It looks like the mobile data wars are starting to heat up, with Vodafone today dropping the price of their mobile broadband offerings.

For 20 bucks (or $19.95 for the pedantic among us) over 24 months, you get 1GB of data over Voda's 3G network, plus it will cost you $5 per month for the USB Internet stick. That price is $10 a month less than the previous offering.

If you're a data hound, you can get 5GB for $39.95 a month, with the USB modem included for free over 24 months. That's down $10 on previous pricing as well.

Considering Vodafone pops you on their 2.5G network when you run out of 3G (rather than charge you roaming fees on Telstra's network, a la 3), this is a pretty solid deal, and potentially the best offering on the market at the moment.

[Vodafone]

We saw Sprint/Clearwire/whoever's Xohm WiMax tested in B-more with speedy results. And now, news from a Xohm employee in Baltimore is that the service is also live and working (albeit in an "unsupported" test capacity) in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and northern Virginia. So anyone with WiMax-enabled hardware in those cities, let us know if you're picking up any sweet 3 mbps pipe out there. [MP3Car]

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Our friend (and Wired editor) Nick Thompson wrote a piece in the Washington Monthly accusing John McCain for the sorry state of America's broadband. It seems the e-mail-avoiding presidential candidate, as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, supported too much consolidation and too little oversight. The end result? "Since 2000, the United States has gone from fifth in the world to twenty-second in broadband penetration."

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What's wrong with this headline spotted on Ars Technica today?

"Australian ISPs offer US advice, smugness, on net neutrality"

Of course as always, headlines only tell half the story. Reading the Ars article, you quickly learn that it is in response to this article from ZDNet AU, where the heads of local ISPs BigPond, iiNet and Internode were interviewed on what Net neutrality means for Australians. The answer? Not too much, because our systems are very different, at least for the moment.

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Near-instantaneous porn downloads will soon be possible in Japan thanks to a speedy new, widely available, fibre-optic service from ISP KDDI. The service will offer upload and download speeds (each way) of up to one gigabit per second. The service goes online October 1 for single family homes and low-rise apartment buildings for about $US56 a month, and will be considerably higher than the current 100 megabits per second norm most Japanese citizens already enjoy today. If the outcome of the 2008 election doesn't get me to move to another country, these currently untouchable download speeds just might. [Japan Today]

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Need some wireless internet love, but without the hassles of a 24-month contract? Have oodles of money to spend? Then Telstra's got the pre-paid wireless internet solution for you!

The Big T has released its own pre-paid wireless internet solution. For $149 you get yourself that wireless modem you see in the pic above, plus $10 worth of credit. The cost of the actual data varies, ranging from $20 for 150MB to $100 for 6GB.

Credit expires within 30 days. Unless you buy some more credit that is, in which case it carries over to the next month.

We bag Telstra's data pricing (and rightly so), but for some people, the Big T is the only option, especially in outback Australia. So it's good to see them offering pre-paid for those customers who wouldn't necessarily have the coin to sign away two years of their life on wireless data.

[via Lifehacker and Tipster Stuart - Thanks Stuart!]

Comcast has just released a series of documents in response to the Federal Communications Commission detailing how, exactly, the ISP filters your traffic. Based on their traffic analysis, five protocols (Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack and Gnutella) were especially filtered. Not anymore. Now Comcast is going to be throttling ALL traffic you generate, even if it's from their own Fancast streaming video service, if you're generating abnormally high traffic compared to your peers.

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Today Google, along with HSBC and a few other investors, helped place an order for 16 low-orbit Thales Alenia satellites to begin the push for a massive broadband deployment in equatorial Africa that it hopes will help connect 3 billion people in the world who are currently webless. It's a noble plan, with quite a long ways to go.

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AT&T's just updated its terms of service for broadband customers, and starting next month, if you're a heavy downloader, get ready to have your connection squeezed to a trickle. While they haven't implemented usage caps a la Comcast (yet)... Read More »

The biggest fear for any mobile road warrior out there using a wireless internet connection from one of the Telcos is that if you exceed your data quota for a month, your next bill will probably come packaged with a taser so you can shock yourself out of the wallet-sickening stupor.

The good news is that iPrimus yesterday broke trend with the rest of the mobile broadband providing networks by offering services that shape your data speeds rather than charge you excess, something ADSL has been offering for years.

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