Find: The FCC is rebooting a three-year-old plan to crowdsource mobile broadband speed tests

Um, yeah. Why'd this take so long?

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
The FCC is rebooting a three-year-old plan to crowdsource mobile broadband speed tests

After being sworn in earlier this week, new FCC chair Tom Wheeler is preparing to pick up where his predecessor left off. The Wall Street Journal reports that today, the FCC said it's almost ready to preview an app that will let users test and report their mobile broadband speed. Using this data, the agency will compile its first nationwide study of mobile broadband service across different carriers — much like the broadband tests it's been conducting over the past few years. An open meeting on Thursday, the first with Wheeler in command, will include a presentation on the app, which is set for release on Android in the spring of 2014.

The mobile broadband report has been a long time in the making: the FCC announced its intention to...

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Internet Explorer continues to Find: Webstate - ie grows on desktops, chrome falls; on mobiles, android up, safari down


// published on Ars Technica // visit site
Internet Explorer continues to grow, and Mavericks already on 11 percent of Macs

If nothing else, the browser and operating system numbers from October showed the huge behavioral differences between Mac users and Windows users. Both Microsoft and Apple released new versions of their desktop operating systems last month, with Windows 8.1 from Microsoft and OS X 10.9 Mavericks from Apple. In raw terms, Windows 8.1 already has many more users than Mavericks—about double—but as a proportion of the actual user base of the two platforms, it's the Apple software that's in the lead. 10.9 percent of Mac users are on the latest version of the operating system. Just 1.9 percent of PC users are on the newest Windows.


In a month that also saw Microsoft release a new version of its browser, not a great deal has changed among desktop browser preference. Internet Explorer picked up 0.42 points, Firefox gained 0.10 points, and Chrome dropped 0.54 points. Safari and Opera saw a gain of 0.07 and a loss of 0.05 points, respectively.

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