broadband | Zoli's Blog

Is the USA Really the Broadband Leader?

Technology February 23rd, 2009

The US is not exactly the leader when it comes to Broadband or even Mobility – in fact we’re way behind several Asian and European countries.

But is that really true? Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School disagrees. He published a study on the World’s Connectivity Scorecard. His key thesis is that penetration and connection speed is not enough to measure true connectedness: we have to consider to what extent the Consumer, Businesss and Government sectors put broadband to productive use.

The compound index reveals a few surprises: the USA is actually #1, closely followed by Sweden and Denmark, and in fourth position (surprise!?!) is Malaysia, leaving countries like Japan, Korea, Norway in the dust.

I am not entirely convinced about the US position, especially if we take a look at the Consumer vs Business segmentation … and don’t get me started on Government.

No Broadband on Internet Street

Humor, Misc December 3rd, 2008

You can’t make this up … there really is no Internet on Internet Street.

Andrzej Gromek bought a house in Warsaw, Poland on a street named … Internet. Wow! How nice of the City of Warsaw to recognize the Internet by naming a street after it!

Mr. Gromek soon discovered he could not get a broadband connection in his house. Turned down by all providers he launched a campaign to the National Telecom Authority in Poland. They first took his letters for a prank, but after a dozen or so decided to look at the matter. It turns out that Mr Gromek is the only resident on Internet Street actually wanting to use the Internet, and it would not be economically feasible to pull it to one customer only.

Solution: Mr Gromek is now selling his house. I hope he does not move to a street named after water, electricity or gas… smile_wink

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

Tags: broadband, Humor, internet

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I’m Broadcasting Over the Comcast Cap – This Can’t Be Good

Software September 7th, 2008

Since Comcast is about to cap monthly traffic at 250G per month, I thought I would check my monthly stats. Little did I expect that I am already exceeding this limit… but what’s scary is that it’s outbound traffic, not inbound.

This can’t be good – I probably have some malware sitting on my machine. Neither McAfee nor Spybot S&D finds anything… if you have ideas, pls. comment below. Thanks in advance – I guess this is my first crowdsourced problem resolution. smile_sad

Update (9/21) Lots of good advice in the comments. I tried another pacakage, highly advised by several.. only to find a thread by the author, acknowledging it does not properly measure usage under Vista. Crap. I am not too worried though: my router shows way higher download traffic than upload, which is the “normal” user profile. It’s in packets though, not Gigs. Why does it have to be my pain though? Comcast shoud not introduce the bandwidth cap without providing a measurement tool.

Tags: bandwidth, bot, broadband, comcast, leak, malware, mcafee, spybot, spyware, torrent, virus

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Comcast Testing Higher Speeds?

Technology August 20th, 2007

My Internet experience has been bumpy all day, even though my connection speed was far better than expected. I don’t think the problem was speed as such, it’s was the spottiness – lost of 1-2 second mini outages. Now I’m starting to wonder if Comcast is silently testing a major speed update. Just looks at these test results: