Alex Goldman

Amazon today made good on hints that it planned to release a Kindle-compatible e-book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, expanding the market for its digital library by tapping into the devices’ booming growth. While the news might seem counterintuitive — surely a free application will eclipse a $360 purpose-built device? — Amazon’s […]

There’s $4.7 billion allocated as part of the “Broadband Technology Opportunities Program” in the new stimulus plan, which was signed into law on February 17th, and it looks like the telcos will get most of it. Verizon alone could get $1.6 billion. If the money goes to Verizon, I believe that it will go to projects that […]

IDT Spectrum has a map of its holdings on the company Web site (not shown on the map: holdings in Alaska, Hawaii, and even territories, such as Guam and Puerto Rico). Holdings vary in size from 200 MHz of 39 GHz spectrum to over 600 MHz. At 28 GHz, its holdings are as large as […]

Dustin Jurman is the founder and president of Tampa, FL-based WISP Rapid Systems Corporation. He said he hopes that WISP management improves. “I want to see better networks in this industry, and we need to improve customer service too. When people have a bad experience with one wireless provider, they stop trusting wireless,” he says.  […]

Anne-Marie Fowler brings an unusual background to the wireless broadband business. She was a wealth advisor at Morgan Stanley and Prudential in Silicon Valley. “My clients worked in Silicon Valley during the tech boom,” she says. “They became first-time philanthropists.” So she moved from advising them on how to make wealth to advising them on […]

Satellite broadband provider Hughes Network Systems has stormed back into ISP-Planet’s ISP rankings, reporting 401,000 broadband customers as of March 31, 2008, which makes it 18th in the U.S. “Within the next few weeks, we’ll publish Q2 numbers,” notes Mike Cook, senior vice president of Hughes. “The headline is that satellite broadband is now a proven […]

A flexible architecturePark says the company’s quad-radio BelAir200 is ideal for WISP deployments, thanks to the fact that it can function both as a rooftop point-to-multipoint solution and as a street-level mesh product. “Our software architecture allows us to put any radio into any mode,” he says. “So you can get a BelAir quad-radio product, […]

Three ISPs are serving customers, as of this month, on the network of Cambria County in Pennsylvania. For more on the network, called Cambria Connected, see CONXX Builds a Network for Cambria County. [ISP-Planet] interviewed the owners of two ISPs. Robert Dillion, owner of In The Stix broadband is a normal WISP owner. He’s young, eager, and […]

[ISP-Planet] first wrote about Cumberland, Md.-based public network builder CONXX in 2005, when [it] described the company’s network architecture as The ATM WISP. CONXX’s public networks are built to telco standards, the company says, with high redundancy. In addition, by using ATM instead of Ethernet, the company reduces network overhead and increases real throughput. Earlier this month, the […]

The software from Riga, Latvia-based MikroTik is as good as anything and offers a better price, says Dennis Burgess, Senior Engineer at House Springs, Mo.-based consulting and services provider Link Technologies. Burgess speaks enterprise languages. He’s Microsoft certified and a CCNA. “With customers who are familiar with Cisco, I can talk Cisco to them and […]

Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation talked common sense on wireless and spectrum issues at Freedom to Connect (F2C) last month. When powerful lobbies come to Washington, D.C. working for ideas that are not popular, one of their first priorities is to obfuscate the obvious. People who are not already paid for, such as […]

Introducing the tool that shows the user when the problem’s on the PC, not on your network. ISPs know San Jose, Calif.-based Propel as a vendor of acceleration software. The acceleration market is one of the few software arenas where competing products offer genuinely different methods of solving the same problem (anti-spam is another). Thus, […]