Given their decision to milk copper and stick with VDSL, AT&T is continually juggling last mile bandwidth capacity, managing user demand for HDTV streams, broadband and voice using compression and prioritization (as in: reducing your Internet speed if your entire house starts watching HD programming). Aside from their inability to match cable’s 50-100 Mbps service speeds, the company has done fairly well at this balancing act offering top speeds of 24/3 Mbps, while also offering 3 HD streams.

Those three streams will soon be four:

Speaking at the event, held in Newport Beach, California, Stankey tried to dispel early concerns about whether AT&T had enough capacity to fuel its IPTV service, announcing that the company intends to introduce four HD streams per home by the end of the year, up from the current three, thanks to a combo of more efficient compression and more bandwidth.

As noted in July, that additional bandwidth is coming courtesy of VDSL channel bonding, which allows AT&T to offer slightly more bandwidth at an additional 1-2,000 feet from the VRAD using additional copper pairs. However, AT&T’s putting that additional bandwidth toward video, not user data speeds. AT&T says being unable to meet cable speed tiers faster than 24 Mbps down 3 Mbps up is ok, since most people don’t buy it anyway:

While AT&T has found the capacity to beef up its managed IPTV service, Stankey downplayed the company’s positioning against DOCSIS 3.0-based cable modem services, which typically outpace U-verse’s top tier. He questioned whether there’s much demand for D3 speeds. “The fact of the matter is we sell 18- and 24-meg products. The bulk of our customers choose not to buy that,” he said, noting that most see the value in AT&T’s 6-Mbit/s tier.

Stankey omits AT&T’s specific weakness at offering upstream bandwidth (their website likes to do that too), or the fact that millions of distance-constrained or un-upgraded AT&T customers only have the choice of 6 Mbps, which is magically why so many AT&T customers choose it.

Of course today’s power user is tomorrow’s average user – and come tomorrow – AT&T’s still going to have to find a way to increase speeds further. Barring getting into rocket pigeon connectivity, they’ll either have to finally bite the bullet and install last mile fiber (which investors won’t approve because it requires waiting for returns), or keep their fingers crossed that some of these ultra-fast DSL variants being cooked up in the Alcatel Lucent labs (though still distance constrained) arrive sooner rather than later.

Link to the original article…

As rumors had suggested, T-Mobile this week is launching faster HSPA+ upgrades in 24 new markets, including Austin, Baltimore, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee and many other large markets (hit their release for the full list). With these new launches, T-Mobile says they now offer the faster service in fifty markets nationwide, reaching roughly 85 million Americans. The service is theoretically capable of 21 Mbps downstream, but users should see speeds somewhere closer to 10 Mbps. T-Mobile hopes to reach about 185 million subscribers with the faster technology by the end of the year. T-Mobile today also unveiled their new, swiveling and HSPA+ ready webConnect Rocket 2.0 USB Laptop Stick.

Link to the original article…

BitTorrent recently announced that the company had open sourced uTP, the BitTorrent protocol powering the latest release of uTorrent. According to the company, they open sourced the code – available here, if you’re interested – in the hopes of extending its adoption within the BitTorrent ecosystem. As mentioned last fall, the new uTP platform is designed to be more network friendly, measuring the time a packet takes to get from peer A to peer B, detecting problems, then throttling speed (usually upload) to help compensate. Still, according to Torrent Freak, there are early hiccups, and users have “seen their speeds decrease dramatically” with the new protocol.

Link to the original article…

Meet another useful and amazing gadget for sport professionals and amateurs, that comes with solid training features. New Powered with sensitive GPS Forerunner 405, Garmin will accompany active user in many popular sports for example cycling amateurs will enjoy such feature as GSC 10 speed and cadence sensor, special features allows to monitor pedaling and wheel speed. With such important helper user can manage his activity in a wise way. It is great to know and to picture the data of whole sport activity situation that is carefully stored in memory, to know where is necessary to apply bigger effort and of course to improve and support already achieved results.

Link to the original article…

I’ve been a Vonage customer since pretty close to their beginning. I had, for the longest, one of their Cisco ATA-186 VoIP adapters that I’d consider small enough to travel around with, but broadband in a hotel back in those days was just plain odd and not as normal as it is now some years later.

Vonage has had other miniature offerings that could be packed up and plugged up while traveling but none seem to have the same feature set and usability as the recently released Vonage V-Portal. Gone are the days of multiple offerings from Vonage; they wised up and support one definitely good adapter.

The best part of summer is getting away, but even when taking a break from the real world, everyone still needs to be in touch with work, loved ones, or both. Vonage offers a number of ways to do just that:

• Domestic Travel: Did you know that you can take your Vonage adaptor with you while traveling domestically you can make and receive calls for the same cost of using the adaptor at home? Just plug in an adaptor in to a high-speed Internet connection, and your home phone number comes with you virtually.

• International Travel: If you are traveling or moving abroad this summer, Vonage offers a way to make calls back to the U.S. without getting charged an arm and a leg on your cell or using cumbersome calling cards. Plug in your Vonage adaptor and you can make calls to the U.S. for free.

• Virtual Number: While abroad, you may want to add a local phone number to your Vonage account so locals can call you for free. Vonage has you covered here, as you can add a local international number in several locations for an additional $4.99-$9.99 per month (more details here).

• And, as always, Vonage’s $24.99 Residential Premium Unlimited Plan includes calls to the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, and landlines in Italy, France, Spain, England and Ireland are included.

The V-Portal, which is a Vonage adaptor and one-port router combined, comes with a built-in LCD screen. Among its features, the LCD helps customers with troubleshooting, displays call logs, and allows users to set call forwarding.

Dimensions(in mm): 126L x 124W x 31.9H

With some upcoming trips coming up, it means that I’ll be able to tote this around and save money while making phone calls and not use up my cellphone minutes. Also when it’s not plugged up, via the Vonage control panel – a web based method to maintain your account – I can forward all calls to my cellphone.

Save money, easy to pack… I can dig it. Monthly fees do apply.

[ Vonage ]