A year ago, Congress asked for a plan that would provide affordable broadband service to all America’s citizens. On March 16th, the Federal Communications Commission responded with a non sequitur: a national wireless plan which is good in its way, but which largely fails to tackle the problem it was asked to solve. … more

Super-fast broadband will be available to every home in the UK by 2020, the prime minister is to promise later. … more

Access to broadband internet might once have been seen as a luxury, but increasingly it’s viewed as an economic necessity. As this OECD report (pdf) suggests, investment in fast access can bring returns all sorts of ways. These include allowing the creation of “smart” electricity grids, which can lower power consumption; gathering and providing transport information, which can lower commuting time; and making greater use of the internet in education and healthcare, for instance by allowing doctors to monitor patients at a distance. … more

The cost of international telecommunications and internet connectivity is expected to drop significantly next July, this year, after the East African sub marine cable system (EASSY) becomes available. … more

Africa has the lowest number of internet users in the world, a problem that has prevented its inhabitants from enjoying the benefits of digital media. … more

Telstra has announced that it is months away from testing 4G technology that could push the maximum capacity of its mobile broadband services up to 172Mbps within five years. … more

The National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission released Tuesday is ambitious in the right way, staking out such immodest national goals as building the most innovative and fastest wireless networks on the planet and vastly improving the wired infrastructure within a decade. But the commission moved so cautiously toward those goals, it’s hard to see at this point how it’s going to reach them. … more

Google and a group of telecommunications companies are about ready to turn on a fast Internet cable running under the Pacific Ocean from the U.S. to Japan, increasing bandwidth by about 20 percent and giving Google its own connection to Asia. … more

European public broadcasters are calling on lawmakers to make it easier to offer their programming over the Internet, saying cumbersome copyright practices restrict their ability to develop new digital services and prolong the fragmentation of the European television landscape. … more

Federal regulators on Tuesday made public the details of their ambitious policy to encourage the spread of high-speed Internet access. But their 376-page proposal, the National Broadband Plan, was met with a chorus of questions, even from the staunchest advocates of its goals. … more