Customers with Sky Broadband might find their provider's capacity crawling northward toward the end of the year. The broadcaster is paying Virgin Media's business arm £49 million ($74 million) for some of Richard Branson Liberty Global's deliciously fast fiber infrastructure. While there's no mention of BT, we wouldn't be surprised if this technological makeover was prompted by its corporate rival's recent assault on Sky's sporty golden goose.

Filed under: Networking, Internet, HD

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Via: The Next Web

Creating a mobile ad hoc network is tricky when rounding people up for a game or two, let alone when linking thousands of soldiers whose lives are at stake. DARPA has had enough trouble getting such large-scale networks off the ground that it just put out an official request for solutions. The agency wants ad hoc technology that grows both elegantly and automatically, and it's prepared to ditch legacies like internet-based networking to get there -- in fact, it would rather not rely on IP technology when 20 years of research in that area hasn't panned out. Anyone sitting on a brilliant solution has until May 24th to submit an abstract for consideration ahead of an August 7th symposium. We hope at least a few people answer the call, if just for the possibilities that breakthroughs spill over to civilian life -- DARPA helped build the networking we're using right now, after all.

Filed under: Networking, Alt

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Via: DARPA

Source: Federal Business Opportunities

Qualcomm's been doing very well lately, and most of those chips it builds are for mobile devices that demand a lot of data to serve their owners' needs -- and as more and more folks jump on the smartphone bandwagon, the demand for data will continue to grow exponentially. Today at Qualcomm's What's Next in Mobile event in Santa Clara, California, the company told us more about its plan to help build a network that'll be able to serve up the data all its SoC's need. The goal is to give us 1000 times the capacity of what we currently have. One of the key parts, as Qualcomm sees it, is small cell base stations in homes, offices and retail spaces working in tandem with the large cell towers that currently adorn so many roofs and mountain tops -- the same thing ex-FCC head honcho Julian Genachowski talked about last year.

You see, macrocells (read: towers) can blanket wide areas in signal, but they struggle to penetrate the innards of buildings, which is where small cells come in handy. For those who aren't familiar, small cell base stations like femtocells and picocells have been around for years, helping to boost cell signal in small areas by hooking into a local wired network. Until now, these small cells have served as a small-scale supplement to macro networks, but Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob sees them comprising a much bigger chunk of the network of the future. According to him, there are a few issues with using them in an expanded role, however.

Filed under: Mobile

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Provo, Utah's plan to sell its cost-plagued fiber network to Google has been approved by the municipal council, meaning it'll soon become the third Google Fiber city. However, while still not receiving any money upfront as earlier reported, it'll now have to advance $1.7 million in equipment and engineering costs not part of the deal before, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. In exchange, each Provo resident will get a free 5-megabit internet connection for seven years and Google will have to upgrade the network to connect all the city's homes. It's not quite free, however, as the city's 120,000 residents must still pay a $39 million bond for building the network -- meaning they'll shell out $3.3 million for each of the next 12 years.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Salt Lake Tribune