On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released a decision that effectively bans “zero-rated” Internet services in the country. While the notion of zero-rating might be somewhat new to many readers in the United States, the practice is common in many developing economies. Essentially, it is the practice by which a carrier creates an […]
How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?
December 29, 2015 by
This week saw an exciting announcement about the experimental deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 in limited markets in the United States, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and parts of northern California, which will bring gigabit-per-second Internet speeds to many homes over the existing cable infrastructure. The potential for gigabit speeds over the existing cable networks bring hope that more consumers […]
Where is Internet Congestion Occurring?
April 2, 2015 by
In my post last week, I explained how Netflix traffic was experiencing congestion along end-to-end paths to broadband Internet subscribers, and how the resulting congestion was slowing down traffic to many Internet destinations. Although Netflix and Comcast ultimately mitigated this particular congestion episode by connecting directly to one another in a contractual arrangement known as paid peering, […]
Why Your Netflix Traffic is Slow, and Why the Open Internet Order Won't (Necessarily) Make It Faster
March 25, 2015 by
The FCC recently released the Open Internet Order, which has much to say about “net neutrality” whether (and in what circumstances) an Internet service provider is permitted to prioritize traffic. I’ll leave more detailed thoughts on the order itself to future posts; in this post, I would like to clarify what seems to be a […]
Shaping Wi-Fi’s future: the wireless-mobile convergence
January 17, 2015 by
According to recent news, Comcast is being sued because it is taking advantage of users’ resources to build up its own nationwide Wi-Fi network. Since mid-2013 the company has been updating consumers’ routers by installing new firmware that makes the router partially devoted to the “home-user” network and partially devoted to the “mobile-user” network (a […]
