Archive for the ‘Internet Speed Clocking’ Category

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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The ‘Connection Speed’ of Social Networking

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Social networking is giving the words “internet connection speed” a whole new meaning.  It’s now more popular than e-mail.  As fast as e-mail is, in these days of millions of bits per second, it’s just not immediate enough. Seeing a message pop into an inbox just doesn’t compare to receiving a tweet on Twitter or even a comment on Facebook.

According to a new Nielsen report called “Global Faces and Networked Places,” “member communities” such as Twitter and Facebook have overtaken personal e-mail to become the fourth-most-popular way people spend time online (after search, portals and software applications).

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time. And based on data from December 2007- 2008, time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth.

“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” commented John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online. “While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing.”

It goes beyond individuals to larger organizations, like those listed as the most popular pages on Facebook: Barack Obama’s page is by far the most popular Facebook page with close to 6 million fans, while Coca-Cola, Nutella, and a page about Pizza follow with around 3 million fans. The strange this is that the Coca-Cola page is that it wasn’t even created by the Coca-Cola company. According to AdAge, there are now over 250 Coca-Cola fan pages on Facebook. Companies may be quickly losing control of their brand image.

Another social networking site, FML (FMyLife.com) was already quite popular, but over the last few days, it managed to add more than 100,000 new fans every day.

With this kind of growth, you’ll want to make sure your internet connection speed is at its best.  Clock yours using speedplexer.com.

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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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Why Rural Broadband?

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Right now, broadband and high-speed internet are only available where the infrastructure is there to support them.  But for those living outside of urban areas, they may be left with only the super-slow-motion of dial-up, or options that only the wealthier can afford. These are people who are being left behind, unable to benefit from the telecommunications and information revolution. This creates a digital divide.

According to SpeedMatters.org, “The digital divide leaves a large slice of our citizens without high speed Internet access, and some without Internet access at all. Those who ‘go without’ are left out of the potential advantages of high speed Internet access in areas as diverse as education and health, to civic participation and staying up on the news.”

Recently though, the New York Times reported that one company said they were working with rural electric cooperatives to offer high-speed Internet service, delivered over power lines. The technology has been around for several years, but hasn’t typically been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone.

They began deploying Internet service last year with one rural cooperative in Alabama, and this week announced an expansion to include five more cooperatives in Alabama, Indiana, Virginia and Michigan, where 5,000 customers signed up in the first two weeks.

Wireless service is another option for rural areas, but delivery over power lines can overcome hilly terrain or other obstacles that block wireless signals.

The company charges $29.95 a month for service at 256 kilobits per second and $49.95 for 1 megabit per second. Those are far slower speeds than cable and phone companies offer at those prices generally 1 to 3 Mbps, but if those options aren’t available, it’s still much better than dial-up speeds at a maximum of 56 kilobits per second. Clock your internet speed now to see what kind of access you’re enjoying.

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Is it Fair for your ISP to Slow You Down?

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

About a year ago, Comcast’s “network management” techniques got a lot of negative publicity–mostly because of the way they slowed people’s connections, or cut them off entirely. In fact, Federal Communications Commission was brought in to investigate its widely criticized anti-BitTorrent filtering.

(BitTorrent is an advanced peer-to-peer sharing technology that allows users to share music, movies, software, and other intellectual property. It works by splitting up files into tiny bits of data that can be shared in any order. Eventually after sharing a file with others, the speed for downloading increases, thereby taking the burden off of the servers and putting it on the users.)

The FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, said the question was, “Are they reasonable network practices?” He added that “when they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public.”

One blogger put it this way: “Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. …the fact that a major ISP is now filtering yet another class of Internet traffic should not be major news–except for two factors: BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.”

Another blogger said that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as the client, and then disconnecting. Tests by the Associated Press seemed to prove that Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks, even if relatively small files were being transferred.

One blogger/customer noted that while clocking his internet speed, he noticed that regularly got only a portion of what Comcast was promising.  One customer even took Comcast to court over their phrasing of offering an “always-on” connection in their press and promotions. But the fine print seems to have been more binding than the press release.

The final word may be this headline from Reuters news from only a few weeks ago: “Comcast beats forecast but loses subscribers,” of course, they attribute it to “recession and competition”, but it could simply be poor customer service and bad press. 

The moral of the story for internet users:  measure your internet speeds and read the fine print!

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