WebProNews

Tag: Broadband Internet

  • The FCC Finally Has Accurate Broadband Maps

    The FCC Finally Has Accurate Broadband Maps

    The Federal Communications Commission has achieved its first milestone toward collecting accurate data regarding broadband in the US.

    The US Government has been working to close the “digital divide,” or the difference in internet access available in urban and rural communities. In order to tackle the problem, the FCC has been working to develop an accurate map of existing internet coverage in the US.

    According to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the first milestone toward that goal has finally been reached.

    “On June 30, the Federal Communications Commission opened the first ever window to collect information from broadband providers in every state and territory about precisely where they provide broadband services,” Rosenworcel writes. “I announced the opening of the window with a Note to put this milestone in context and to explain in detail the Commission’s work over the previous 18 months to update and improve our broadband maps. Today marks the close of this first data collection window—the next important step forward in our efforts to build more accurate broadband maps, which are much-needed, long overdue, and mandated by Congress.”

    The first draft of the map will be released around November 2022, after which the agency will continue to improve the accuracy of the maps.

    “Looking ahead, there’s one more important thing to note about the new maps,” Rosenworcel adds. “When the first draft is released, it will provide a far more accurate picture of broadband availability in the United States than our old maps ever did. That’s worth celebrating. But our work will in no way be done. That’s because these maps are iterative. They are designed to updated, refined, and improved over time.”

  • SpaceX Launches Third Batch Of Starlink Internet Satellites

    SpaceX Launches Third Batch Of Starlink Internet Satellites

    According to a press release, SpaceX has launched its third batch of Starlink satellites, including one with an experimental coating.

    Starlink is a group of satellites, or satellite constellation, aimed at providing high-speed, broadband internet across the globe. Eventually, as many as 12,000 satellites will be deployed to provide worldwide coverage. The third batch consisted of 60 satellites, for a total of 182 to date.

    There have been a number of concerns raised about the project. One of the biggest concerns is the growing problem of space debris. Another is that thousands of satellites reflecting sunlight could make it hard for astronomers to study deep space, not to mention interfere with radio waves.

    SpaceX is working to address all of these issues. For starters, the Starlink satellites orbit at 550 kilometers. The lower orbit helps ensure the satellites burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their life, rather than continuing in orbit for hundreds or thousands of years.

    The press release states that “on this flight, SpaceX is also testing an experimental darkening treatment on one satellite to further reduce the albedo of the body of the satellites.”

    Should the darkening treatment be successful, it should go a long way toward addressing astronomers’ concerns.

  • Want The Fastest Internet? You Better Go With Cable

    Tired of having those lags in loading a streaming video that interrupt your all-important viewing enjoyment? Want to be able to download gobs of torrents in the blink of an eye? Feel like your Internet connection moves slower than a sloth’s languid bowel movement? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these and find yourself craving the very fastest in Internet broadband speed, a new analysis suggests that you get yourself a cable ISP.

    Ookla, the global leader in independent broadband testing, has completed a study of all ISPs’ average download speeds in 2011 and found that throughout the year the six fastest ISPs were Comcast, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable, and Insight Communications. According to the report, Comcast and Charter were found to have an average download speed of 17.19 Megabits per second. Cablevision ranked third at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at fourth at 15.74 Mbps, Time Warner placed fifth at 14.41 Mbps and Insight followed in at sixth at 14.22 Mbps.

    Craig Moffett, a senior analyst with Sanford Bernstein, told Multichannel News that cable’s rule over the broadband dominion won’t be ending anytime soon. “As more people are served by higher-speed connections,” said, “more and more applications are evolving to take advantage of them. Customers with lower-speed connections are increasingly being forced to upgrade to higher speed connections… or be left behind.”

    In other words, you get movin’ so fast that you can’t slow yourself down.

    Verizon was a stand-alone among telco and DSL providers in being the only non-MSO that managed to hold a candle to the cable provider’s broadband speed. Verizon was clocked as having an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps. Other than that, its telco contemporaries and DSL providers, as a comparison, were moving at not-quite-corpse speed. AT&T, for example, averaged a download speed as 4.40 Mbps and Qwest Communications averaged 6.34 Mbps.

    Stepping down from a cable modem these days to a telco or DSL provider would probably feel like running into a quicksand trap for many users, especially if the difference is going to be as low as 25% of the download speed you’re used to.

    It seems that the high speed dominance of multiple system operators isn’t that big of a secret to Internet users as as Comcast and Time Warner are already the top two worldwide MSOs with 22,360,000 and 12,109,000 subscribers, respectively. Or, alternately, if you’re already tethered to one of these MSOs and were holding out on some impossibly faster ISP out there, well, sorry – you’re not gonna get much faster Internets anytime in the near future.