Archive for the ‘Cable Speeds’ Category

Chat Online with Fast Cable Internet Speed

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Online chat rooms are now a favorite haunt for teenagers who want to connect with their friends. They are not only popular among teenagers; people from virtually all age groups find chatting online an ideal way of communicating with other users. A few online chat clients have also added video conferencing facilities, which have become quite a rage today. It goes without saying that a fast cable internet speed is needed for a smooth online chatting experience.

Chat rooms are primarily divided into two categories, which are paid chat rooms and free chat rooms. Most popular chat rooms such as Yahoo, Windows Live, and AOL are free chat rooms, and they contain rich graphical interface, both in 2D and 3D. This is the reason why they are also called Visual Chat Rooms. A minimum cable internet speed of 256 kbps is required to utilize the 3D features of Visual Chat Rooms, such as “Avatars”. These “Avatars” are animated characters which can be moved around in a graphic environment. However, if you intend to use text and audio only, an internet connection speed of 128 kbps should suffice.

The enduring appeal of online chatting lies in its inherent ability to shorten the distances between users and facilitate communication in real time. It is suggested that you verify your actual cable internet speed before you sign up for online chat. There are a number of reliable web-based internet connection speed test applications which can help you enumerate your true internet speed and make your online chatting experience more enjoyable.

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Yahoo Search Monkey Improves Searches

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

The New York Times’ Miguel Helft offered the Bits Blog his live running commentary during Yahoo’s presentation of its new innovations. Entitled “The End of the 10 Blue Links,” Yahoo offered an update on the progress of their Search Monkey, a service that allows Web publishers to show up more prominently in search results.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, explained that most users don’t want to search; they want to complete a task. And we know they want to do so as quickly as possible, with internet speed. That’s why Yahoo is getting away from offering just 10 blue links on the search results page and, instead, fulfilling the user’’s intent. Search Monkey does that by extracting “objects,” or things that people care about, like people, cities, restaurants, teams, etc. from the Web. Yahoo, he said, is relying on partners and Yahoo’s “open” philosophy to help gather rich data about the objects.

Yahoo has also been working to understand the content of pages through Search Monkey. It helps Yahoo to extract things like a restaurant’s location, ratings and other characteristics from a Web page about that restaurant, and present that to searchers.

Changes will be seen as the steps are rolled out over time, but Yahoo searches will increasingly deliver boxes of rich results. It will be able to do this, in part, because of its learning algorithms, but also in part because of the acceptance of Search Monkey, which allows publishers to flag certain kinds of information from their Web pages to Yahoo, making it easier for the search engine to process.

Though Google is the clear dominating force in searches with 64% of the market versus Yahoo’s 20%, even Google recently made some improvements.

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Spam Pollutes More than the Super Highway

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

A new study entitled ‘The Carbon Footprint of Spam’  published by ICF International and commissioned by the computer security company McAfee, claims that spam uses around 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes for an entire year.

They calculated that the average CO2 emission for a spam email is around 0.3 grams. “That’s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times,” the report states. 

Interestingly, the majority of energy usage–around 80%–comes from users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam filters (also known as false positives).

Spam creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year.

The good news is that McAfee notes that current levels of spam filtering save 135 billion killowatt-hours of electricity that would otherwise be wasted. “That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road,” the report says.  But, we could remove the equivalent of another 2.3 million cars if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter.

 “Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull — before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity — equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road,”  the report tells us.  But another way to fight the energy-sucking power of spam is not to pass it on. Be mindful of slowing down the traffic on the information superhighway, and you’ll be helping keep up the internet speed!.

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Crime and Punishment With Internet Speed: Part 1

Friday, March 20th, 2009

The New York Times reported that police agencies are now using the same Web 2.0 tools as everyone else — sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace.

Last month, police in Auburn, Maine, posted images from a surveillance video on Facebook. Facebook members soon provided tips, and suspects were arrested and charged with burglary and criminal mischief.

Now Web services are being developed specifically to allow public and private investigative agencies to share information, and these tools are increasingly popular within law enforcement.

One service, called CrimeDex, is billed by its creators as a “Facebook for law enforcement.” A former police officer started the service in 2002 after growing frustrated with the wasted time investigators spent trying to determine whether other agencies were chasing the same suspects. CrimeDex is used by more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies and private businesses like banks and retail chains. For a monthly fee, members can submit information, photographs and videos related to possible crimes and make comparisons with data from agencies that may be seeing similar patterns or suspects. “It’s the digital equivalent of the old-fashioned Western sheriffs nailing a wanted poster to a tree,” the site’s developer said.

Another Law Enforcement 2.0 service, CrimeReports.com, is intended to increase the transparency of law enforcement agencies and strengthen their interaction with the public. They allow police agencies around the country to record instances of crime on a single nationwide map powered by Google. Citizens can visit the site too, and see a map of crimes in their neighborhood, peer across city lines to see crimes elsewhere, and sign up to receive regular e-mail alerts of all recorded criminal activity in their area. CrimeReports plans to add a neighborhood watch feature, so citizens can form groups on the service and send alerts and tips to participating police agencies.

And nationwide broadband would increase the speed of justice! But as we’ll find out in Part 2, sharing information with real-time internet speed can cause problems too.

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Internet Speed Envy, Globally

Friday, March 13th, 2009

A recent article from The New York Times tech blog compared high-speed Internet use around the world to see if it’s true that many other countries get faster, cheaper and more widely available broadband service than the U.S..

They found that in Japan, broadband service of 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month. So they get three times the speed at about a third of the price.

In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps. That’s quite a difference.

But if you take into consideration that Japan, Korea and Sweden have made significant investment in their fiber optic networks, the United States may not be too far behind. Japan’s average speed is about 16.7 Mbps. Sweden was 8.8 Mbps. And Korea averaged 7.2 Mbps.

In countries that haven’t made the investment in infrastructure we see average download speeds ranging from 3.2 Mbps in Italy to 6.4 Mbps in Germany, according to a study by the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The United States has an average download speed of 5.2 Mbps.

But Internet speeds in the United States are getting faster. Verizon’s fiber optic service, FiOS, offers 50 Mbps service with the capacity to offer much faster speeds. AT&T is building up their U-Verse service, offering data speeds of up to 25 Mbps with Internet video as well. Cable systems are starting to deploy the next generation of Internet technology called Docsis 3.0, offering speeds of 50 Mbps (compared to a maximum of about 16 Mbps available with today’s cable systems) and eventually much more.

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Primetime for Broadband

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

The popular slogans that are doing the rounds in cyberspace these days are TV on PC, Online TV, and Broadband TV. There’s no doubt that the primetime television viewing trend is changing in the US. The current survey data shows that about 55% of Americans are connected to broadband, which offers them high cable internet speed that is ideal for online primetime television viewing. In addition, more than 10 billion online videos are being downloaded each month, confirming the rise in demand for television and video content over the net.

The latest report released by IMMI (Integrated Media Measurement Inc.) further corroborates that people are migrating from TV to broadband. In fact, about 20% of prime TV episodic content is now being watched via the internet. It seems that broadband TV is the future of primetime episodes.

Gone are the days when online TV conjured up images of poor quality TV streaming. With broadband technologies improving by leaps and bounds, it is time the TV networks sit up and take notice, since most ISPs are offering their clients a cable internet speed that perfectly suits online TV viewing. What’s more, with high speed cable, watching television has become more convenient and enjoyable.

Now, the ISPs often provide a net connection with cable internet speed that is significantly lower than what they advertise. This becomes a major problem especially if you’re planning to watch primetime content via the web. One of the surest ways to verify your actual broadband speed is to take a cable internet speed test. After all, it is essential, since a slow internet speed can mess up your primetime content, big time.

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Internet Speed - DSL versus Cable

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line, and it comes through the phone line. Therefore you are connected through your personal line all the way to the source where the line originates.  As a result the DSL Bandwidth speed is stable.

Internet Cable is fed to the system by nodes, which are sort of halfway points between you and the source.  The Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides a bandwidth to an area that includes many customers, and they share the bandwidth. As a result, during peak usage the speed can be significantly degraded.

Which is better and/or faster is hotly debated, and ultimately it depends on what is available in your area. While DSL offers users a choice of speeds ranging from 144 Kbps to 1.5Mbps, cable modem download speeds are typically up to 2 times faster than that, BUT because cable technology is based on shared bandwidth, the speed fluctuates.

In more rural areas with fewer subscribers, you’re bound to have faster download speeds  than a subscriber in a metropolitan center.

On the upload stream, however, cable and DSL are closely matched for speed. Both DSL and cable Internet speeds are largely dependent upon the service provider and either the distance away from the switching station you are or how many subscribers are in your immediate area.

If you’re thinking of switching from one to the other, testing your current connection’s internet speed over a period of time can help you decide, especially if you can compare them to others in your area.  If you haven’t decided which service is best for you, ask your neighbors which service they use, what speeds they are getting, and if they’re having any problems. Then break down the speed versus the cost, and decide which works best for you.

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