Networking

75-year-old Sibritt Löthberg from Karlstad Sweden just got her first computer, but it didn't take her long to download all the necessary patches.

Swedish news site The Local reports that Löthberg's home has been tricked-out with a record-breaking 40 Gb/s connection - the first time a private residence has tapped into the internet at such high speeds.
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The blazing-fast connection comes courtesy her son, Peter Löthberg, a Swedish optical internet guru working at Cisco.

In telecoms, Telstra is no 800 pound gorilla. It's an 800 pound colic-ridden infant, irritably throwing its toys out of the pram when it doesn't get its own way.

Whether you agree with what the government's been doing on broadband policy or not, it's become a hot electoral issue -- things are definitely moving. There's a fibre rollout hopefully coming to urban areas, a WiMax deployment for the bush and for everyone else, there's the Broadband Now Web site: a site devoted to showing those in Australia's remotest areas how they too can get connected by whatever means possible.

Somewhere in the 2020s, a decade after the last IPv4 address has been used up, computer science students are going to learn about the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 as an example of either the best or the worst system upgrade in the world's history of system upgrades. We know it will be the greatest system upgrade either way: hundreds of millions—if not more than a billion—systems will have had to be updated in some way.

The coming shortage of Internet Protocol addresses prompted the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) on Monday to call for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol, IPv6.

The current version, IPv4, allows for more than 4 billion (2^32) Internet addresses. Only 19% of the IPv4 address space remains. Somewhere around 2012-13, the last Internet address bloc will be assigned and the Internet will be full, in a manner of speaking.

An effort to crack down on illegal file-sharing over Ohio University's computer network is apparently working, according to a news release from OU Tuesday.

Brice Bible, the university's chief information officer, reports in the release that illegal file-sharing on the university's network has "virtually stopped."

The OU information technology (IT) group that Bible heads has been denying network access to users who engage in high volume peer-to-peer file swapping with parties both inside and outside the university network.

So it's World Telecommunications Day today and what better time than now for Telekom Malaysia to announce that Malaysians consumers (in selected areas) can finally have an option of getting a 4Mbps broadband connection! Up till now the fastest speed you could get was a 2Mbps link. Interestingly, it also appears that Celcom (owned by Telekom Malaysia) is now offering NATIONWIDE wireless UMTS (384Kbps) and HSDPA (3.6Mbps) connectivity. Not bad - now to wait and see if it actually works!

Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that researchers led by the University of Tokyo broke Internet speed records two times in two days.

The US military plans to test an internet router in space, in a project that could also benefit civilian broadband satellite communications.

Cisco Systemsand Intelsat General, a subsidiary of Intelsat, are among the companies selected by the US Department of Defence for its Internet Routing In Space (IRIS) project, which aims to deliver military communications through a satellite-based router.

ALTHOUGH it has taken nearly four decades to build today's internet, some researchers, with the US government's blessing, want to scrap all that and start again.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969.

The Government may have no choice but to withdraw the licences of wireless broadband service providers that are using the 3.5GHz frequency.

The use of the frequency, to provide fast Internet access to businesses, has been found to interfere with transmissions between the Measat-2 communications satellite and its earth station.

Energy, Water and Communications Minister Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik blamed the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which had given out the 3.5GHz spectrum licences.