traffic. Hello Captain Obvious!
Jun 17th
Greetings Readers!
This only comes as a shock to people living under a rock, but according to Cisco, internet traffic is going to increase! Their estimates show that by the year 2012, global internet traffic will reach half a zetabyte! For those who aren’t geeky enough to know your bytes, a zetabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, or around 250 billion dvds worth of data. That is a lot of data!
I will give you one guess why the traffic is going to be increasing by 46% annually. If you guessed anything other than video, you clearly don’t check out enough blogs and podcasts. Internet video traffic increased from 12% of global internet traffic in 2006 to 22% in 2007. They predict that it will account for 90% of global internet traffic by 2012. IPTV is included in that figure as well as video transfered via Peer-2-Peer networks. The only other interesting figure in this prediction is that mobile traffic will double every year between 2008 and 2012.
None of these figures should come as a surprise to anybody. With the popularity of viral video sites and streaming video sites growing in leaps and bounds, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to see that video traffic will account for 90% of internet data in 2012. This news is floating around the internet, even hitting the front page of Digg like this is shocking information when its not a difficult prediction to make. A zetabyte is a new word for many people but that doesn’t change the story any. While this might be worth a small mention, there are more newsworthy things than an obvious story like this.
The only part of the prediction that I take issue with is the mobile data figure. This figure is entirely dependent on mobile carriers. What mobile carriers charge for data services and the availability of mobile data services are the determining factors here. If carriers increase charges or don’t continue to expand their networks, this figure will never be reached. Adoption of devices like the iPhone will help realize this figure but it still ultimately depends on the carriers. Time will tell if this figure turns out to be accurate, but I’m not betting on it.
With predictions like this, it is worth asking, how with ISPs cope with this increase in traffic? If we are having issues with companies like Comcast and their network management practices now, what will they be like in 2012 when a half a zetabyte is crossing the tubes every year? This is a discussion for another post or podcast, but I will leave you to ponder that question.
-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray
Verizon Throws the Baby Out with the Bathwater, Screws Users
Jun 16th
Greetings readers,
In another story of consumers getting screwed, which seems to be a theme on this blog, Verizon has decided to block access to the entire alt.* USENET directory because they are too lazy to enforce their own service agreements. Reading that link will get you up to speed with all the details, but the short version is that Verizon has decided to block the entire alt.* USENET directory after the Attorney General in New York threatened charges for not enforcing their own policies to take down child porn. Instead of blocking the 88 out of over 100,000 offending groups, they decided to just block access to all of them despite whether their contents are legitimate or not.
While I support the efforts to eliminate child pornography, which will never happen by the way, I am suprised at Verizon’s actions to shut down thousands of legitimate USENET discussion groups. This is essentially the kind of overreaction that the recording industry has been lobbying for to get ISPs to shut down Peer-2-Peer networks to squash it’s piracy problems. With such an overboard reaction that Verizon has taken, what will they do when somebody points out to them that child porn circulates on bittorrent and every other P2P service on the internet? Will they kill all P2P access?
Customers need to stand up to Verizon and fight for the legitimate purposes of services such as USENET. This is just another part of the Net Neutrality issue. Verizon needs to learn from the mistakes of others and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Taking extreme measures to handle a small problem is never a productive solution.
Despite having considered using it in the past, I have never used USENET before, but I will be reconsidering my desire to switch from Comcast to Verizon Fios now that I know they lack the common sense of a good ISP.
It is time that consumers stand up for their beliefs in how the internet should be used and fight back against such reckless actions taken by ISPs such as Verizon.
-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray
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