Forums: Bandwidth Monitor

Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream. While increased satellite on-board computing capabilities ideally would mean that only the most useful information would be transmitted to Earth, an unresolved question had been how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African information technology company on Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country's leading internet service provider. Internet speed and connectivity in Africa's largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

One of the more creative ways in which Americans are proposed to pay for the government's lavish spending habits has been revealed by Reuters. The proposed "Spectrum user license fee" on p132 of President Obama's budget would see cellular phone operators paying an annual levy for using certain bands of radio wavelength; despite operators already spending billions at FCC auctions for access to these frequencies. The fees will start at $50million for 2009, rising progressively to $550million per annum in 2013. This license fee will naturally be passed on to the operator's customers should the budget be passed and in...

Periodically, and both Wednesday and today I could not log on, basically all day until just now. But I checked and the FR site was up.I think the problem is simply that FR is busy and I, on dial-up, just can't get through before the connection times out. I get this error: But I want to make sure there is not something else going on, such as being blocked or something for some reason.Any comments you might have about access problems to FR, especially on dial-up, are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell had a message for Democrats, or anyone else contemplating trying to re-impose the fairness doctrine: The move could undermine the justification for existing localism and children's TV regulations, and could be used against public radio. He also suggested it would not come back wearing a big sign saying, "it's me, the fairness doctrine," but would likely instead be rebranded. Those were some of the observations McDowell provided Wednesday in a speech to The Media Institute in Washington, which is a strong opponent of the doctrine. A copy of the speech was supplied to B&C. In the...

Will posting in all capital letters, eat up more bandwidth.

I used the "recommended server" for my test, which is only 150 miles from here. Test and post results. See who's fast and who's slow. Use the "hyperlink" option to copy and paste your result.

Some Comcast customers who actively download software and video files may soon find one set of unexplained delays replaced with a different sort of equally cryptic slowdowns. Comcast is starting to test new approaches to protecting its network from what it describes as congestion caused by a handful of customers who use far far more bandwidth than everyone else. Until now, Comcast has been using devices that interfered with the BitTorrent protocol—the most common method for downloading large files from computers of other users. BitTorrent is often used by people exchanging pornography and illegal copies of movies, but creators of...

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ? That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up...