Broadband Advisor

Telcos critical of the government's clean-feed Internet scheme will respond to a call to trial the technology over the holiday season.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) this week issued a final decision to reject Telstra's request to be exempted from providing certain regulated fixed line services to Optus.

Canadian next-gen networking company, Axia NetMedia CEO, Art Price, has offered a simple message to whoever wins the tender to build Australia’s National Broadband Network: Competing with your customers is bad for business.

A leading economist has predicted the National Broadband Network (NBN) will boost all industries but also hurt retail and wholesale companies.

The Competitive Carriers Coalition (CCC) and chair of Broadband World Australia 2008 have claimed that Telstra has pulled out of the event after it failed to force conference organiser, Terrapinn, to remove the CCC and independent telco analyst, Paul Budde, from the program.

The federal government published this week submissions it had invited from industry players, public interest groups and concerned individuals on regulatory issues associated with the National Broadband Network process. The government received no less than 80 submissions from a broad range of participants including major telco providers, ISPs, disability access groups, telecommunications consumer and industry groups, telco experts, academics and individuals. Computerworld explored each submission and here we provide you with the key points outlined in each proposal. In most cases, the views are lifted verbatim from the submission.

Verizon's announcement last week that it was launching a flat-rate wireless plan that would allow for unlimited calling had a cascading effect on the US telecom industry, as AT&T and T-Mobile soon followed suit with flat-rate wireless calling plans of their own.

I can't find much difference between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) members' business model and a band of large-scale ticket scalpers, but lately they and their music-industry cousins in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are exhibiting the collective cojones of a bank robber demanding change for the getaway car's parking meter.

A look at the greatest all time Data Center controversies in the history of the networking industry.

The war between Telstra and the Australian Competition and Communications Commission (ACCC) has escalated and there's still no solid vision of a high-speed Australian broadband network or pricing plan.

With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet, we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We can thank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" to money from the entertainment lobbies, and forward-thinking artists and content distributors--I'm proud that writers and publishers took the lead on this--who recognise that reach is the currency of the digital age.

Largely due to the continued dumb statements and actions of a few apparently PR-challenged carriers, the network neutrality issue is alive and well in the United States. Since any issue like this seems to create a legislative void that must be filled, we now have at least two network neutrality related bills for Congress to consider. If one liked legislation-based solutions, merging these bills and tossing out a bit of Federal Communications Commission make-work would not be too bad, but there would still be some questions left unanswered.

Welcome to Beijing.

Elections aren't the only things in chaos in Pakistan these days. The country recently decided to censor YouTube. Unfortunately, Pakistan botched the technology: It issued BGP routes that leaked, causing a worldwide reroute of all YouTube requests to a black hole in Pakistan -- taking YouTube off the global Internet for a couple of hours.

Recently a retired AT&T employee named Mark Klein announced at a Capitol Hill press conference that he had evidence that "An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables ... was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room."

When Pakistan Telecom blocked YouTube's traffic one Sunday evening in February, the ISP created an international incident that wreaked havoc on the popular video site for more than two hours.

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

For the majority of those looking to upgrade to broadband Internet for the business or home, it's all about the extra speed.

Running a business and want to promote yourself online? You need a domain name.