When a guy like Steve B. Burke likens TV viewers’ stampede online to a “wildfire,” you know the cable industry is feeling the pressure. Burke is the president and chief operating officer of Comcast, America’s largest cable distributor.
AOL was the top Internet service provider when it came to customer service in 2008, according to a Forrester Research report. The rub: AOL’s top rating based on Forrester’s “customer experience index” translates into a “just OK” mark.
As a group, ISPs grade out with a “poor” rating of 59 percent based on Forrester’s customer experience index.
At a digital music panel in Nashville this week, executives from AT&T and Comcast created a furor by saying they were passing along warnings to customers that the RIAA says are illegally uploading music files onto the Internet.
Later, the companies tried to calm the outrage erupting in the blogosphere by harrumphing they weren’t cutting off Internet access to those people–or in the case of Cox, hardly ever cutting it off.
The news that President Obama has formally nominated Julius Genachowski to chair the Federal Communications Commission has been received with something slightly short of euphoria by a large portion of the broadcasting and telecommunications sector. Over the last eight hours Ars Technica has been deluged with statements of pure, unadulterated happiness about the pick….
Worried that your broadband provider is slowing down your Web traffic?
If so, you might want to download the aptly named “Switzerland”–a tool that tests whether your Internet provider is violating the principles of so-called “network neutrality.”
Network neutrality, which prevents carriers from blocking traffic or manipulating the speeds of traffic from certain Web sites, became a hot-button issue several years ago when carriers suggested they should be allowed to charge content providers more for using faster lanes on their networks.
When AT&T grudgingly agreed to break itself up 25 years ago, it was seen as a truly momentous event in the history of the telecommunications industry. Today, however, some experts question not only whether the breakup of AT&T was necessary, but whether it even had any long-term impact on the telecom market.
At a recent press breakfast, someone asked top executives of Sony Electronics about their plans to let their televisions show video delivered by the Internet. While the company has an early effort, called the Bravia Internet Link, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, said the company can now introduce better products because it has reached an agreement with the cable industry.
Clearwire shares are down sharply this morning after negative comments from analysts at J.P. Morgan and Stanford Group. Though its stock saw a lift yesterday following the completion of its deal to acquire Sprint’s Xohm wireless broadband business, the concern is that the company needs substantially more capital and that the intensely competitive landscape will overshadow its technological advantages.
The digital Disneyland of the future–where we freely work and play online–may be at risk. Why? Because, some argue, broadband carriers can’t support it. The Internet’s “free ride” culture has led to more people downloading gigabytes of data at practically no cost.
If you thought that federal regulators were upset at Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent, wait until they start scrutinizing what wireless providers are doing.
Comcast’s earnings get announced before tomorrow’s opening bell, but the company has a couple of things going for it that might be helping analysts predict what those numbers will look like. First, 70 percent of consumers prefer bundling, and currently only cable can offer it. Second, even as we head into a recession, broadband and video are considered “no more discretionary for most families than running water.”
Major speed enhancements are rumored to be coming soon from Comcast, which has been spending serious cash to upgrade its network to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard.
Comcast came clean with the Federal Communications Commission late Friday, detailing how it throttled and targeted peer-to-peer traffic–maneuvers it has repeatedly denied.
The cable concern said it indeed hit “particular protocols that were generating disproportionate amounts of traffic.”
Salesforce.com (CRM), which is mainly known for software that helps sales executives track and manage customer prospects, today said it paid $31.5 million in cash for Instranet, a 10-year-old company based in Chicago that makes software to improve product support.
Comcast Corp. rightfully received a smackdown from the Federal Communications Commission last week for not telling customers that it was blocking some of them from using peer-to-peer services to download videos and other content off the Internet.
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