Hasta La Gadget!

If you were told that all of the sudden you could no longer access unlimited amounts of broadband by your cable provider, and if you exceeded your limit you’d have to pay overage charges, you would want to be able to track how much data you’ve been consuming, wouldn’t you? So would AT&T’s broadband customers, but some are left with nothing more than a couple notification emails.

An undetermined amount of subscribers to the telephone company’s U-Verse high-speed Internet service are unable to track their monthly data usage. When they try to check online, they are greeted with the following message: “Note: Your usage is not yet available for display. You should not be concerned about your usage for billing purposes. AT&T will keep you informed about your data usage via email.”

AT&T knows this is an issue, but still charges those who exceed their limit. The company said in an email to GigaOM, “All customers will hear from us early and often if they are close to exceeding their data plan. Before a customer’s usage surpasses his or her data plan and an additional charge is applied, we send that customer an alert when they reach 65, 90 and 100 percent of their monthly data plan. And we offer two billing grace periods.”

[via GigaOM]

AT&T tiered broadband customers still don’t have meter is written by Mark Raby & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Representatives from the Twitter empire have today spoken of a new era of search within the home website of the 140 character titan. This upgrade within the site’s codes will allow for “Simpler Search” as they put it, it including both search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results. This update will require no additional effort from you, the user, with all of the newness coming from Twitter’s own developers on their side of the web.

Search autocomplete will appear to you in the main search bar at the top of Twitter – the same place the twitter search bar has been for some time. What you’ll see with this update is a list of results that pop up under the search bar whenever you type in several characters. You’ll be able to select from these results or disregard them altogether if you’d like.

Also included in those results that pop up downward is a set of the people that you follow on Twitter as their name results to the word you’re typing. After your search is entered, you’ll see a list of results that come from an improved search engine inside Twitter that will push the following, per Twitter:

• Spelling corrections: If you misspell a term, we’ll automatically show results for your intended query.

• Related suggestions: If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms, we will provide relevant suggestions for terms where the majority of that conversation is happening on Twitter.

• Results with real names and usernames: When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username.

• Results from people you follow: In addition to seeing ‘All’ or ‘Top’ Tweets for your search, you can also now see Tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow when you select the ‘People you follow’ view. Viewing Tweets about a topic from just the people you follow is a great way to find useful information and join the conversation.

Results for your searches should be more relevant and accessing your friends’ twitter accounts should be more of a snap than a click festival. Have a peek at our timeline below to keep up to date on all things Twitter as well – do it now!

ALSO NOTE: These changes won’t be immediate, but you will see them soon!

Twitter introduces Simple Search is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Anyone on a slower broadband connection like I am, or heaven forbid on a dial-up connection, knows that modern websites assume you have a decent amount of bandwidth. Downloading all those photos and videos can take ages on a slow connection and Facebook knows the lack of bandwidth is one of the reasons people in some parts the world don’t join the network. Facebook has a plan to fix that, at least in the Asia-Pacific Gateway area.

Facebook has announced it will be investing in a project that will cost a total of $450 million to run an undersea fiber-optic cable. The cable will run from Malaysia to South Korea and Japan with branches splitting off for other countries. The new undersea cable will reduce the number of hops data has to take making downloads and uploads faster.

Facebook won’t say exactly how much money it invested in the undersea cable project. The project is also backed by major Chinese Internet providers and a number of other companies. “Our investment in this cable will help support our growth in South Asia, making it possible for us to provide a better user experience for a greater number of Facebook users in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore,” a Facebook spokesman said.

[via BBC]

Speaking this week on the future of the detention center and naval station set in Guantanamo, Cuba, Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale mentioned this week that a $40 million dollar fiber optic link is in the works for 2013. This link, said Breasseale, would offer up greater telecom access for those living at the US military base. The link would not, however, as Breasseale assures, be any sort of indication that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility would be open for any longer than it would have had the link not been built.

It’s still on the books that President Obama plans on closing the detention center, currently housing 169 inmates at this very moment, but all substantive measures aimed at doing so have been blocked thus far in Congress. The fiber optic cable project will be coming (if approved) after the relatively recent construction of a football field for inmates at the detention center, it having cost $744,000 USD on its own.

“It would be a mistake to assume that some potential use of fiber optic communication lines is any indication of how long the detention center will be around. Our goal remains to close the detention facility. We have no plans to close the naval station there.” – Breasseale

The land on which the Guantanamo Bay naval base is built is still being leased to the United States from Cuba, that deal having been initiated all the way back in 1903. The prison there has been detaining “terror suspects” since 2001, and the entire facility was marred with controversy since its existence was first hitting the airwaves in the early 2000′s as well. The US Defense Information Systems Agency has conducted a “feasibility study” for the fiber optic link and have found the potential cost to be around $40 million USD.

[via PhysOrg]

Pentagon plans fiber optic link to Guantanamo Bay is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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