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
The cable industry’s grip on the U.S. broadband space increased last quarter, with Comcast and Charter gaining nearly 500, 000 subscribers, combined. Phone companies AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Frontier, however, all lost Internet customers. ArsTechnica reports:The 14 largest ISPs, accounting for 95 percent of the US market, gained 192, 510 Internet customers in Q2 2016, bringing the total to 91.9 million, Leichtman Research Group reported today. Cable companies accounted for all of the gains, adding 553, 293 subscribers for a new total of 57 million. The phone companies lost 360, 783 subscribers, bringing them down to 34.9 million. Phone companies’ losses more than doubled since Q2 2015, when they lost about 150, 000 subscribers. Comcast and Charter, the two biggest ISPs, led the way in subscriber gains. Comcast added 220, 000 broadband subscribers to boost its total to 24 million, while Charter (the new owner of Time Warner Cable) added 277, 000 subscribers for a new total of 21.8 million. AT&T lost 123, 000 subscribers, lowering its total to 15.6 million. Verizon lost 83, 000, leaving it with 7 million Internet customers. CenturyLink and Frontier lost 66, 000 and 77, 000, respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat (condensed): Netflix really wants to show you how fast (or slow) your Internet connection is, and to do so it has launched a new website at Fast.com that conveys the real-time speed of your connection to the Web. It’s designed to give people “greater insight and control of their Internet service.” Netflix said it was for: Providing a website featuring non-downloadable software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection, as well as downloadable computer software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection.Compared to Speedtest.net, Fast.com doesn’t offer any details on how fast is your upload speeds, what’s the ping time, and any detail on location and ISP. However, it’s seemingly faster, and automatically detects your download speeds when you visit the website. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
alphadogg writes: A new wireless standard that extends Wi-Fi’s reach down into the 900MHz band will keep the 802.11 family at the center of the developing Internet of Things, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced today. 802.11ah, combines lower power requirements with a lower frequency, which means that those signals propagate better. That offers a much larger effective range than current Wi-Fi standards, which operate on 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and lets the newer technology penetrate walls and doors more easily. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: Workers in New York City have begun installing the city’s first LinkNYC kiosks. The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points, which are taking the spots formerly occupied by phone booths. 500 more of these hubs will be installed by mid-July, and the full network will eventually include over 7, 500 of them. “Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays.” The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. When the project was announced in 2014, officials said construction would start “next year.” They sure cut it close. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
