Quotes from the just-issued Digital Rivers Report on broadband deployment in the Pittsburgh area: “The team discovered that broadband access technologies are available today to deliver the necessary bandwidth, but telecommunications companies are unable or unwilling to build the necessary network infrastructure universally.” “This research suggests that broadband deployment patterns are independent of affluence, a common misperception in discussions of the Digital Divide. Rather, significant service gaps exist where broadband ...

What if a company lost $54 billion and nobody noticed? That’s what happened last week with AOL Time Warner. It reported the largest quarterly loss in corporate history, a truly mind-boggling evaporation of wealth. Despite this, AOL’s stock actually went up after the announcement. What’s going on here? More… UPDATE: This column is also running on CNet News.com.

XTremeSpectrum CEO Martin Rofheart writes: I wanted to alert you to yesterdayÂ’s news that the FCC issued its First Report & Order on ultra-wideband. The FCCÂ’s First Report & Order was made available yesterday and constitutes formal approval of unlicensed spectrum between 3.1 GHz and 10.6 GHz for ultra-wideband technology. We are thrilled with this ruling, which caps a three and half year effort by the FCC. After review of ...

For the past day, I’ve been at a small workshop on spectrum policy hosted by the Aspen Institute. Aspen regularly assembles key figures from the government, private sector and academia to frame emerging communications and Internet policy issues. This one was interesting. I was there to advocate open spectrum and unlicensed wireless technologies, like 802.11/WiFi. It was heartening to see the level of awareness about WiFi among the lawyers, economists, ...

MSNBC (from Reuters): “China trails only the United States in the number of people with Internet access at home, with more than 56 million people able to connect from their residences, according to a report released on Monday.”

Wall Street Journal: “Corporate spending on computers, software, storage and communications gear fell 8.4% last year, the first annual decline since 1958, according to government statistics.” Yowza!! After death, taxes and Moore’s Law, few things have been more certain than increasing corporate IT spending. This statistic confirms we’re experiencing more than just a hangover after the Internet boom. The article goes on to say that things look only marginally better ...

AllNetDevices: Nokia and IBM Global Services are teaming up to deploy WiFi wireless LAN hotspots. The unlicensed wireless public access market is going to be huge, and in a few years it will be dominated by established players such as wireless carriers and ISPs. There will be room for newer aggregators such as Boingo, Sputnik and Joltage, though they will quickly have to get big or find a defensible market ...

New York Times: Google has come up with a clever way to get around the Church of Scientology’s efforts to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to make it harder to find anti-Scientology sites. Google is removing the sites from its database, but adding a link on the results page to chillingeffects.org. Chillingeffects.org is posting the Church’s DMCA complaints, which include links to the target pages. This shows what a ...

My WindowsXP user profile somehow got corrupted. When I booted up my laptop a few minutes ago, all the configuration I had done (Themes, folder settings, IE preferences, bookmarks, etc.) were gone. I wonder if all this is hidden somewhere, or if I just need to manually reset everything. This is a case where bundling IE with Windows is affirmatively bad. Just because Windows screwed up on of its config ...

I was wondering when Dave would find this site…. For anyone visiting, that line about being under construction is true. I want to do a bit more work on this site before officially announcing it.