Telecommies

Verizon just lowered the price for unlimited mobile internet on a few cell phones to $29.99 a month. Now the plan is limited to the Verizon SMT5800, Verizon Wireless XV6800, and Motorola’s Q9m (shown in image). This plan will expand to more smart phone models in the future.

These cell phone signal boosters, “femtocells,” designed for home use are one more reason to ditch your landline. The Associate Press explains:

Not only do femtocells improve coverage indoors, where the carrier has a hard time reaching, they reduce traffic on regular, outdoor cellular towers. Perhaps best of all, the carrier doesn’t have to pay to carry the traffic from the femtocell to its network, because the device plugs into a home broadband connection. The so-called “backhaul” traffic, which carries calls from a cellular tower to the wired network, is a major part of the cost of operating a wireless network.

While these gadgets threaten already suffering landline business of Verizon and AT&T, market forces may force them to embrace it anyway. Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin comments, “‘They’re afraid that by deploying these femtocells, at least where they have a landline footprint, they might be putting their landline business at risk’… But that business is at risk anyway – a lack of femtocells may make cellular subscribers keep their landlines for another year or so, but not for long[.]”

Right now Sprint has a competitive lead, already offering them for $49.99 plus $15 a month for unlimited home calling.

Source: Wireless industry works to boost cell phone coverage in the home, Associate Press (4/3/08)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing online is the flash point of the present political conflict surrounding net neutrality. The ball started rolling when Comcast allegedly started discriminating against users of BitTorrent, a popular P2P file sharing software. Either way, the real issue is P2P software has a bad reputation for facilitating software piracy.

Clogging the internet with large illegal file transfers is disagreeable on several levels. This is where the Internet Service Provider (ISP) network management comes in.

But it’s important to stress that P2P software offers unique advantages of efficiency . Like any tool, it’s how you use it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Bit Torrent, it just happens to be a popular tool for nefarious activities.

That’s why Verizon’s new development, P4P technology, is such good news. The Statesman explains:

“The advance is an enhancement of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, which provides Internet users with faster downloads by gathering up pieces of a large file from the computers of many users and then cobbling them together… Sending files with the new technique along faster, cheaper paths resulted in download speeds that were an average of 60 percent faster…”

What differentiates P2P from P4P? PCMAG points out, “P4P actually works to push file’s packets from within the ISP’s network, avoiding paying for the extra bandwidth needed to reach an Internet backbone.” Theoretically, it would be a managed form of file sharing from the ISP end. It’s performance without the piracy

Verizon’s P4P holds great potential, the kind of potential a government regulated net neutrality environment threatens to destroy.