Lawmaker in Brazil Aims to Make Broadband Access a Right nytimes.com
Cable comes up a winner even while losing, thanks to broadband fiercecable.com
New Protocols Show up to 76% Speed Jolt for iPhones, iPads pcworld.com
AT&T may be capping Motorola Atrix, HTC Inspire upload speeds fiercewireless.com
Sprint’s recent comments reflect irritation with Clearwire fiercebroadbandwireless.com
Malware-laden sites double from a year ago cnet.com
Keynote Ranks Mobile Web Performance wirelessweek.com
Frontier boosts TV hookup fee to $500, mulls Oregon shutdowns seattletimes.com
Britain is ‘dangerously’ reliant on satnav systems, according to experts broadbandgenie.co.uk
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Tags: Broadband, Broadband access, iPhone, Mobile, Telecommunications India, Wireless

Western Digital to snap up Hitachi for $4.3 billion electronista.com
Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic unitethecows.com
Netflix spooks Hollywood more than ever cnet.com
Warner Bros. to Rent Movies Digitally on Facebook hollywoodreporter.com
Comcast confident VoD service can compete with Netflix totaltele.com
Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP disruptivetelephony.com
Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns torrentfreak.com
Is it time for a 4G reality check? fiercewireless.com
Rightmove UK to Add Broadband ISP Speed Results to Home Sales Database ispreview.co.uk
iPhone 5 to sport aluminum back, redesigned antenna and A5 chip networkworld.com
App Stores Everywhere! Opera Opens Mobile App Storefront gigaom.com
Hackers Claim They Can Unban Banned PS3s While Banning Unmodded PS3s techdirt.com
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Tags: App Store, Broadband, Google, iPhone, Media, Mobile, Opera, Telecommunications India, Virgin, Wireless

Forget the statistics, the “key words” or even foward looking statements. Although strictly not under the purview of the blog, mobile Internet has attracted the attention of lot of people. Even though, it cannot support the applications that a true broadband needs (due to inherent limitations of medium), it is perceived to be cheaper than laying down optic fibre cables. The existing mobile towers can be rejigged and made to serve the customers with fewer incremental investments.

In any case, this again is a reflection of state of mobile internet in India. Opera has launched Appia powered Mobile App Store which would serve the needs for “apps”. I am not aware of how the apps are coded but perhaps they are platform agnostic.

Opera Mini is on a roll. Not only they have a clear dominance in over 200 countries but a simple elegant Java powered mobile app is awesome. I have used it on my Android and can testify to it’s usefulness. Infact, it is easy to download and run it on an emulator and use it tethered to your GPRS handset.

Mini has also been sucessful over it’s mobile counterparts (or something like BOLT which are alternatives in mobile space) for one simple reason; it’s ability to compress the data and serve it to end user. So far, they have not mentioned about the huge amount of data flowing in through their data centre but nevertheless, they would be willing to scale up, build profiles (if I am not mistaken, best way out would be individually numbering each download) and then serve it up for targetted advertisments. It is all a matter of scale.

On the flip side, it’s petition in EU against Microsoft has not really worked “the wonders” that it was required to. It’s desktop share is still a pathetic 2% worldwide despite being ahead in the innovation game. I am using Firefox 4 presently (nightly builds) and can testify that it is one of most significant advances in the history of open source browsers. Though Web Kit based browsers are cool (over proprietary engines like Presto- which again is a matter of debate), I can see some real heavy lifting done by Firefox; be it in extension development or all around stability fixes.

At least, on my Linux Mint installation (with a few other extensions) it is a great product; in consonance with Thunderbird, the migration to Open Source is complete.

Getting back to Opera, it still needs to tone up it’s work flow. At least, that seems to be a despondent mood on the forums/ news groups. After sticking out years crowing about web standards (yes, they are important) but persistent arguments about Acid 3 compliance and being the “fastest” out their are wearing thin. I care not about the fancy “tests” for they have no meaning for me as far as the page is rendered on my useless BSNL. I see the lag where it matters the most and is hurting Opera users.

Still, I wish them the best for their app store which would be a significant gain of revenues; it could have been implemented with some form of micropayments (which would be a pain to implement it) in an ecosystem where there is no clear defined “way out”. App based advertisments (like Angry Birds for Android) is surely a way to go.

Related articles

• Opera Launches Appia-Powered Mobile App Store To The Public (techcrunch.com)
• App Stores Everywhere! Opera Opens Mobile App Storefront (gigaom.com)
• Opera Opens Mobile App Store That Works With (Almost) All OSes (mashable.com)
• Opera Opens Cross Platform Mobile App Store (readwriteweb.com)

Tags: Acid 3, android, Angry Birds, App Store, Broadband, BSNL, Computing, DTH, Embedded Linux, Google, GPRS, India, Internet, iPhone, Java, Linux, Media, Microsoft, Mobile, Mobile WebMobile Web, Open Source, Opera, Opera Launches Appia-Powered Mobile App Store To The Public, Opera Mini, techcrunch.com, Telecommunications India, Web Kit, web standards