The number of Internet users worldwide has mushroomed to reach the two billion mark, the head of the UN's telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, said on Wednesday.
The number of mobile phone subscriptions also reached the symbolic threshold of five billion, the secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) told journalists.
Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially.
Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 -- the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol -- could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call "IPv6 brokenness.''
T-Mobile USA Inc. (DTEGY) is set to boost its HSPA+ network over the next 12 months, announcing plans to increase network download speeds up to a theoretical 42 megabits per second, or roughly twice the speeds the carrier currently offers for its “4G” branded service. T-Mobile USA has noted that its current 4G service offers real-world speeds between five and 10 Mbps, so theoretically the new offering could see those real-world speeds double.
Community site 4chan (www.4chan.org) suffered another distributed denial of service attack Monday, according to a report by Web analytics firm Netcraft.
Many of the individuals in pro-WikiLeaks hackers group Anonymous are also members of 4chan's boards.
As of January 1, 2011, the number of unused IPv4 addresses stands at 495.66 million. Exactly a year earlier, the number of available addresses was 721.06 million. So we collectively used up 225.4 million addresses in 2010. 242 million, really, if we ignore the unusual circumstance that Interop gave back nearly 17 million addresses.
It has been announced that Liverpool will trial 200Mbs broadband access for 1,000 homes in the city via powerline technology.
One of the big ideas a few years ago was that it could be possible to receive broadband at superfast speeds using existing power cables. Broadband signals would effectively ride the electricity grid at different wavelengths to electricity signals, allowing for instant high-speed broadband access for everybody.
A satellite that will be used to provide residential broadband connections for Europe, northern Africa and some parts of the Far East has been successfully launched, French satellite company Eutelsat announced on Monday.
The Ka-band satellite — known as KA-SAT — launched on 26 December. It has a capacity of up to 70Gbps. KA-SAT has been designed by Eutelsat to provide broadband coverage for Europe, northern Africa and some parts of the Far East and is expected to be fully operational for residential broadband subscribers from late in the second quarter of 2011.
I used to pay $60 per month for a bundle of TV service and broadband service from Comcast. I decided I didn’t want the TV part anymore, so I canceled it, leaving just the broadband. My new monthly bill: $60 per month.
Ever since then, I've yearned to cut that broadband cable, severing my association with Comcast altogether. I’ll admit that my cable broadband is fast and reliable, but it’s not a moveable feast--I get to enjoy those virtues only at home. Meanwhile I’m under contract with Sprint for another data plan, for service that I can take with me when I leave the house.
Spamhaus was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack after it released info about a WikiLeaks mirror site, but there is some confusion over who was behind the strike.
Last week, the anti-spam organisation put out a warning wikileaks.org was redirecting web traffic to third-party mirror site wikileaks.info – a space Spamhaus said was a known hive of activity for Russian cyber criminals. Spamhaus’s main concern was the security of the website’s Webalta's 92.241.160.0/19 IP address space – it did not have any anti-WikiLeaks agenda.
Google said it is not quite ready to decide where it will build an experimental, ultra-high-speed broadband network that will provide internet connections that are 100 times faster than the connections most Americans get from their phone and cable companies today.
In February, Google announced plans to build a handful of test-bed fibre-optic networks to deliver internet speeds of one gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans.
