As usual, Karl Bode broke the news today that Comcast, the nation's top cable operator and the second largest broadband provider in the U.S., will implement a 250 GB broadband cap starting in October as part of the company's shift to a protocol agnostic network management scheme. According to sources, [...]

Two incidents this week at the Democratic National Convention make me a little worried. First, Salon's Glenn Greenwald got hassled by private security and was threatened with arrest for videoblogging outside an AT&T-sponsored party for Blue Dog Democrats, an event that was supposedly held to thank the conservative Democrats for [...]

(Back after another inadvertent blogging break...summertime and the living is easy - plus I've been playing as a day trader in the stock market. More on that later.) CNET's Declan McCullagh has this illuminating investigative article about a "secret" DC lobbying organization called the Law and Media Group (LMG), which, [...]

In keeping with the virtually universal theme this earnings season, Time Warner Cable issued its Q2 08 earnings results (PDF) this morning, showing continued robust growth in broadband, digital voice and digital service subscriptions, even as overall basic subscriber counts notched down. During the quarter, TWC added a net 201,000 [...]

Small midwest cable operator Insight Communications issued selected Q2 08 financial and operating results (PDF) this morning and, in what is clearly becoming the surprising but so far consistent trend of this earning's season, posted strong subscriber growth across the board. During the quarter, Insight, which serves around 700,000 core [...]

AT&T will jettison wireless users that engage in P2P file-sharing over its network, the company said Friday in a letter PDF filed at the FCC (and flagged today by Ted Hearn at Multichannel News). Senior lobbyist Robert Quinn answered a question posed at hearing last week by Republican FCC Commissioner [...]

Verizon issued its Q2 08 earnings earning results this morning and although the company's wireless business helped propel Verizon to strong net income growth, its customer wireline business -- including video and broadband, heretofore growth stalwarts -- seems to be, um, in the toilet. One clear sign that something is [...]

Top telco AT&T issued its Q2 08 earnings report this morning showing revenue and net income growth thanks to its hot wireless business. But, in a sign that the recession is taking a stiff toll on consumers' budgets, AT&T's consumer wireline business -- including voice, broadband and overall video subscriptions [...]

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo probably thinks he'll score political points and votes with his campaign against the dissemination of child pornography on usenet groups, and he's probably right. He also likely believes that he'll look tough by threatening Comcast, a cable operator that everybody seemingly loves to hate. [...]

Apple issued its fiscal Q3 08 earnings report today showing its usual stellar results -- revenues rose 38% year-over-year to $7.4 billion while net income rose 31% to $1.07 billion thanks to strong Mac and iPod sales. But the same dark cloud that seems to be descending on the entire [...]

(I'm back again! This time no excuses for the blogging absence aside from 1. too much to do in my personal world 2. no inspiration and 3. a surprising and temporary boredom with the media/web/technology/telecommunications world. I have, however, stayed up-to-date in the celebrity realm. Best sites for gossip, BTW, [...]

(Philadelphia, PA) Cable CEOs and CTOs alike agree that the pace of technological progress is the biggest challenge facing the cable industry now and for the foreseeable future. Speaking at two consecutive general sessions at the Society of Cable Engineer's Cable-Tec Expo here, industry business and tech leaders underscored how [...]

Underscoring its leadership role in the online distribution of music and entertainment, Apple announced this morning it has sold more than five billion songs via its iTunes store, up by more than a billion since January 2008 when Steve Jobs told MacWorld attendees that the number of songs sold stood [...]

(Light blogging this week and next due to...so many things.) As usual, Karl Bode at Broadband Reports broke news today when he was the first to report that Comcast will begin testing its new protocol agnostic management system in two markets, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Warrenton, Virginia. Karl got a hold [...]

The WSJ has this illuminating interview with cable veteran and Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt in which Britt makes the case that cable operators won't keep paying high license fees for TV networks if the migration of video content to the ad-supported Internet continues. There is a model today [...]

I came across two seemingly unrelated items this morning about nasty hacker attacks. The first is this post at TorrentFreak discussing a malicious hack of Comcast's home page. For a period of time, the hackers appear to have changed the Comcast DNS/WHOIS records to point at a non-Comcast page, resulting [...]

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts shed more light this morning on why Comcast invested $1.5 billion in the new Sprint-Clearwire WiMax venture, saying that he was dazzled by a 50-Mph trial run of Clearwire's WiMax service that he and fellow investors took before they plunked their money down. Speaking at a [...]

(Washington, DC) Google co-founder Larry Page said today that Google was the winning bidder in the recent 700 MHz C Block auction...for one weekend, until Verizon topped its bid. "We had a long weekend," he said, provoking laughter from attendees at a New America Foundation breakfast here. (Webcast replay.) Google [...]

Canadian broadband network management technology company Sandvine will unveil today at the NCTA show a new tool for allowing broadband operators to manage broadband traffic during periods of congestion. Sandvine got caught up in the recent controversy surrounding Comcast's throttling of P2P applications because the company reportedly supplied the underlying [...]

As the cable industry heads into its big annual trade show this weekend in New Orleans, it has one major unqualified success to tout. U.S. cable operators added a collective 1.3 million net new voice customers during Q1 08, a strong run rate that is slightly higher than the 1.2 [...]

I overslept this morning only to awaken to the news that CBS is buying CNET for $1.8 billion. I had to rub the sleep out of my eyes twice before I realized that I wasn't dreaming. What possible synergies could these two companies generate and why would CBS pay a [...]

A study by the German Max Planck Institute for Software Systems has purportedly revealed that despite Comcast's contention that it throttles P2P applications only during periods of peak congestion, in fact the nation's top cable operator "blocks" BitTorrent applications at all hours of the day. Moreover, another top cable operator, [...]

AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega says that despite common perception, AT&T's wireless service is not a closed system and that the nation's top mobile carrier stands ready to work with Google to incorporate the search giant's open Android platform into its mix of options. Speaking this morning at [...]

(Washington, DC) The U.S. phone industry is sympathetic to the pursuit of anti-piracy policies by Hollywood and the record industry, the head of the industry's main trade association said today. Speaking at a Media Institute lunch, US Telecom CEO Walter McCormick was asked about the record industry's recent stepped-up pressure [...]

MG Siegler has this well-justified rant against uber-tech news site Ars Technica. His basic complaint is that Ars Technica is "really good at stealing other's ideas" because they ripped off a piece he did likening the global spread of the iPhone to the game of Risk. MG links back to [...]