Roy Mark

Icahn Ups Stake in Motorola

Motorola’s management and billionaire investor Carl Icahn are heading for another showdown. In a March 5 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Icahn, already Motorola’s largest stakeholder, disclosed that he had raised his stake in the company to 6.3 percent. In all, Icahn or Icahn-controlled entities own 142 million shares of Motorola. Icahn has […]

Telco Earmarks $1B for Network Expansion

Driven by a global surge in data, voice and video traffic, AT&T officials said March 5 they plan to invest $1 billion to expand the company’s international networks. The investment more than doubles AT&T’s 2006 enterprise investment and represents a 33 percent increase over 2007 spending. AT&T said the $1 billion would be used to […]

Juicing Up Broadband Speeds Down Under

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes Australian lawmakers should be more concerned about fair pricing than speed for its proposed fiber-to-the-node national broadband network. The Australian government has pledged to build a network with speeds of up 12M bps, reaching 98 percent of all of its citizens. The Australian government plans to foot the cost of […]

E-Voting Two-Step: Paperless Ballots, No Recounts

With so much on the line for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the March 4 presidential primaries in Texas and Ohio, election watchdogs will be closely monitoring the process for e-voting problems. Texas, in particular, will be closely examined as three of the state’s largest counties deploy paperless ballots. Ohio, which has its own […]

P2P Claims Heart of New Net Neutrality Debate

WASHINGTON-Capitol Hill staffers got a healthy dose of the revived network neutrality debate swirling around Comcast at a Feb. 29 luncheon conference organized by think tank iGrowthGlobal. A complaint filed at the Federal Communications Commission claims that Comcast’s network management policy includes deliberate throttling of P2P applications like BitTorrent during peak network hours. Comcast says […]

ICANN Targeted by Lawsuit, Yahoo

WASHINGTON-Network Solutions found itself a target of a class action lawsuit Feb. 28 charging the domain registrar with bilking consumers through a scheme forcing them to buy domain names from Network Solutions instead of competitors that charge less. According to the lawsuit, when someone searches Network Solutions for the availability of a domain name, the […]

Markey Floats Wireless Bill of Rights

Under a proposed bill by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, wireless carriers would be required to disclose in clear, plain and conspicuous language the terms of service contracts and communities would be free to provide their own wireless services. As part of the Massachusetts Democrat’s plan, carriers would be forced to disclose any early termination fees […]

Missing White House E-mails Probe Muddied

WASHINGTON-A U.S. House hearing on missing White House e-mail erupted into a partisan political catfight Feb. 26 when Democrats released a hotly contested statement by a former Executive Office of the President IT employee who claims he warned the White House its e-mail archival system was inadequate. “The process by which e-mail was being collected […]

Nokia Displays Nano Phone

A possible mobile phone of the future went on display Feb. 25 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Developed by Nokia and the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, the device employs nanotechnology to create a stretchable and flexible phone. The folded design fits easily in a pocket and could […]

Comcast Takes a Net Neutrality Bashing

Comcast stepped into the FCC dock Feb. 25 to face accusations it discriminates in handling Internet traffic from content providers, violating the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. In the end, not even turning to the Bible seemed to help the nation’s second-largest broadband provider’s defense. Before Comcast Executive Vice President David L. Cohen could […]