Bandwidth caps: One hundred and one distractions

adminTech Note

When Cablevision of New York announced this week it would begin offering broadband Internet service of 101 megabits per second for $99 per month, lots of people took notice. Which was the point. Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and …

Bandwidth and QoS: Much ado about something

adminTech Note

The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado about nothing: Internet CAN take video strain …

Understanding leverage, volatility, and the crash

adminTech Note

One can critique Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton’s work on a number of fronts, from the CAPM model to his involvement with the 1998 failure of Long Term Capital Management. And he still doesn’t get to the true source of the current crisis — monetary policy and an erratic U.S. dollar. But I found this MIT lecture useful in explaining …

Web 3.0, ctd.

adminTech Note

Three media veterans — Gordon Crovitz, Steve Brill, and Leo Hindery — give paid content, via micro-payments and related subscriptions, yet another shot. With iTunes and Amazon also doing their part to advance the model, will we finally get a break-through?

Apples and Oranges

adminTech Note

Saul Hansell has done some good analysis of the broadband market (as I noted here), and I’m generally a big fan of the NYT’s Bits blog. But this item mixes cable TV apples with switched Internet oranges. And beyond that just misses the whole concept of products and prices. Questioning whether Time Warner will be successful in its attempt to cap bandwidth usage …