Altice USA may not be the most recognized ISP name out there, but the country’s fourth-largest provider is about to get a big upgrade over the next five years or so. According to the company’s roadmap , Altice plans to bring high-speed, 10 Gbps fiber lines directly to its 8.3 million customers starting in 2017. Made up of the former Cablevision and Suddenlink networks, Altice plans to accelerate their rollout by skipping the DOCSIS 3.1 system that bigger providers like Comcast have been installing for cities where they provide a gigabit connection . Rather than building another hybrid fiber and cable network, Altice is going straight to a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) system — something even Google Fiber failed to follow through on when Alphabet paused its rollout earlier this year. While Google Fiber has decided to explore wireless 5G options for getting high-speed connections to customers’ homes, Altice CEO Dexter Goei told the Wall Street Journal that he doesn’t believe those standards will ever match the speeds of a full fiber network. Verizon, meanwhile, gave up plans to roll out FiOS fiber-to-the-home service beyond the East Coast early last year. While those two internet giants stumbled, Altice has the advantage of building on top of its existing footprint without the need to build a new network completely from scratch.
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America’s fourth-largest cable co. will offer 10Gbps fiber
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children’s show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI’s five-year strategy for 2017-2022. “Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk, ” said Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director. “It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don’t do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. “Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years’ time.” The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK’s entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100, 000 of the “most at-risk” British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes “early children’s programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television.” The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. “We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Cyber Monday is likely to have been the biggest online shopping day in history, according to an analysis of visits to US retail websites. Online spending in the US yesterday hit a new record with $3.39bn spent online, a 10.2 percent increase year-over-year — ahead even of Black Friday, when $3.34bn was spent. ZDNet adds:Cyber Monday is expected to generate slightly less mobile revenue than Black Friday at $1.19bn, but that’s still a 48 percent increase on last year, according to the analysis by Adobe. Consumers have spent a total of $39.9bn online so far this month, it said, up 7.4 percent on last November, with 27 out of 28 days seeing online sales of over $1bn. The five best-selling toys in terms of quantity sold on Cyber Monday were Lego, Shopkins, Nerf, Barbie, and Little Live Pets. The five best-selling electronic products were Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple iPads, and Amazon Fire tablets, the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.