News

• Verizon to stop offering standalone DSL

  Verizon Communications next month will stop offering so-called "naked DSL" -- high-speed Internet without landline phone service -- in a move that flies in the face of the trend of consumers ditching their home phones for mobile handsets.

• Broadband infrastructure: Time for real policy

  I'm late filing this column. Why? It's my AT&T U-Verse DSL connection again. Make that "yet again." I've been struggling with it all day.

• Motorola's NVG510 DSL modem... not very good

  A few weeks ago here in the above ground portions of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker we got hooked on the British series "Downton Abbey".

• Yet more DSL woes

  For the last few weeks I've been wrestling with my new AT&T U-Verse DSL service and outlined my travails here in Gearhead (here and here) after which you might have assumed all would be well, that AT&T would have pulled out all the stops and sorted out my issues. Alas, this week I'm no happier and, apparently, neither are many of you.

• Diagnosing DSL. Again.

  In the last 11 years I have moved house three times. Each time I have purchased Internet service from AT&T and each time AT&T has managed to make establishing service an epic struggle that consumes hours of my time, leaves me without service for days or weeks, and drives me to the edge of homicidal despair.

• Programming in Lua

  I haven't talked about programming languages for a while so here goes: We start this week with the free, open source (MIT License) Lua language.

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  NBN Co fibre rollout may surpass DSL by 2015: Telsyte

  Fibre optic internet access is set to bypass digital subscriber line (DSL) in 2015 if the NBN Co continues its fibre to the home (FTTH) rollout across Australia but this is dependent on the Labor government staying in power, according to analyst firm Telsyte.

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  Vendors closing in on 1Gbps using DSL

  DSL vendors are using a variety of methods such as bonding several copper lines, creating virtual ones and using advanced noise cancellation to increase broadband over copper to several hundred megabits per second.

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  ABS: Over 500,000 net users get 24Mbps

  More than 60 per cent of all Internet connections are now at or above 1.5Mbps according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

• Broadband booms in the Naughties

  Global Internet access has exploded over the last decade from about 350 million to 1.6 billion, according to new research. More than a third of Internet users worldwide will connect via broadband, according to a BuddeComm report. About 500 million people will be on fixed-line technologies by year’s end. Almost two-thirds of users will subscribe to DSL connections, about 20 per cent via cable modem and only 10 to 15 per cent will use fibre.