“We estimate 3.74 million (3.7%) US TV subscribers cut their TV subscriptions 2008-12 to rely solely on Netflix, Over the Air, Online, etc, 1.08 million (1.1%) in 2012 alone. We forecast US TV cord cutter households will reach 4.7 million (4.7%) by year-end 2013.”

The number of cord cutters is steadily growing

(via courtenaybird)

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 It’s Time to Fix the Pitifully Slow, Expensive Internet Access in the U.S. | Wired.com Here are the facts: Approximately 19 million Americans can’t subscribe to high-speed internet access because they live in areas that private companies believe are too expensive to serve. Internet access is still very expensive compared to the rest of the developed world – a third of Americans don’t or can’t subscribe. Internet access in America remains relatively slow – particularly when it comes to upload speeds, the very feature necessary for cloud computing and creating user-generated content. Cable companies dominate wired internet access and face no real competition or pricing pressure; telcos like Verizon and AT&T have retreated to wireless, which will never be a full substitute for wired capacity; and we still have no plan for a nation-wide upgrade to fiber.

 It’s Time to Fix the Pitifully Slow, Expensive Internet Access in the U.S. | Wired.com

Here are the facts: Approximately 19 million Americans can’t subscribe to high-speed internet access because they live in areas that private companies believe are too expensive to serve. Internet access is still very expensive compared to the rest of the developed world – a third of Americans don’t or can’t subscribe.

Internet access in America remains relatively slow – particularly when it comes to upload speeds, the very feature necessary for cloud computing and creating user-generated content. Cable companies dominate wired internet access and face no real competition or pricing pressure; telcos like Verizon and AT&T have retreated to wireless, which will never be a full substitute for wired capacity; and we still have no plan for a nation-wide upgrade to fiber.

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Who invented the Internet?: The outrageous conservative claim that every tech innovation came from private enterprise. - Slate Magazine Earlier this month, President Obama argued that wealthy business people owe some of their success to the government’s investment in education and basic infrastructure. He cited roads, bridges, and schools. Then he singled out the most clear-cut example of how government investment can spark huge business opportunities: the Internet. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama said. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” Until recently this wouldn’t have been a controversial statement. Everyone in the tech world knows that the Internet got its start in the 1960s, when a team of computing pioneers at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency designed and deployed ARPANET, the first computer network that used “packet switching”—a communications system that splits up data and sends it across multiple paths toward its destination, which is the basic design of today’s Internet. According to most accounts, researchers working on ARPANET created many of the Internet’s defining features, including TCP/IP, the protocol on which today’s network operates. In the 1980s, they strung together various government and university networks together using TCP/IP—thus creating a single worldwide network, the Internet. Suddenly, though, the government’s role in the Internet’s creation is being cast into doubt. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal,argued Monday in a widely linkedJournal op-ed. Instead, Crovitz believes that “full credit” for the Internet’s creation ought to go to Xerox, whose Silicon Valley research facility, Xerox PARC, created the Ethernet networking standard as well as the first graphical computer (famously the inspiration for Apple’s Mac). According to Crovitz, not only did the government not create the Internet, it slowed its arrival—that researchers were hassled by “bureaucrats” who stymied the network’s success. “It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” Crovitz says. I’ll give him one thing: It is important to understand the history of the Internet. Too bad he doesn’t seem interested in doing so. Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances.

Who invented the Internet?: The outrageous conservative claim that every tech innovation came from private enterprise. - Slate Magazine

Earlier this month, President Obama argued that wealthy business people owe some of their success to the government’s investment in education and basic infrastructure. He cited roads, bridges, and schools. Then he singled out the most clear-cut example of how government investment can spark huge business opportunities: the Internet.

“The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama said. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

Until recently this wouldn’t have been a controversial statement. Everyone in the tech world knows that the Internet got its start in the 1960s, when a team of computing pioneers at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency designed and deployed ARPANET, the first computer network that used “packet switching”—a communications system that splits up data and sends it across multiple paths toward its destination, which is the basic design of today’s Internet. According to most accounts, researchers working on ARPANET created many of the Internet’s defining features, including TCP/IP, the protocol on which today’s network operates. In the 1980s, they strung together various government and university networks together using TCP/IP—thus creating a single worldwide network, the Internet.

Suddenly, though, the government’s role in the Internet’s creation is being cast into doubt. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal,argued Monday in a widely linkedJournal op-ed. Instead, Crovitz believes that “full credit” for the Internet’s creation ought to go to Xerox, whose Silicon Valley research facility, Xerox PARC, created the Ethernet networking standard as well as the first graphical computer (famously the inspiration for Apple’s Mac). According to Crovitz, not only did the government not create the Internet, it slowed its arrival—that researchers were hassled by “bureaucrats” who stymied the network’s success.

“It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” Crovitz says. I’ll give him one thing: It is important to understand the history of the Internet. Too bad he doesn’t seem interested in doing so.

Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances.

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Google plots the 20-year evolution of the Web | CNET News As part of its Google I/O extravaganza, Google released an interactive visualization that tracks the evolution of the Web over the last 20 years in terms of user and data growth, as well as the core Web technologies that have driven the transformation of the Internet from plain old HTML to a rich, interactive medium.

Google plots the 20-year evolution of the Web | CNET News

As part of its Google I/O extravaganza, Google released an interactive visualization that tracks the evolution of the Web over the last 20 years in terms of user and data growth, as well as the core Web technologies that have driven the transformation of the Internet from plain old HTML to a rich, interactive medium.

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Mobile Internet Usage to Top Wireline Surfing by 2015: IDC Report | eWeek.com

People are using mobile devices and notebooks to access the mobile Web more than ever before, according to an IDC report.

More U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices by 2015, according to a report from IT analytics firm International Data Corporation. The company’s Worldwide New Media Market Model (NMMM) forecast that as smartphones begin to outsell simpler feature phones, and as media tablet sales explode, the number of mobile Internet users would grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6 percent between 2010 and 2015.

The report noted that the impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline. Western Europe and Japan will not be far behind the United States in following this trend, the report noted.

Worldwide, the total number of Internet user will grow from 2 billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, when 40 percent of the world’s population will have access to its resources.

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 Cool Infographics | The Map of the Internet The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet.  Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details.  You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog. It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections.  In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.

 Cool Infographics | The Map of the Internet

The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet.  Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details.  You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog.

It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections. 

In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.

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Internet Surpasses Television as Main News Source for Young Adults The Internet is now the main national and international news source for people ages 18 to 29, a study from the Pew Research Center reports.In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time.

Internet Surpasses Television as Main News Source for Young Adults The Internet is now the main national and international news source for people ages 18 to 29, a study from the Pew Research Center reports.In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time.

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