Articles about ISPs

Some industries make more attractive targets for cybercriminals than others, thanks to the type of data they hold and the services they provide. The telecoms sector is one such. 85 percent of the top telecom companies in the US, UK, France, Italy, Denmark, and Germany experienced a third-party data breach in the past 12 months alone.

Which is why SecurityScorecard is introducing a new set of security ratings developed especially for telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and cloud providers.

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There is lots of good news lately for SpaceX, especially NASA choosing the Hawthorne, CA-based company to build a $2.89 billion lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Moon landing slated for 2024. Key to that single-source contract, which eliminates two competitors including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was SpaceX’s willingness to restructure payments to fit the $750 million appropriated by Congress this fiscal year for the project.

Already the lowest Artemis bidder, Elon Musk’s company was willing to make the deal work for the customer, which is unusual thinking for space contractors, with many asking, Where did SpaceX get the money?

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We've already seen how lockdowns have been affecting internet speeds around the world, but what other impact has the pandemic been having on the web?

A new Internet Performance Report from ThousandEyes looks at the availability and performance of internet-related networks, including those of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), public cloud, Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Domain Name System (DNS) providers.

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Let me clear the air right off the bat: most SMB owners are making more than one major mistake in their hunt for an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The big players in the ISP space love preying on the SMB market because it's so easy to oversell bandwidth, obfuscate the facts, and generally make the process a "smoke and mirrors" game which serves to their advantage.

I'll be the first to admit that broadband shopping is a tricky affair. Service areas for ISPs and their various offerings are as arbitrarily drawn as gerrymandered political districts in the US. Their sales reps are generally trained on how to guilt trip SMB owners into too much bandwidth by relying on keywords like 'productivity' and 'downtime'. And most decision makers have no idea how to shop for broadband based on actual usage needs and instead let ISP reps make this judgement call for them. All of these factors contribute to ISPs having an unfair advantage in negotiations, upselling services and pipelines that merely line sales rep quotas.

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The advertising of broadband services has long been fraught with complaints and controversy, but a new rule change should help to bring this to an end.

Following an investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), ISPs will no longer be able to advertise high "up to" speeds. Instead they will have to advertise the average speed achieved by at least 50 percent of customers at peak times. Previously, the rules permitted the advertising of headline speeds enjoyed by just 10 percent of people, and the ASA found that many broadband customers were disappointed with their connection speed.

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While the UK enjoys a fairly decent level of broadband coverage, there are still plenty of people struggling with relatively slow connections. It's a problem that's particularly common in rural areas, and BT has offered to stump up £600 million to ensure that more rural homes have decent connections by 2020.

The UK government had already indicated that it wants every home in the country to have access to an internet connection of at least 10Mbps and plans to introduce rules that will permit customers to "demand" such speeds. BT's investment -- through its Openreach subsidiary -- would bring 10Mbps+ connections to a further 1.4 million rural homes, and would eliminate the need for new rules from the government.

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Having two items in one isn't always the best idea. When I was a kid, it was fairly popular to buy a television with an integrated VCR. The problem? When the VCR broke, you had a TV with a non-working video player in it forever. Hilariously, it wasn't uncommon to see people plug standalone VCR units into the televisions when that happened. It looked silly. The trend continued later with TVs that had built-in DVD players.

Today, NETGEAR unveils an all-new two-in-one product that is actually very cool. The Nighthawk X4S (C7800), as it is called, is an AC3200 WiFi Cable Modem Router. In other words, it is a modem and router in one. In fact, NETGEAR claims this is the first-ever combo unit to feature DOCSIS 3.1, offering ultra-fast speeds if available in your area. Of course, the dilemma becomes -- if either the router or modem portion stops working, you pretty much need to replace the entire thing. The router won't work with a standard modem, as there is no Ethernet WAN port -- just coaxial.

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Donald Trump has forged ahead and done what privacy advocates hoped would not happen. The US president has signed a resolution rolling back FCC privacy rules, meaning that ISPs are now free to share and sell customers' browsing histories without express permission.

The signing of the bill into law comes after the Senate and then the House voted to allow ISPs to share customer data without consent. The White House has confirmed that Trump has reversed the Obama-era rules, so closely targeted advertising is now not far away.

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Concern has mounted in the US after the Senate and then the House voted to permit ISPs to sell customers' browsing histories and other data without consent. In response to these concerns, major ISPs have spoken out to say they will do no such thing.

AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have all published statement that aim to calm fears that may have arisen this week. All three insist they do not sell customer data and have no intention of doing so. Whether customers are convinced by the pleading, however, is a different matter entirely.

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We live in an age where privacy is valued incredibly highly, but at the same time there are more and more ways for our privacy to be encroached upon. One of the most recent concerns came after the US Senate voted last week to allow ISPs to sell customers' browsing histories without consent.

Things were turned up a notch a couple of days ago when the House agreed and voted to repeal FCC-approved privacy rules. Since the result of the vote was known, there have been reports of a huge surge in interest in VPN tools, private search engines and the like, and now VPN review site The Best VPN has come up with a series of tips to help internet users maintain their privacy, and stop ISPs from getting their hands on potentially sensitive information about browsing habits.

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In a major blow for privacy advocates and individual rights, the US Senate has voted to permit ISPs to sell or share customers' data -- including their browsing histories -- without consent.

The vote overturns a Federal Communications Commission rule that banned such activity. While there are still legislative hoops to jump through before the result of the vote is ratified, ISPs will be rubbing their hands in glee at what the Senate has done.

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If you have eschewed the big names and opted for a smaller ISP, you probably have a happier broadband experience. These are the findings of a report which says the big four ISPs in the UK -- BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk -- are rated lower than their smaller rivals.

In fact, the highest rated provider, SSE, has only been in the broadband game since 2014, with Yorkshire-based Plusnet coming in second place, says Cable.co.uk.

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The head of of the GCHQ believes that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks could be eliminated completely if internet service providers (ISPs) were to completely rewrite their software and its code.

The technical director of GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre, Ian Levy, is already preparing to engage in talks with ISPs, such as BT, over how they could be the key to ending DDoS attacks. After the cyber attacks that occurred as a result of the Mirai malware were made public, GCHQ made it a priority to prevent further attacks that could be launched using the same measures.

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There are calls for ISPs to provide more accurate broadband speed information to customers to allow them to make better comparisons between companies. The current method of providing theoretical maximum figures is just not acceptable, says the UK's Local Government Association.

The LGA points out that ISPs' current provision of estimated speeds are not necessarily a true reflection of the reality. Just as consumers can use price comparison sites to check out the best deals for electricity and other utilities, so the LGA believes a similar service should be available to allow for more accurate speed comparison.

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This morning, thousands of BT and Plusnet customers complained about dodgy internet connections. The problem has now been fixed, and the cause identified as a failed UPS owned by Equinix, leading to massive disruption.

Equinix, owned by Telecity, said there had been a problem "with one of our UPS system at 8/9 Harbour Exchange (LD8)" in London. The exact cause is not yet known, but further investigations are underway.

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