Networking

Communications provider Comcast on Wednesday announced two new tiers of service for heavy residential downloaders, along with speed upgrades for subscribers of its existing services.

The two new plans, dubbed "Extreme" and "Ultra" clock in at 50 and 22 Mbps of downstream respectively and 10 and 5 Mbps of upstream. Comparatively, customers of Comcast's "performance" plans are getting a big jump from 8 to 16 Mbps on the downspeed, however, upload performance remains at 2 Mbps.

Marlborough’s Kaiuma Park Estate developer Peter Yealands has announced a contract with locally-based ThePacific.net to install a 1000MB ‘Fibre To The Home’ (FTTH) high speed information and communication system to every house in the magnificent new Pelorus Sound development near Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds.

New Zealand’s domain name system is unlikely to be protected by digital signatures in the near future, despite moves in the US and elsewhere to implement protocols to make this happen.

InternetNZ’s executive director, Keith Davidson, says New Zealand is moving towards introducing the protections, called domain name and addressing system security extensions (DNSSEC). However, he says the technology is not yet stable or usable.

The world's largest quantum-encrypted network has been unveiled in Vienna, providing a glimpse of how data could be transmitted securely in the future.

The network is the result of more than four years of work with 41 organisations from 12 countries working to integrate quantum cryptography into a modern business network. It has been overseen by the EU-sponsored SECOQC (Development of a Global Network for Secure Communication Based on Quantum Cryptography).

The internet has a huge security problem that's temporarily fixed with bent paperclips and some gaffer's tape. Without concerted effort, hackers could easily spoil what little confidence remains in the internet.

In fact, cyber-criminals are already exploiting the Domain Name System hack uncovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky this summer -– essentially setting up fake banking websites that users reach by typing in their bank's real domain name. (That's according to research by Georgia Tech's David Dagon and Internet System Consortium's Paul Vixie.)

A research team at Toshiba's Cambridge laboratories claim the system is virtually impregnable and can even alert users when a hacker is trying to steal information.

BT’s proposed £1.5bn-plus ($2.8bn) investment in a superfast broadband network appeared closer to becoming reality on Tuesday after regulators set out plans to remove many price controls on internet access.

The UK’s leading fixed-line phone company said in July it would spend the money on high-speed fibre optic infrastructure only if regulators allowed it to secure an appropriate rate of return.

The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.

Earlier this year, users of an online community for sharing presentations were unable to access the site and upload their presentations for 48 hours. It seemed to be that a large botnet (network of infected computers) was trying to take down the site by saturating the network connection to the site’s hosting provider. The website was experiencing a heavy distributed denial of service (DDos) attack.

Australian Internet Service Providers should embrace Internet Protocol Television and collaborate with each other to offer IPTV as it will become a killer application in the new National Broadband Network (NBN) environment, according to research company IDC.

IDC claims that IPTV, the broadcast of digital audiovisual content using Internet Protocol, offers massive potential for ISPs to increase their average revenue per user and reduce customer churn.