MuniWireless

A study conducted by the Saïd Business School at Oxford and the University of Oviedo in Spain (and sponsored by Cisco) has ranked South Korea, Japan and Sweden as the countries with the highest quality broadband connections. This year’s study focused on upload and download speeds as well as latency, not broadband penetration. With more people viewing high-definition video on the Internet, broadband connections need to be faster and better.

According to the study, the countries with broadband connections that meet…

Borders will be rolling out free WiFi service in its US book stores starting October. I had a feeling they were going to convert from paid to free WiFi after Barnes & Noble began providing free wireless service. At present, Borders uses T-Mobile but it is switching over to Verizon.

I am happy to see that Borders is providing free WiFi service. I use their discount coupons often and when I am in a Borders store, I often want to take…

Free Press has published a PDF debunking the top ten net neutrality myths. For instance, the myth that net neutrality rules will discourage investment:

“The rhetoric about Net Neutrality discouraging investment is just a general outgrowth of the reflexive but misguided belief that any and all regulation discourages investment. The evidence does not support this theory. During the years following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, ISP investment rose dramatically as new regulations were being implemented. Investment declined, however, in the period…

St. Cloud, Florida, one of the first communities in the US to deliver free citywide WiFi service, is shutting it down citing budget problems. What’s very sad about this is that according to the mayor, the people who could not afford DSL/cable Internet service were the ones who used St. Cloud’s free WiFi:

“No matter what people thought of it, it did make our community somewhat unique,” said Mayor Donna Hart, who voted against shutting down Cyber Spot. “We’ve only had…

I’ve always disliked Starbucks in the US — lousy coffee, uncomfortable seating arrangements, absence of real coffee cups (they give you a single espresso in a HUGE paper cup), bad food. But I was surprised to find that other people apparently have been dissecting the Starbucks “cafe culture”, notably a history professor at Temple University who has written a book called “Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America From Starbucks”:

“If Bryant Simon owned a coffee shop, it would not have…

AT&T is finally launching multimedia messaging service (MMS) on the iPhone tomorrow. That’s a welcome announcement for some iPhone users, but many fear that the added data traffic will cause even more breakdowns in the network. Customers of AT&T have been critical about the operator’s poor cellular service which has been suffering from the success of the iPhone.

Recently, the FCC has proposed rules that would make it more difficult for service providers, including wireless operators, to discriminate against certain types…