AT&T buckles to Neuts – sort of

Posted by Richard Bennett

This just in from the Wall St. Journal: AT&T Offers New Concessions In BellSouth Deal

WASHINGTON — AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company’s $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp.
Approval by the full commission [...]

Ericsson buys Redback

Posted by Richard Bennett

Now here’s a “holy mother of god” moment:

Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson’s agreement to buy Redback Networks Inc. for $2.1 billion reflects how the explosion in video and other multimedia services over the Internet and a surge in broadband subscribers are driving phone and cable companies to upgrade their networks and spurring big makers of networking [...]

The Symmetry non-issue rears its head again

Posted by Richard Bennett

The Washington Post has been mislead into making some silly remarks about Internet symmetry:

The information superhighway isn’t truly equal in both directions. Cable and phone companies typically sell asymmetrical Internet services to households, reserving the bulk of the lanes for downloading movies and other files and leaving the shoulders at most for people to share, [...]

About that dark fiber

Posted by Richard Bennett

One of the fantasies I hear these days says there’s tons of dark fiber all over the place so bandwidth is essentially free. Never mind all the routers it takes to light it up, the fiber is there so anybody can use it for next to nothing. You’ve probably heard this too.
It turns out that [...]

The consequences of leaving a word out

Posted by Richard Bennett

Charles H. Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer of Cisco Systems, has the neuts in an uproar thanks to the omission of a word from this Op-Ed:

Continued governmental support to promote an open and highly competitive telecommunications market combined with accelerated corporate and private initiatives to ensure that all Americans have equal, high-speed [...]

Hosting Matters is run by idiots

Posted by Richard Bennett

This blog is used to be hosted at Hosting Matters, a web service that claims to be blog-friendly. A few days ago, they noticed it was putting a lot of load on its little server, which it shares with 200 other users. So their response was to disable comments by nuking the permissions on [...]

Lessons from Internet 2

Posted by Richard Bennett

David Isenberg tried to explain his dramatic turn-around on net neutrality recently:

In June of 1997, when I wrote the essay, it seemed reasonable (to a Bell Labs guy steeped in telco tradition) that a stupid network might incorporate low level behaviors analogous to taxis or tropism to automatically adapt to the needs of the data. [...]

Defining away the uncertainty

Posted by Richard Bennett

David Isenberg is jumping on the cluetrain to defend Dr. David Weinberger from charges of fuzziness. According to the Davids, there’s no uncertainty about Network Neutrality:

As a proponent of Network Neutrality, I cringe when I hear, “We do not even know what Network Neutrality means.” We DO know. Such statements are true ONLY in the [...]

Weinberger’s Net Neutrality Gaffe

Posted by Richard Bennett

A gaffe is when a politician accidentally says what he really thinks. Net neutrality advocate David Weinberger committed one recently when he wrote:

…I recently spent a day�sponsored by an activist think tank�with a dozen people who understand Net tech deeply, going through exactly which of the 496 permutations would constitute a violation of Net neutrality. [...]

Barack Obama

Posted by Richard Bennett

New York Magazine has an has an interesting little piece on Barack Obama:

A woman stands up and tosses Obama what I assume she thinks is a bit of red meat. What, she asks, does the senator think of the pervasiveness of religion in public discourse these days? Obama doesn�t take the bait.
�No one would say [...]