Build it, and they will come! And no, I don’t mean the fabulous baseball movie but high-speed broadband networks. And not only will they come, but they will also know how to use the speeds. This is just the start for a generation of consumers who are growing up on gigabit connections and are reliant on the “network” for everything.
Continue reading “The Gigabit Generation”Sometimes, when sitting quietly, enjoying a cooling cup of perfectly crafted pour-over coffee, I find myself staring at the back of my hand. In front of my eyes lies a landscape akin to the red sand of the American Southwest that lay baking under the scorching sun after a week of rain. You can see … Continue reading 04.04.2023 Musings
About 30 years ago this month, some boffins at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab at Stanford University decided to set up a website — they wanted to improve how information was exchanged between many international physicists. And that is how the first website in North America was born. We have come a … Continue reading Broadband & Internet is Growing Everywhere
About a month ago, I wrote about the state of Starlink, the satellite broadband division of SpaceX, and speculated that I won’t be surprised if “the Starlink network evolves into Tesla’s very own broadband backbone, connecting all Tesla vehicles.” Elon Musk, the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, threw cold water on that theory in a tweet. However, a … Continue reading Starlink on wheels, ships, and planes
According to an FCC filing (PDF) submitted as per the requirements that come with the $885 million subsidy SpaceX received as part of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, the company’s Starlink has 10,000 users on its network. It has 1,000 satellites in orbit at present. Starlink is capable of launching 60 satellites at a time, with … Continue reading The (present) state of Starlink’s network
I am one of the fortunate ones — I have enjoyed the fiber-connected life for nearly 11 years, four of which have been blessed by a gigabit/second connection. The bi-directional gigabit speed has been a blessing. That speed has come in handy during the pandemic — I am nearly always on Zoom and using the … Continue reading The Need for (Gigabit) Speed
A lot of old tech ideas are back in fashion thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. A few weeks back, Intel announced that — thanks to the immediate need for people to work from home, and in many cases, learn from home — it saw a sudden spurt in the sales of laptops. 1 Logitech, … Continue reading Return of the old fashioned
I am fortunate to live in a building that is serviced by WebPass, an SF-based, internet provider that is now owned by Google Fiber. I have been a customer for over a decade, and can’t live without their rock-solid gigabit per second connection. And it is way cheaper than whatever Comcast is charging for its … Continue reading My Morning Speeds vs Evening Speeds
For past five years, the net new additions to the overall number of broadband subscribers in the US has hovered around the 3 million a year. 2015 was no different — 3.1 million signed up, according to Leichtman Research, a research group that tracks the broadband market. As of now there are over 90.5 million broadband … Continue reading U.S. has over 90 million broadband subscribers
Whether they like it or not, cable companies are fast becoming broadband-first companies. But it’s not by choice that they are embracing over-the-top video, starting their own web video offerings or finally coming around to the idea of cord-cutting. “It’s totally, totally shifted to Netflix,” Charlie Ergen, the CEO of Dish Network, recently told The New York Times. … Continue reading It’s All About Speed and Broadband, Not TV
