broadband

Users will soon be able to avail themselves of Wi-Fi roaming. The Wi-Fi Alliance along with the Wireless Broadband Alliance are developing standards for the new service following the same offering in the mobile industry.

The idea of the initiative is to allow travellers to fire up their PC/tablet/smartphone and have it automatically log onto the nearest Wi-Fi network that has a roaming agreement with the home network.

A new report from ABI Research says that over 60% of the world’s population will be able to access some form of 4G mobile broadband technology by 2015. According to ABI analyst Neil Strother between LTE and WiMAX, 4G technologies will reach an estimated 4.4 billion people within the next five years. This will make up more than double the 2 billion people today who currently have access to 3G mobile data technologies such as HSPA or EV-DO Rev. A, he says. ABI estimates that around 770 million users around the world today have access to either WiMAX or LTE services.

According to a report by a United Nations agency the population of the Internet will exceed two billion users this year which is close to the 1/3 of the world population. However, developing countries are significantly far behind the developed world.

Broadband for America, an advocacy group with members including AT&T and Verizon Communications, released a new survey that found 57% of likely voters in the U.S. don't support any Internet regulation by the federal government. AT&T and other groups used the results of the survey to back their opposition to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's ongoing effort to enact network neutrality rules saying that the agency should not proceed with rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

Free Press, ColorofChange.org, Credo Action, MoveOn.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee will go on a rally to protest a recent proposal by Google and Verizon Communications at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Friday.

The organizers of the rally hope to convince Google, which has long voiced support for net neutrality, to abandon the joint proposal with Verizon. Critics of the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal have called it a weak alternative to other efforts aiming to prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking Web traffic.

The law to distribute waste and used laptops among small business owners is being promoted to the US Congress. Two US senators on Monday introduced their bill to help small businesses that want access to broadband services and new technologies.

The bill pushed by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is based on the recommendations from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's broadband plan, released in March.

According to the study, by Coleman Bazelon, a telecom economist with The Brattle Group, network neutrality rules being adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could lead to the loss of more than 340,000 jobs in the broadband industry over the next 10 years.

 According to a recent report by USTelecom the United States is among the world's top in broadband use per month. As subscriber numbers and speed are not enough to estimate the real condition of broadband in a country the use was at the focus of this study.

 Developing countries risk missing out on the benefits of information technology because of their lack of broadband infrastructure, a U.N. agency said.

Lack of broadband Internet access deprives countries of the possibility of building up offshoring industries, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said in a report late on Thursday.

It also prevents people from tapping into all the advantages of mobile phones, whose use is exploding in poor countries.

 Leading mobile service carrier in the US Verizon Wireless suddenly stopped selling its Verizon Hub this week. The experimental device that combined a home telephone and Web applications was launched by the company at the beginning of the year in February. Verizon Wireless didn’t provide any explanation of the reasons to stop selling the device.