Fiber to the home providers in Japan are having to lower their rates to compete with fast, cheap and reliable LTE services in the country. “Fixed-broadband giants NTT East and NTT West have been forced to slash their FTTH prices for new subscribers by an eye-watering 34 percent from 5,460 (US $66.70) to 3,600 ($34) per month to try and re-ignite their subscriber growth and stop the outflow of subscribers to cheaper LTE mobile broadband [...]

Nintendo’s launch of their new Wii U game console this week was marred somewhat by the fact that new users were greeted with a 1 GB firmware update right out of the box. Worse, if interrupted, some users are reporting that an interrupted firmware update can result in a bricked (inoperable) game console. LA Times reporter Ben Fritz is one of the most prominent people to tweet that his system was rendered useless by an [...]

A new study by the Internet Innovation Alliance insists that consumers experience a $8,870 annual savings on goods and services simply by having a broadband connection. The study (simple graphical break down, press release) achieves these numbers by estimating the money saved by broadband users through only cost comparison, access to “a deeper inventory” of items, and the gas saved by not having to drive to brick-and-mortar stores. Obviously you could have done all of [...]

NEW YORK — Empire State Development (ESD) approved funding for two SLIC Network Solutions projects to bring FTTH to currently unserved St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties. Slic Network Solutions, Inc. (SLIC) is a for-profit company located in Nicholville, New York that was formed in 1995 as an ISP. SLIC has previously developed and managed last-mile fiber networks in Canton, Potsdam and Massena to provide voice and data services primarily to commercial customers. The company’s customers [...]

Dish has stated repeatedly that they need a partner for a planned LTE network, and at least one partner under consideration is Google. According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, Dish and Google have been talking about the possibility of a joint wireless effort over the last several weeks, though an anonymous source also insists the talks are very preliminary, are part of larger discussions with numerous companies, and may ultimately lead [...]

Earthlink has spent the last few years exploring every possible solution in an effort to get around the competition firewall erected by incumbent carriers, ranging from city Wi-Fi efforts to broadband over powerline technology. None of those worked, and not that long ago Earthlink was trying to remain afloat by refocusing on dial-up. In a bit of good news for the company, it appears they’ve just announced the completion of a new broadband project that [...]

AUSTIN, TX – In Texas, 1.8 million households subscribe to broadband for schoolwork according to a new report from Connected Texas, a subsidiary of Connected Nation that operates as a non-profit in the state of Texas. The report, “Providing Learning Anywhere: K-12 Education in Texas,” carefully examines the importance of high-speed Internet in kindergarten through high school education across the state and concludes that nearly nine out of ten Texas households with children own a [...]

HBO’s HBO Go broadband streaming service is currently only available to customers who not only have a cable subscription, but also only to those whose ISPs have struck an arrangement with HBO. And while Netflix says they assume that such a standalone offering is inevitable for HBO, HBO has repeatedly insisted such an offering isn’t sustainable (read: we don’t want to lose the huge subsidies we get from cable operators). In yet another attempt to [...]

DES MOINES, IA – Danville Mutual Telephone Company, a small cooperative telco in Iowa, has selected the Calix Unified Access portfolio for its active Ethernet FTTH buildout. For more than a decade, Calix has been serving the needs of communications service providers in Iowa — a state that has several hundred independent phone companies — and enabling the delivery of advanced broadband services to its residents and businesses. Over the past decade, many small rural [...]

White Space broadband uses the spectrum freed from the transition to digital television to create an entirely new unlicensed connectivity option — one that has taken a long time to develop. Supported by major players like Microsoft but threatened by repeated attacks by broadcasters, the technology so far only exists in the United States as a smattering of niche product trials, despite promises that the technology could be an inexpensive wireless broadband option. According to [...]