Daily Archives: April 2, 2006

Paradox of the Worse Network – AT&T: “15Mbps Internet Connections Irrelevant”

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Nate Anderson:

At this week’s Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference, AT&T COO Randall Stephenson told his listeners that increased bandwidth was no longer of great importance to consumers.

“In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn’t transport at those speeds,” he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T’s field tests have shown “no discernable difference” between AT&T’s 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast’s 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.

AT&T, formerly SBC is the dominant internet provider in Wisconsin…… Stephenson completely misses the point that bidirectional fast networks to the home will open up many, many small business opportunities.

Internet Injects Sweeping Change into Politics

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Adam Nagourney:

The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating with the approach of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 White House elections, prompting the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information.

Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.

Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.

Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.

No Doubt.

Korea – The World’s Most Wired Country

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Norimitsu Onishi:

Reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea decided that becoming a high-tech nation was the only way to secure its future.

The government deregulated the telecommunications and Internet service industries and made investments as companies laid out cables in cities and into the countryside. The government offered information technology courses to homemakers, subsidized computers for low-income families and made the country the first in the world to have high-speed Internet in every primary, junior and high school.