FCC Propose New U.S. Broadband Plan

FCC Propose New U.S. Broadband Plan The FCC is about to propose a US broadband plan. Our online news habits are not as diverse as you might think and the internet could win this year’s Nobel Prize. It’s Monday, March 15th. I'm Natali Del Conte and it’s time to get loaded. The Federal Communications Commission is proposing another plan to get the US connected to broadband everywhere. This is a 10 year plan and it would establish high speed internet as the countries dominant communication network which makes the TV and telecom giants not too happy. The plan would give ISP a subsidy to get accessed to more rural areas, it could also mandate an auction on news broadcast spectrum for wireless access and also developed a universal set top box that connects to the internet as well as provides cable TV which I would be mostly all four. Would be mostly all four, this will cost a lot of money in infrastructure investment but the SCC argues that the plan would pay for itself when the broadcast spectrum is auction off. You can read the plan yourself at broadband.gov. The SCC also wants to make sure that you're actually getting the broadband that you're paying for. Late last week the government agency launched a tool that will let you test your download and upload speeds. It test wireless and landline based broadband connections. And allows you to see the latency, the time it takes for data to be sent from your computer to the server, the jitter and the variability in the data between your computer and the server, you can find it at broadband.gov. The internet may seem diverse but really it’s not as diverse as you might think. A new pure research study shows that 57% of online newsreaders go to the same two to five sites repeatedly and that’s about it. The results can be compared to cable TV we have hundreds of channels but we really only watch a handful. Further more only 7% of respondent said that they would pay for online news and of those that are faithful to a single news site only 19% said that they would actually pay. So I guess we really are creatures of habit and don’t worry we don’t have any plans to charge for loading. A new version of Digg is coming soon. This was announced this weekend at South by Southwest. Some new features will include the ability to Digg something without logging in which is good because for some odd reason Digg can never remember to keep me logged in no matter how many times I tell it too. There will also be an updated home page which will be affected by your own interest also a key word can now be a category of stories. Leader boards are coming back and it’s supposed to be faster. We don’t know exactly when these features will launch. If your Wii work out has hit a Plato considered CTA Digitals Wii pushup bar. It goes on top of the Wii fit balance board and let’s you use the adjustable grips to go deeper into that pushup if you feel the need to do that. It cost $25.00 on Amazon. There’s a new flavor of rock band coming out Green Day rock band. The bands front man Billy Joe Armstrong confirmed that this will hit storage shelves on June 8 for $60.00 on the PS3 and Xbox and $50.00 on the Wii. It will include 47 tracks all exportable to Rock Band, Rock Band II and Rock Band III when it comes out later this year. Green Day is from the east bay like me and I know they got a lot of flack for going main stream from the underground music scene from which they were born. The purest called them Sell Out, so whatever will they think of this. If you're hoping to win the one million dollar Netflix price for developing the best movie recommendation software you can forget it. Netflix has canceled the contest after it was pointed out that the contest made user data public including movie recommendations and choices made by hundreds of thousands of users who could actually be identified inside of that data. The FTC got win to this and Netflix was subjected to a law suit said they scrap the idea all together and will continue to look for other ways to keep improving their recommendation engine. This years Nobel Prize winner could be the Internet. The Internet is among one of the 237 nominees for the world famous piece prize. If you think this is some weird user generated scan you're wrong not just anyone can make nominations for the Nobel Prize. Only a select group of previous lariats, members of national governments and scientist and university professors can nominate and apparently they think the internet is worthy. So who exactly would keep the 1.4 million dollars if the internet wins? Those are all your headlines for today. I will see you tomorrow with more, thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you’ve just been loaded.