He's also encouraged by results of a workshop on this issue at the Annenberg Center earlier this month in which business interests, regulators, academics and consumer advocates agreed on a set of principles for the industry, though the results won't be published for another couple weeks.
Still, there's no doubt that the rate at which Americans are turning to high-speed access is slowing – almost to a crawl. Between December 2004 and May 2005, the number of home Internet users with high-speed connections climbed from 50 percent to 53 percent, according to a study last fall by the Pew Internet Project, which called it a "small and not statistically significant increase."
By contrast, two-thirds of Canadians have broadband access. Nearly one-third of American adults do not use the Internet at all, the study found; just 23 percent of those who came online in the previous year chose a high-speed connection.
After the initial rush to sign up customers for high-speed DSL and cable Internet service, the remaining dial-up users who haven't switched to faster service aren't attractive candidates to do so because they tend to be older, less educated, with lower income and relatively apathetic about using the Internet in the first place, says John B. Horrigan, associate director for research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Should Congress decide to side with telecom and cable providers in the Net neutrality debate, it could discourage people from paying for faster online access. If the broadband providers got their way, they could build their own network of content and services within the Internet, and discourage people from going outside to competitors.
"Net neutrality doesn't fit comfortably into the way users actually behave when they use high-speed Internet connections. They like to pilot their own ships online," Horrigan says. "With high-speed connections, you don't behave as if you'd want walled gardens, you go far and wide and satiate your info needs."
Verizon is demoing crowd analytics technology that uses 5G along with AI and mobile edge computing to give stadium operators insights into the flow of fans throughout a venue.
As we move closer to fully realizing the potential of Wi-Fi 7, it becomes evident that the RF, signaling, and throughput tests are not merely procedural checkpoints but the pillars of excellence in wireless communication.
With low earth orbit (LEO) satellites fast becoming the norm and 3GPP unifying telecom standards around the globe, the satellite IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) sector ought to be looking at a bright horizon. But is this the case?
