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  Monday Evening Links -

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 4:00pm MST

  
  Freedompop cagey about revenue model for 'free' mobile broadband service fiercebroadbandwireless.com
  Sprint done with WiMax gadgets fiercebroadbandwireless.com
  Congress (still) looking into investigating Carrier IQ pcworld.com
  Bright House rolls out WiFi in Florida fiercebroadbandwireless.com
  Rupert Murdoch Lashes Out Against The White House For Asking Congress Not To Break The Internet techdirt.com
  Hacker threatens to release full Norton Antivirus code Tuesday reuters.com
  Everything Everywhere upses the whole UK 4G applecart gomonews.com
  New broadband subs spike in 3Q'11; highest since 2009 lightwaveonline.com
  House Members ask Homeland Security to monitor socil networking sites fiercetelecom.com
  Skype coming to Windows phones - how happy will operators be about that? siliconrepublic.com
  California imposes standards for battery chargers wirelessweek.com
  Uh-Oh PC's: Half of computer sales are mobile gigaom.com
  Demand for ebooks soars, libraries struggle to stock virtual shelves washingtonpost.com
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  MPAA: Let's Rush PIPA, SOPA Through Anyway - Because Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and Jobs

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 3:03pm MST

  
  SOPA effectively ran into a brick wall over the weekend after the White House came out with a statement urging SOPA backers to head back to the drawing board and draft legislation that doesn't involve censorship and breaking the Internet. As you might expect, SOPA supporters are still hoping to move forward with both bills, taking a number of tactics. One, folks like Rupert Murdoch are trying to vilify SOPA opponents like Google and OpenDNS, insisting they're secretly supporting foreign pirates. In reality, both companies simply highlighted how PIPA and SOPA are just awful pieces of legislation written by people with absolutely no technical understanding for the benefit of campaign contributors.
  
  The second tactic of SOPA and PIPA supporters is to apparently pretend that the shelving of SOPA isn't a big deal, while repeatedly hammering the falsehood that their primary interest in passing these laws is saving and/or creating jobs. The MPAA has issued a statement downplaying White House opposition and the horrible weekend they had, going so far as to insist that "now it is time to stop the obstruction and move forward on legislation," while insisting the White House statement "clears the way for action on these important bills." Also, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs and did we mention jobs?

  We applaud the continued leadership in the House and Senate for working to enact common-sense legislation to stop foreign websites from stealing American creativity and jobs. Misinformation simply can't be allowed to replace honest debate, and derail the critically important fight to protect American jobs. We hope the Administration s role in this debate now will help steer the attention now to what can be accomplished and passed into law to protect American jobs.

  The problem, as always, is that the MPAA's credibility when it comes to job and piracy statistics simply does not exist. "More jobs!" is also the rallying cry of Democrat Harry Reid, who ignores the fact that the bills could harm the one part of the American economy that is actually creating jobs, the smaller technology startup sector.
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  Cable ISPs Offered Fastest Speeds in 2011* - *At Least Among Largest ISPs, And Thanks to Slow DSL

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 1:07pm MST

  
  Todd Spangler over at cable-industry trade magazine Multichannel News crows that cable operators came out on top in 2011 in terms of speed. According to data compiled over at the Ookla Net Index, the six fastest residential ISPs in the U.S. based on average download speed were Comcast, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications.
  
  The rankings only included the nation's largest carriers (omitting smaller, faster municipal, independent Co-Op or Google fiber operations) and results from both DSL and FTTH/N were blended together, bringing down average speeds for both AT&T and Verzion:

  Comcast and Charter delivered average download speeds of 17.19 Megabits per second, followed by Cablevision at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at 15.76 Mbps, TWC at 14.41 Mbps and Insight at 14.22 Mbps. Verizon Communications fared better than its telco peers with an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps, thanks to FiOS Internet, its fiber-to-the-home service that provides up to 150 Mbps downstream. And overall, Verizon had the highest upstream speeds with an average of 7.41 Mbps. Still, the company's legacy DSL services dragged down overall speeds.

  Cable's dominance isn't expected to change anytime soon here in the States, with many more rural-focused telcos (Windstream, CenturyLink, Frontier, Fairpoint) lacking the funds to seriously upgrade to fiber to the home, and larger companies like AT&T and Verizon all but halting their last mile upgrades.
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  Canadian Network Neutrality Complains Rise Sharply - As Rogers Continues to Bumble Network Management

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 9:38am MST

  
  Back in 2009, Canada passed network neutrality rules designed to protect consumers from anti-competitive treatment of network traffic, though at the time there was a lot of concern about the rules being adequately enforced. Last year a request made of government data revealed that there were fifty two complaints made over the first two years the rules were in place, with roughly half of those having to do with Rogers and their total inability to keep their network management systems under control. Since last fall however, complaints have spiked with 51 complaints having been filed since last September.
  
  The new rules have changed the way many Canadian ISPs tackle traffic management, with Bell announcing last December they'd be backing off throttling completely. However Rogers not only continues to throttle legitimate applications, they continue to insist they're in total compliance with CRTC rules -- despite that clearly and repeatedly not being true:

  Rogers is not tipping its hand about any upcoming change to its traffic management policy, but says it operates in "complete compliance" with CRTC's traffic management guidelines. "It's something that our network people look at all the time, and we are constantly evaluating, but we have nothing to announce today," Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, said in an interview Thursday. Engelhart added that past technical glitches with its popular World of Warcraft game have been solved...

  Users in our forums continue to complain that Rogers is engaging in some of the upstream-traffic-choking TCP packet forgery that got Comcast in so much trouble here in the States. It is expected that Rogers will ultimately buckle and move to more intelligent network management, but for now it remains clear that denial is their primary strategy. While Rogers broadband users may not be seeing more intelligent network management just yet, they are getting a new price increase as a new year's present.

  
  
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  Canadian Network Neutrality Complaints Rise Sharply - As Rogers Continues to Bumble Network Management

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 9:38am MST

  
  Back in 2009, Canada passed network neutrality rules designed to protect consumers from anti-competitive treatment of network traffic, though at the time there was a lot of concern about the rules being adequately enforced. Last year a request made of government data revealed that there were fifty two complaints made over the first two years the rules were in place, with roughly half of those having to do with Rogers and their total inability to keep their network management systems under control. Since last fall however, complaints have spiked with 51 complaints having been filed since last September.
  
  The new rules have changed the way many Canadian ISPs tackle traffic management, with Bell announcing last December they'd be backing off throttling completely. However Rogers not only continues to throttle legitimate applications, they continue to insist they're in total compliance with CRTC rules -- despite that clearly and repeatedly not being true:

  Rogers is not tipping its hand about any upcoming change to its traffic management policy, but says it operates in "complete compliance" with CRTC's traffic management guidelines. "It's something that our network people look at all the time, and we are constantly evaluating, but we have nothing to announce today," Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, said in an interview Thursday. Engelhart added that past technical glitches with its popular World of Warcraft game have been solved...

  Users in our forums continue to complain that Rogers is engaging in some of the upstream-traffic-choking TCP packet hijinks that got Comcast in so much trouble here in the States. It is expected that Rogers will ultimately buckle and move to more intelligent network management, but for now it remains clear that denial is their primary strategy. While Rogers broadband users may not be seeing more intelligent network management just yet, they are getting a new price increase as a new year's present.
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  SOPA Runs Into Brick Wall - White House Opposes, SOPA Gets Shelved (For Now)

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 7:07am MST

  
  Last week supporters of both SOPA (in the House) and PIPA (in the Senate) tried their best to downplay opposition to the controversial laws, in the process accusing law opponents like Google and Open DNS of secretly helping pirates. As of last Friday, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) were busily insisting the government should rush the laws through then worry about the potentially devastating impact of DNS filters at a later date.
  
  As opposition grew, both Leahy and Smith began stating they really would pull DNS filtering to save the bills. Over the weekend those efforts ran into a brick wall. It began with the White House issuing a statement saying they wouldn't support the bills in their current form:

  Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity.

  Congress also announced over the weekend they'd be shelving SOPA. While that's certainly good news for opponents, this is clearly an effort that the entertainment industry isn't going to give up on, and Harry Reid has stated he'll being sticking to the schedule in pushing PIPA through. It has been fairly clear all along that the primary target of this legislation has been The Pirate Bay, and SOPA likely would have failed in hurting the website.
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  Report: LightSquared's Interference Fixes Won't Work - LightSquared: Your Report Suffers From Conflict of Interest

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 6:29am MST

  
  Despite constant claims by LightSquared that they've developed low-cost solutions that will mitigate their planned network's interference with GPS, a Federal Advisory board has declared that that there is "no practical solutions or mitigations" that would allow LightSquared and GPS to peacefully co-exist. Back in June LightSquared proposed utilizing a 10 MHz swath of L-band spectrum in the lower portion of the company's spectrum assets to avoid interference. The company then proposed several antenna solutions high-precision GPS users could implement at their own expense to resolve issues.
  
  The National Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Committee last week issued a statement saying that none of these solutions were acceptable:

  Based upon this testing an analysis, there appear to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.

  LightSquared is responding to the report by claiming a conflict of interest by one of the panel's members, insisting that Bradford Parkinson, the vice chairman of a board, is also a director of GPS vendor Trimble Navigation.
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  Hulu Takes Aim at Original Series - Like Netflix, Will Try to Bypass Licensing Lock Out

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 6:13am MST

  
  As Netflix becomes more and more powerful, they're facing greater and greater challenges from the companies whose legacy business models they threaten, with ISPs trying to impose low caps and high overages -- and broadcasters raising rates on licensing. To get around this, Netflix has been pushing into original content, recently snapping up the rights to a new show by David Fincher and Kevin Spacey, the rights to the cancelled-but-popular Fox show Arrested Development, and developing a new gangster show starring Steven Van Zandt. This path is also appealing to Hulu, who plans to launch their first series this February and is putting money aside for more original and exclusive programming.
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  LTE iPad Already Being Produced - Verizon, AT&T Compatible Device On Sale in March

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 5:57am MST

  
  A report in Bloomberg proclaims that an LTE version of the iPad 3 is already in production, with Apple's manufacturing partners in Asia ramping up production of the device this month with the intention of reaching full volumes by February. In addition to supporting new AT&T and Verizon LTE networks, the new tablet will have a quad-core chip with a significantly higher-resolution display. There's no iPad chipset in the iPhone yet due to size and battery constraints, something the tablet doesn't face. The iPad 3 is expected to go on sale in March, according to the report.
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  Monday Morning Links -

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 4:01am MST

  
  Top tenth of Internet users use a heck of a lot of Internet: Study broadband-expert.co.uk
  Lightsquared and GPS can't coexist electronicsweekly.com
  How much does file-sharing resemble stealing, and does it matter? theatlantic.com
  White House Comes Out Against The Approach In SOPA/PIPA techdirt.com
  Systems at City College of San Francisco have been infected with viruses and transmitting data since 1999 sfgate.com
  How the Internet of Things could make the world a greener place gigaom.com
  Hulu plans to raise money for expansion into original programming bloomberg.com
  UK student loses US extradition hearing, could face 10 years jail time guadian.co.uk
  Motorola scores win in ITC Apple patent case bgr.com
  iPad 3, with LTE and other updates, will be out in March washingtonpost.com
  CES 2012 was biggest show ever theverge.com
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