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The majority leaders of both the House and the Senate are attempting to expedite passage of a bill which will likely be the first of several economic stimulus measures. However, a close examination of the bill, titled the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” reveals that the sections relating to broadband [...]
Archive for January, 2009
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Welcome Brett Glass
January 29th, 2009 
Richard Bennett The following post is from our new co-blogger, Brett Glass. Brett and I first crossed paths when we were working on the “Skywalker” token-ring project at Texas Instruments in the early 80s. Brett was part of the team in Houston doing the chipset, and I worked on a team on Austin doing a terminal server [...]
Professional Complainers Blast Cox
January 28th, 2009 Richard Bennett Cox Cable announced plans to test a new traffic management system intended to improve the Internet experience of most of their customers yesterday, and the reaction from the network neutrality lobby came fast and furious. The system will separate latency-sensitive traffic from bulk data transfers and adjust priorities appropriately, which is the sort of thing [...]
What recession?
January 26th, 2009 Richard Bennett So here’s your recession-proof business, ladies and gentlemen:
Netflix, the company which mails out DVD rentals and also offers streamed programming via the internet, saw a 45% jump in profits and 26% rise in consumers to 9.4 million in the fourth quarter.
This was the quarter in which Netflix released Watch Instantly on non-PC platforms. It’s so [...]
Internet Myths
January 21st, 2009 Richard Bennett Among my missions in this life is the chore of explaining networking in general and the Internet in particular to policy makers and other citizens who don’t build network technology for a living. This is enjoyable because it combines so many of the things that make me feel good: gadgetry, technology, public policy, writing, talking, [...]
Damned if you do, screwed if you don’t
January 20th, 2009 Richard Bennett The FCC has finally noticed that reducing the Quality of Service of an Internet access service affects all the applications that use it, including VoIP. They’ve sent a harsh letter to Comcast seeking ammunition with which to pillory the cable giant, in one of Kevin Martin’s parting shots:
Does Comcast give its own Internet phone service [...]
Tags: Keeping the Issue Alive
January 16th, 2009 Richard Bennett Friends of Broadband should be pleased with President-elect Obama’s proposed broadband stimulus program, which proposes $6 billion in grants for wireless and other forms of broadband infrastructure. Granted, the package isn’t as large as many had wished; Educause had asked for $32 billion, ITIF wanted $10 billion, and Free Press wanted $40 billion, but this [...]
Briscoe explains Re-ECN in plain English
January 6th, 2009 Richard Bennett See the current issue of IEEE Spectrum for a nice description of Bob Briscoe’s Re-ECN, A Fairer, Faster Internet Protocol:
Refeedback introduces a second type of packet marking—think of these as credits and the original [ECN] congestion markings as debits. The sender must add sufficient credits to packets entering the network to cover the debit marks [...]
