Continue reading Verizon’s My FiOS app puts your entire living room under one Android roof

Verizon’s My FiOS app puts your entire living room under one Android roof originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DSL is on the ropes, and cable companies are seeing their broadband numbers rise, according to data on broadband sign ups during the second quarter. Leichtman Research Group found that the top 18 providers in the U.S. acquired about 350,000 net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in the April-June period. Net broadband additions in the quarter were the second fewest of any quarter in the ten years LRG has been tracking the industry.

That’s pretty significant. It means that new subscribers are hard to come by, so gains for providers will come from the competition — and so far cable and fiber products are the winners there. For every consumer that added service from a telecoms provider, cable providers added three. The top cable broadband providers have a 56 percent share of the overall market, with 8.9 million more subscribers than the top telephone companies – compared to 7.85 million this time a year ago.

But all is not lost for telecom companies — at least those that are upgrading to fiber. AT&T and Verizon added 628,000 fiber subscribers in the quarter (via U-verse and FiOS), while losing 578,000 net DSL subscribers. No wonder Time Warner Cable’s CEO thinks broadband is his company’s future and AT&T’s CEO says DSL is obsolete.

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Holographic disc storage may not have worked out so well for InPhase, but the folks at General Electric are still trying to make HVD work. Their latest breakthrough, shown off today at an IEEE symposium in Hawaii, is a new micro-holographic material which is 100x more sensitive than its predecessor and ups recording speed to that of Blu-ray discs. In the two years since we saw it last some of the hyperbole has apparently been lost — no claims of “two to four years left for Blu-ray” this time around — but manager Peter Lorraine still thinks the DVD-sized discs have a future in archival and consumer systems. That’s getting tougher to imagine in a world with FiOS and Netflix streaming, but if there is ever another disc format you may be looking at it right now.

Continue reading GE’s new holographic storage burns 500GB discs at the speed of a Blu-ray

GE’s new holographic storage burns 500GB discs at the speed of a Blu-ray originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fiber Broadband is finally coming into its own, thanks to the growing number of fiber broadband deployments across the world. However, fiber broadband’s growing popularity is coming at the cost of DSL, one of the more widely deployed broadband technologies.

• According to Infonetics Research, the worldwide Passive Optical Networking (PON) market jumped 20 percent in the first quarter of 2011 over the fourth quarter of the previous year, and is now over billion, an all time high. PON is a technology used to deliver fiber broadband to our homes.
• China, Korea and Japan are the reason why Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON), spending jumped a whopping 46 percent in the first quarter of the year over the previous quarter as Infonetics data shows. EPON is one of most widely deployed fiber broadband technologies with over 40 million subscribers using it as a basis to get super fast broadband.
• During the first three months of 2011, Verizon added 207,000 FiOS fiber-to-the-home  subscribers. Verizon is one of the largest fiber broadband providers in the US.
• A double-digit sequential drop in DSL infrastructure spending in all regions led the overall market’s decline led by China shifting its broadband spending to fiber. China, according to Point Topic is the largest broadband country followed by the U.S.

Just to be clear, DSL isn’t going away anytime soon. At the end of 2010, there were 331 million broadband subscribers that used DSL-based connections versus 72 million who used fiber-based broadband connections. So fiber has a lot of catching up to do!

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Back in December, I broke the mobile broadband speed limit using Verizon’s just launched 4G network. The only LTE-compatible devices at that time were USB dongles, and they were initially limited to computers running Microsoft Windows. Since then, Verizon has added USB support for Mac computers, but also new MiFi devices that can share the fast 4G signal with multiple devices.

For the past week, I’ve been using one of the new MiFi’s. Novatel Wireless sent me a loaner MiFi 4510L, which Verizon currently sells online for with a two-year data contract. This morning I used the device as my only data connection for my laptop and a tablet. It can share the 4G connection with up to five devices. My laptop was used all morning on the MiFi’s hotspot, while I used the tablet sporadically. Both devices enjoyed super speeds from the 4510L; I felt like I was working at home where I have a fast FiOS connection.

Verizon advertises that the MiFi 4510L should provide downloads 5–12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2–5 Mbps. In repeated tests, the device exceded those claims and performance didn’t vary much. My speedtests routinely showed network latency around 45 milliseconds, downloads at 16 Mbps and uploads just over 5 Mbps, all of which are comparable or better to what I experienced in December.

To give you a real-world example of the speeds, I downloaded the latest Christina Perri album from my Amazon Cloud Storage account in just under two minutes. Every activity I threw at the network and the MiFi — video chats, YouTube HQ viewing, streaming music, browsing and more — offered a comparable experience to my speedy home network.

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The device itself is slightly thicker than the old 3G MiFi I still have for Verizon’s network, but it doesn’t have a noticeably bigger footprint, as you can easily throw the new MiFi in a pocket. The 1500 mAh battery lasted for just over 3.5 hours on the 4G network and can be charged with the included plug or from a computer’s USB port. One upgrade I really like over the prior version is a handy display to show signal strength, battery life and the number of connected devices: A small dot appears for each computer, tablet or mobile device using the MiFi’s wireless connection.

While the MiFi 4510L uses Verizon’s 4G network, it also supports the operator’s 3G or EV-DO data networks; helpful since LTE is only available in 46 markets now. The carrier plans to cover 145 markets before the end of 2011. Since the MiFi 4510L supports both 3G and 4G mobile broadband, it’s future-proof and is prepared to show you 4G speeds if you’re not yet in an LTE coverage area. Using the device at my home office provided standard 3G speeds, just like my old MiFi does.

Should you buy this MiFi? There’s two schools of thought here for people that need mobile broadband. One one hand, some are occasionally using the wireless hotspot functionality that’s becoming prominent on new smartphones. The potential downside here is that using the phone as a hotspot can leave you with a brick. Once the battery runs down you lose both your mobile broadband and your smartphone features. The other camp would rather have a dedicated data device which can offer more monthly bandwidth for the dollar. For those folks, especially in an LTE coverage area, the MiFi 4510L is a great choice.

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DirecTV will be among the first television providers to offer ESPN 3D. The channel launches this June, and DirecTV will place it alongside two other 3D channels, a 24/7 pay-per-view channel and a movies on-demand channel.

This is a markedly different approach from, say, Verizon’s FIOS, which said that it will only add 3D channels when it feels like it. If I can find an extra $2,000+ (spoiler: I can’t) then it’s good news for me, being a DirecTV subscriber. (I only get Internet service via Cablevision, which already broadcast the country’s first 3D sports event last week in the Islanders v. Rangers at the Garden.)

And as much as it sounds like a broken record, the defining 3D TV moment will be this year’s World Cup. I fully expect people who have zero interest in the sport to at least be curious to check out what it looks like. Hopefully Best Buy and so forth will have the 3D matches on display.

As an aside, I will say how hilarious it is that DirecTV has announced 3D channels before it decides to carry Fox Soccer Channel in HD. Sorta lame.